Brrr its cold outside but that didn’t keep us from diving in Palm Beach!
Dec 5: My mom, sister, and cousin all braved the cold and came diving with me on the Deep Obsession. First dive was to the Princess Anne wreck in 100 ft of water. This wreck is pretty broken up but it was neat to see the life around it. Huge barrcudas and a Goliath Group…Lauren was my photogather and I shot video. Second dive was on a shallow reef in 50 ft. We had a sea turtle, eels, and lots of reef fish. Danielle enjoyed chasing the angelfish and Lauren was photgraphing the corals as always! How much fun to be able to dive with your whole family!!!
Dec 27: Great day to dive, the swells were 1-2ft, visibility 30 ft, and water temperature 68 degrees. We went to Ron’s Jump for our first dive. This is a nice reef in about 50ft with lots to see…eels, angelfish, and turtles. But during the dive the boat had a very rare surface sighting of a baby hammerhead shark. It surfed right over the diver’s bubbles. It was so quick we didn’t get a photo, however after the divers were up we spotted the same shark again surfing in the waves! So we got out the camera and boy was this shark posing! This hammerhead was acting like a dolphin, it even came up to the bow of the boat and used the pressure wave from the bow to ride for 2 mins then it dove. What an amazing site!
Our second dive was to Breaker’s reef. This reef is named after the famous Breaker’s Hotel which is directly inshore from this site. We see lots of neat creatures on this 50 ft dive, and today we found a small pencil urchin in a crack and under a ledge a great photo opt with a red fish called a Bigeye.
Dec 28: So if you read the Dec 27th post your about to get your dive gear out and ready for this day! The air temperature finally let up and we went out to dive Juno Ledge. But we got reports of bad visibility so we ended up at Split Reef. This is one of our deeper reef systems (80 ft), and we saw lobster hanging out in the ledges there. The vis was okay (20 ft) but Captain Sean wanted to find us blue waters so we travelled south to the shallow reefs. Along the way we encountered 2 mola molas (sunfish) on the surface, but they were really shy and I couldn’t get any good photos of them.
Second dive was at the Trench. This was a first for me, the site actually has a trench that we follow along to the reef. And in this trench we had 2 huge nurse sharks, sea turtles, and lionfish. What a fun dive and the vis was much better (40 ft). After the dive we started heading home and was joined by a pod of 50 Spotted dolphin. They had a few babies with them and they were moving fast! We looked up and towards the shore and a big black back caught our eye…it was a WHALE! We stayed our distance so that we wouldn’t scare it and when it surfaced that face was easy to id…it was a Northern Right Whale. This whale was probably 40 ft long and it was traveling north. What a neat encounter!!! Made my day!!!
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by Nikole
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