DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA ISSUE 413 AUGUST 25

to around 40m at Albatross, there’s a lot to see when the water is moving in from the deep. Our first dive there, we started off at about 27m, where a wide sandy patch interrupts the steep drop of the wall. Down here, all kinds of smaller critters can be encountered. For us, only to name a few, the denise’s pygmy sea horse in a small pink fan, robust ghost pipefish, hypselodoris and flabellina nudibranchs under a couple of overhangs and big resting nurse sharks only a few meters out on the sand were the highlights on this dive. We kept following the wall close to the bottom for a while to explore the protected overhangs with their corals and sponges before we slowly started to come up a little. In this midsection, colourful tunicates and huge black coral trees cover the wall, accompanied by different types of gorgonian fans, soft corals, green tree corals and many amazing creatures. Just imagine the dramatic scenery down there as Albatross Passage is not just your standard flat wall. There are big openings and small crevices all over. Looking up towards the surface, the light falls into the structures of the shallow edge of the site, where the big schools of fish hang out and smaller schools dart back and forth to play with our bubbles. One great thing about this dive site is that the current only grabs you once you reach the shallow edge of the channel at around 10-12m as you’re ascending. Up here you can hang on to rocks and watch the vast amounts of fish in front of you. Once you’re ready to move on, the current takes you into the channel, where the boat will pick you up, once you are ready. At first the bottom is rocky with lots of dark green coral trees protruding from the white rock. This is a great spot to find desirable flabellinas (my favourite because of their vibrant purple and white colouration) and little orange bubble shells. After this, the channel gets a little bit deeper again and is mainly sandy. At this point we started our safety stop, drifting and watching the fields of garden eels below us. After the boat had picked us up and we had gotten out of our gear for the surface interval, it was time to have some tea and sweet and juicy local pineapple and fresh coconut while sharing our amazing experiences of this very memorable dive. Not getting enough of this so diverse diving up here, I spent most afternoons diving the house reef. The reef starts at knee depth just 20m from Lissenung’s dive shop and expands to about three quarters of the shoreline of the little 100x400m island. It could, in theory, be circumnavigated in just one single dive, if you and your buddy’s air consumption is not an issue. In theory, because the furthest I ever got was about half way. With over 350 different species of fish and countless types of corals and critters just around the front of the island, there is so much to discover, especially when checking every little crack for small things. When I was on Lissenung Island for the first

Haminoeia Bubble Shell

time, I spent lots of time on this reef, sometimes asking one of the staff to drop me and my buddy or one of the guides off about halfway on the other side, so we could do a one way back. There are some massive giant clams, I’ve never seen anything like it. It is also an amazing stretch for colourful night dives full of life. Various types of moray eels, moving tiger cowries, marble shrimps, squid or even nudibranchs which often gathered in specific spots. This time around with my new camera, I decided to not spend so much time on the reef itself but rather on the sand, knowing that those sites usually bring completely different species with them despite their proximity to the reef. So off we went, out the front of the island. Together with my mate, who was new to Lissenung at the time, I searched and searched the sand. We just couldn’t find anything. By the time we ended the dive, I had taken not a single picture. It seemed weird that I had found almost nothing at all that I felt like taking pictures of this time around. Something more, better, had to be there, right? So, of course, I tried again the next day, certain that I’d find something. This time I went slower, spent more time looking over the sand and checking for smaller things than the day before. Sure enough, once we reached the spot where I wanted to start looking properly, probably about 70m away from the beach, I found a really cool looking nudibranch (it was actually a bubble shell), about 1-2mm in length and with a really long tail, a long-tailed Haminoeid. I’d never seen anything like it before and didn’t even know of its existence up until I found it myself that day. Then suddenly they were everywhere, and not just one species. I ended up finding five different types of tiny sea slugs on this one dive, with almost all of them being new to me. Looking for other critters this size, I ended up shooting amphipods, skeleton shrimps and also some ‘real’ shrimps that day. The best thing and one of my favourites on this trip was a pygmy squid. The little free swimming mollusc was hard to get at first but once it settled down on some sea grass, it let me take all the time I wanted. It turned out to be my longest dive yet, continuously busy with looking for all kinds of animals. At some point, the camera battery

82

Dive Log Australasia #413 August‘25

www.divelog.net.au