Simply the Best

A week on Blue O Two’s M/Y Blue Horizon on “Simply the Best” again, this time a round trip from Port Ghalib out to the Brothers, Daedalus and Elphinstone. Eighteen dives, most of them deep, to 36 m. In late March the water was 17–23 °C, noticeably cooler than on the autumn trips.

The first day was check-out reef dives near Port Ghalib: a titan triggerfish, a big pufferfish under an overhang, a bluespotted ribbontail ray, a freckled hawkfish in the fire coral and a bluecheek butterflyfish. That night a Persian carpet flatworm was out on the reef.

Then came the marine parks. The walls were thick with anthias and hung with whip corals, and there were bigeyes in the shade of the overhangs. On the second day an oceanic whitetip with its escort of pilot fish came up to look at us at the end of the dive, right by the divers on the way up. Out at Daedalus the striped lighthouse stands on its platform in the middle of nowhere. A night dive near the end turned up a peacock hind and squirrelfish, the last dive ended with another bluespotted ribbontail on the sand, and on the final morning back at Port Ghalib an osprey sat on the mast-top light.

Shot on the Canon G9 X Mark II in its Fantasea housing, with an INON S200 and a Sea Dragon 2000, plus a few topside frames on a Nikon D80.