AAIB reports relevant to the Bond crash.

I'm a bit worried - well, a lot worried - by the recent crash of a Bond chopper. I'm even more worried by the way that the same helicopter had suffered a engine vibration event several weeks ago. Was it associated?
I'm wondering if there are other cases of airframes that have been in incidents, and then later in a more serious incident. I've snarfed a lot of AAIB reports and am working through them to build up a database.

Calamari-that-steals ; Diving El Condesito (originally "El Condosito")

A comic I read recently had a character described (offstage) as
"calamari-that-steals", which reminded me of this character that I met on a dive last year.

Sepia, cuttlefish, or if you're eating it, calamari, on the wreck of the El Condesito, Tenerife

I have to say that this squid did not exhibit any Sqid-like tendencies and made no attempt at stealing my  wallet. Sam clearly has work to do on Earth, if he can get past the shoot-on-sight orders. (See freefall.purrsia.com if this makes no sense. It won't make much sense afterwards, but it's a fun web-comic.)

A few other photos from the same dive series :

Blue-fin damselfish on El Condesito. The reason for the name should be obvious.

Ornate Wrasse, El Condesito. Close up, the patterning on the head makes me try to remember the names of the various bones in the vertebrate skull.

Oksana's photo of the diving conditions from the top of the cliffs. Not the exact location of El Condesito, but representative.

A different dive site, known as "Roncadores del Faro" ; a "Faro" is a lighthouse (think of the Wonder of the Ancient World, the "Pharos of Alexandria", the archetypical lighthouse.) and is very visible above water (what else are lighthouses for?) ; the fish in the picture are "Roncadores".

Some people aren't impressed.

Note on photos : the red splodges spoiling the corners of the pictures are text comments added by my automatic thumbnail-image generator. If for some reason you want the original image (typically 3-5 times the linear resolution, 9-25 times the pixel count, no text), contact me. Deals are possible for commercial use, or if you've got a good enough other reason, then make your case.

A few more Tanzanian Piscines

 I took a couple of days field break in the nearby town of Mtwara, sans internet, and managed to get a dive in at the "Monoliths" site and the "Fish Market" site near the town.

Dive equipment, camera and buddy were from Graeme Marrs at ECO2 dive centre in the former slave port of Mikidani, a couple of km along the coast from Mtwara.

The two dive sites differ markedly. The Monoliths are pinnacles rising to about 10m below sea level from a harbour bottom at [considerably greater depth - you're not going there without a squeaky voice], and giving a good reef-ish or wall-ish dive requiring a boat.
(As always, the photos below are considerably reduced from the originals.)
The usual suspects were visible. Moorish Idols were strutting their stuff all over the place, then showing off their thinness the moment you press the shutter :

Moorish Idol on the Monoliths

They can be a bit of a tease, because they're reasonably unconcerned by photographers coming up on them, but they dart around a lot, often disappearing because they're so thin laterally.

Meyers Butterflyfish

This one is considerably less common than the Moorish Idol, and moves away more rapidly. It's also very laterally compressed, showing the almost disc-shaped form of the typical Butterflyfish. Very pretty.

 The Tanzanian relaxed attitude to ... well, everything ... is obvious in some of the fishes too (this one on the Monoliths) :

Siesta time

The Monoliths was a fun dive, but having quite a bit of swash (we'd got 1-2m of swell on surface), we were getting bounced around quite a bit, which makes photography a bit awkward. Then we moved on to the Fish Market, in the harbour area of the town. This is a "muck dive" - a muddy bottom giving way to the south to patch reefs. Lots of life in the mud, but also lots of debris from the (literal) Fish Market onshore. This site can be done as a shore dive too, without requiring excessive (and most un-Tanzanian) levels of  masochism, unlike the Monoliths, which would be severely hard work, even given good navigation.
A lot of the life hides down in burrows or under logs.

Shrimp ( Rhynhocinetes durbanensis ? approximately) on the underside of a log ; catfish under the log itself.

The common anemone fish are present on the more reefy bits, including this couple who are not interested in having any photos taken of their homes.

See you! Nemo!

 They really are territorial, and that makes them easy to photograph. So people do.

Platyhelminth - a.k.a. flatworm. colourful, so probably horribly poisonous.

Towards the south end of the Fish Market site coral heads become more common, with more vertebrate life.

Peekaboo !

Or maybe it was looking for a place for a nice kip? It was very definitely siesta time by then.

Sites : 10 Degrees South (and ECO2 dive centre ; adjacent)

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Monoliths (approximate ; don't try navigating off this) :


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And finally, the Fish Market :

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This is also called the Dhow Port, for fairly obvious reasons. The rotting remains of a tug boat are beached here, and the dive runs SSE from there.
All in all, a fun day in the water, and tyhanks and a plug again for Graham and ECO2 for organising the trip. And a Bajaji (Piagagia 3-wheel taxi ; a "tuk-tuk" in most of the rest of the world) back into town after a fine meal and +1m decompression stop.

Onshore Tanzania this time

I've just got back to the rig - same Caroil rust bucket as before - but this time on an onshore job near the village of Ntorya, in Mtwara province, southern Tanzania.


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I don't anticipate anything like such a festival of photography on this job, largely because I'm 20-odd kilometres from the coast, in the middle of a lot of scrubby rolling hillocks. There's also the minor point that I didn't bother bringing a camera with me this time, just what is in the phone.
I might end up with some good "bug photos" though. There's a LOT more insect life around the site than at Nyuni - which indicates how impoverished the fauna on the island really was.

Call off the search parties - Nemo has been found!

Had another swim back out to the reef this lunch time, along with Howard the DD. I went out a few days ago too, and deliberately didn't take the camera to make sure it was a shorter trip. Needless to say, on that trip I saw lots of interesting things, but with no evidence, they're already fading in my memory.
But today's snorkel ...
Howard was having plenty of fun.


















Which is the purpose of the exercise.

















Turtle shell
After much splashing around, and hunting for the reef break (where there is a line of coral heads at 4-5m, with a lot of life), we headed back towards shore.
I spotted this turtle carapace, laying on the seabed.

Last time I was here on Nyuni, I found parts of a turtle plastron (the front, dorsal or belly piece of the shell. And I'd found washed-up pieces of them on the beach too. So finding a carapace wasn't a great surprise.
After I'd taken a couple of photos of it as it lay on the seabed, interior with the ribs visible upwards, I was wondering if I'd have any hope of getting it back home. CITES, paperwork, difficult. And look at the size of it - that drag anchor for the goodie-bag is about 12cm long. I'm not getting that into my rig bag!
So, I got my photos first, then looked at the problem of "Can I carry this to shore without drowning?", as a necessary precursor to "Can I get this through customs?"
Then I turned it over. Surprise time!
The shell started to delaminate. This dark outer covering came off as thin flexible sheets of a plastic-like material, with a layer of flesh (fatty?) bonding it onto the expanded ribs of the carapace (the bony shell).

I decided that I wasn't going to be able to carry this back to shore. The rest of the "get through customs" problem becomes a non-problem.


It's still there, if you want it. Though it's probably moved with each tide.



Next thing I spotted ... Can you see him? (Or, more likely, her?)

I saw it snaking across the seabed, then hiding behind this rock.















This is a crop from the main image above.





It's a Moray Eel, I think a White-eye Moray, but I'm not certain on that.









And for about the 4th time, Blogger's accursed post editor has lost 4 or 5 photos that I uploaded. And this is a really horrible, horrible editor.

A different type of puffer fish.

Oh, sorry, Blogger has lost the original picture of a different species of puffer fish.











And finally the bloody anenomefish that inspired the title of this post. Unfortunately the pictures have got so screwed up and I don't have time to struggle with this pathetic editor any more.

Where Am I?

People have been asking.
The link above should (should) centre on the rig location.
Oh, hang on, what does this do?

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Lots of code ; what does it do? Oh, cool. Saves me lots of screen-shotting etc. It's got the usual controls too.
Camp is here :

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Bar is here :

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It all adds up to a small island off the coast of Tanzania called Nyuni.

People who know me will know that I'm obviously here looking for enchyaline Blue Holes out on the reef, with the intention of discovering "Caverns Measureless to Man" containing Pleistocene alien craft. So far I've found a choked sinkhole that obviously takes water when it's raining, which averages every 2nd-3rd day. "Toto, we're not in Britain any more!"

See earlier posts for swimming photos. Fishy things which haven't tried to eat me (yet).

The aerial photography is obviously a couple of years old. The island has acquired a squatter camp of several hundred people since I was here last, a resident rat problem (goes with the rubbish in the squatter village), and the maintenance as a coconut plantation seems to have been abandoned, so scrubby undergrowth is slowly taking over from the palms. Which by comparison with SongoSongo Island to the south (with it's airstrip), seems to be the normal vegetation for the area.
Oh well, back to the grind of searching for CMTM!

More Ice Island News

Petermann's Ice Island - location update.
For those that haven't been keeping an ear to the, err, water, this is a rather substantial lump of ice that fell off Greenland a year ago. It's slowly working it's way out towards the Atlantic Ocean, where it has the potential to become a significant hazard to shipping. And to the oil installations on the Grand Banks.
The link above gives more detail, including notes I've been making on it's progress over the last few months.
I've just made time to update my satellite surveying (details in Patrick's blog, above), and when last visible (Aug 05th), the berg was just off the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, near Belle Isle. Latitude 51.53N, Longitude 54.95W.

Before long, if not already, it should be visible from the coast of Newfoundland.
And if it does decide to wander off through the oil fields ... there will be "interesting times".

Nyuni - Batch #4 - boat round the island.

Various of us took one of the boats for a trip round the island. Nothing particularly spectacular to be seen form the boat, but once we were back into the lagoon, I went over the side to a patch reef that the boat-master indicated.
First thing to draw my attention was a patch of "Needle Sea Urchins" amongst corals (a species probably in Acropora, but I won't hang for that). Just pretty.













While photographing that, I noticed that, for reasons still unclear, the sea urchins were congregating in particular patches. I don't know why ; I guess that there was something about the substrate that they liked there, but not elsewhere.













A brilliant blue+yellow fish was shoaling in the area.


















They particularly liked gathering around a large lobster pot on the reef, but they would also follow each other around over the reef edge too (where I wasn't going to go on ALP, Available Lung Power).
















After much hunting around on the net, I identified these as Yellowtail Fusiliers ; they shoaled with Twinstripe Fusiliers, which are only marginally less colourful. (Though this picture doesn't do the colour of the two yellow stripes justice ; I'm going to have to start using the colour balance tool for these duck dives to 3 or 5m.


















On my next dive, I spotted this "different" branching coral - which I can't identify.



















I've spent more time than I care to think about staring at this sort of assemblage of fossils and sediments ("wackestone to packstone", anyone?), but even so it was very nice to see these environments "in the flesh" as it were.