hantu bloggers 1 year anniversary dive (otherwise known as my best dive ever)

we visited hantu's underwater garden that nice bright sunday morning.
vis was great at roughly 5m.

what's an underwater garden without a pretty slug or two?

this batfish was hanging out in a discarded bubu.
don't worry, there's an opening big enough for it to get out.

swimmer crab. en garde! there were loads of them.
you just have to look under a outcropping or a crevice
and you were almost guaranteed to spot one. one group spotted
a seahorse(missed it cos of equalisation problems)
and a school of juvenile barracudas. debs took a
picture of some ugly thing that may be a stargazer. well if it isn't,
they sure bought their looks at the same department.(edit: it's a
toadfish)

after two dives, we took advantage of the low tide and
checked out the creatures that inhabited the island.
A monitor lizard was spotted! unfortunately batteries died
it ran pretty quick.

hantu lagoon crossing

egret with a kingfisher in background

no fiddlers were harmed in the process.
that's sam's little finger by the way.

a purple fiddler crab. sam and i realised that one way to make
these tiny high octane scurrying creatures to stop is to give them shade.
one of em critters was running around and only stopped when
it approached the shade of sam's sandal. when sam moved his foot, it
scurried over to his sandal and stopped again.

jeff, debs and sam checking out the legend of pulau hantu.

after the trip to the island we went back to our boat, geared up
and went down for our 3rd day dive.

icon star. i'm beginning to suspect that i keep bumping into
same one at each hantu dive.

and finally what we're all looking forward to. the night dive!
it was great! hantu sure got all it's wares out on display like a
night pasar malam! we spotted a huge cuttlefish,
a winged pipefish(looked like an albino bloodworm to me, with it's squiggling
and squirming among the coral), and
what made this my best dive ever so far!


the story of the morose cuttlefish

and now i present to you...

an adult hawksbill turtle! it was huge!!!!
ah, heck! even if you minus the 25% magnification underwater, it's still huge!
and it's definitely older than me! it has probably withdrawn it's cpf savings already!
debs shone her torch into my mask and i finned over. puzzled and a little put
off cos she blinded me, i was wondering if it was an emergency. she then shone
her torch on this smooth rock with barnacles on it and i was thinking that it may
be some small critter. it was only when she shone the torch on the head,
then it hit me. bouyancy control went out of the window while i was fumbling
with my camera to snap a picture. it was so close to us!it pivoted and then
swam past us as gracefully as an imperial star destroyer(sam's words. quite an
apt description). we were whooping like mad people when we surfaced.
pulau hantu really gave us a great present for this one year anniversary dive.


the divers listening to the dive brief by debs. i'm really glad this dive
happened. now forgive me while i go back to daydreaming that i'll see
that big momma dame of a turtle again at my next hantu dive. :D