Cuttlefish Phone Home

Last day for diving.  Fourteen dives in four days is quite a feat!  Last four dives today including a sunset dive. Today's location would be at Kapalai Resort.

Day Octopus...they are huge!

Day Octopus hanging out and changing crazy colors at the end.

Barracuda hanging out.

The black thing at the top of the photo is another crazy frogfish.

Small black triggerfish

Another scary crocodile fish.

Another small eel

Flounder

 Flounder

This was just a random picture of the star fish on the sea bed.

My digs for the week.  Complete with sleepy kitty.

Scuba Junkie does a lot with turtle conservation.  Just 2 weeks after I left, the babies started to hatch.  There were over 500 turtle hatchlings!  By giving the eggs a safe place to incubate and helping the turtles make it to water, they have increased their chances of survival from 1/1000 to 1/100!

After my afternoon dives, I took a walk around the whole island to check out the two small villages.

Sad to see all of the trash.

Muslim cemetery

Time for my final dive.  This would be a sunset dive. There are some unique creatures that come out at night.  This was a shallow dive, which enables us to stay down for 79 minutes!

Sleepy turtles.

This turtle startled me as he came up from behind me and brushed past me.

The week's diving had been great.  I especially loved the barracuda and the sharks in Sipadan.  But nothing could have prepared me for what happened on this night dive.  Everyone swam over to investigate some coral.  I don't know what they found so interesting in that coral. Frogfish?  Nudibranch?  I can't imagine.  

As I swam over to investigate, I noticed these two cuttlefish hanging out.  I would say one was a male and the other female.  Someone had said later that there were cuttlefish eggs in that coral.  Maybe they were actually concerned about the safety of their eggs, and that's why they were hanging around us.  The male was right in the center of us.  The female seemed a bit shy and was hanging out in the perimeter.  

These creatures seemed so intelligent and genuinely curious about what we were up to.  One girl put out her finger...the male cuttlefish put out two of his tentacles to touch her as in an E.T. moment.  It was unreal to me.  I wanted to kiss them and hug them and let them know we wouldn't hurt their babies.  Cuttlefish are awesome.

Cuttlefish phone home

Cuttlefish!!!  Check out this 3 minute video.  I am left wondering how many of his "poses" were defensive...like was he scared?  Protecting his eggs?  And how many were him being curious and reaching out to see what was up?

After four grueling days of diving, I got an evening to have some drinks with some new friends!

Toilet instructions in a bathroom in Semporna.  Thank God for western style toilets.

My new friends, Tony Cox and Allan  Reyes