Kraken de Mabini

It sure does look like a Hairy Clinging Crab, Mithrax pilosus.

When I click on https://scubaboard.com/ ... with Gmail, I get a Scubaboad "contact us" form with no Error message. In other words, Scubaboard can be contacted via Gmail. Maybe you might need to use a different web service. Good luck!

The strobes and housing i wrap in my wet suit and clothes, and pack them in my two hard shell suitcases. The camera and lenses I wrap in some clothes in my camera bag. The suitcases I check as luggage and the camera bag i carry with me. I have travelled like this for over 20 years with no problem.

Over the past 40 years I have dived from several dive boats, mostly in the Sea of Cortez and the Andaman Sea, all excellent dive trips. But the lone exception was some ten years ago was the Egyptian dive boat, the Gazala Explorer. Both my buddies and me had a miserable experience on this boat with very poor diving and useless dive guides. If you or a friend are thinking of diving the Red Sea on an Egyptian liveaboard, please read the following report by the Egyptian Marine Accident Investigation Branch. In nutshell, the report states that: "16 Red Sea liveaboard dive boats have been lost over the last 5 years. Seven of these losses happened in the last 21 months, and three of these resulted in numerous fatalities." But dive boats in the US can also be deadly, such as the MV Conception in southen California I dived from many times, caught fire at night, trapping the divers sleeping in it, with many fatalities. The moral of the story may be to avoid dive boats, best dive from land. https://divemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025-SB1-RedSeaDiveBoats.pdf https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/02/us/california-dive-boat-fire-captain-sentencing/index.html

The photos of the Black Sand Retreat look lovely. I may consider it for my next dive trip, thank you.

Hi, you mention that you plan to dive in Lembeh. Allow me to suggest you might consider Yos Dive Lembeh resort, where I have dived many times. Dive guides Nuswanto Lobbu and Maureen Dengah are excellent. As most of the good stuff is above 20 m, if one dives relaxed, it is possible to dive for 70 to 90 min, four dives per day. Yos Amerta, the owner, personally oversees the resort, and is himself an uw photographer. I hope to dive there again later this year. info@yosdivelembeh.com

A related and useful Scuba report on diving in Anda, Bohol can be found here: https://scubaboard.com/community/threads/may-2024-anda-scuba-diving-bohol.646545/

Many thanks for posting this most enjoyable report. The maps helped me follow your trip. The photos are all excellent! They show the great diversity of sea life. What camera and strobes did you use?

If possible, it might be great for you to keep both your homes, the one in Hawaii and the one in a South Carolina Island which gives you ready access to the Caribbean. You would then have access to two diving paradises, Hawaii and the Caribbean. Maybe three if the diving from your South Carolina Island is at all interesting. The marvels of modern air travel may well allow you to juggle all three, that is if your land obligations are compatible with a diverse underwater life.

Good news! Thank you for posting.

Hi, Aquatica: Time has come for you (and for the USA) to switch to metric from the medieval inches/pounds. Everybody else in the world uses metric, in case you hadn't noticed. Cheers!

Lovely film, thanks for posting it.

In the 1990's I joined a group led by the late Capt Jim Black to dive in the Red Sea, the divers had dived all over the world, but the boat (I seem to recall it was the Gazala Explorer) and diving were marginal at best. None in that group ever returned, or to any Egyptian or mid Eastern dive site, as there is practically nothing there when compared to SE Pacific or Mexican dive sites.

On second thought, the dorsal three white lines and the white mantle's edge tell us these nudis are a Mexichromis trilineata couple. The white may be replaced with a light color depending on the nudi's diet. Nice photo, thanks for posting it!

Yes, these two nudibranchs do remind one of a Mexichromis trilineata, but I am not able to take it any further. Maybe you can ask Terry Gosliner or Mike Miller for their expert opinion.

Neville Coleman's "Nudibranchs Encyclopedia", while a bit old, is an excellent book, well worth having together with Gosliner's books. Thosee by Helmut Debelius are also well worth having. I found that the more books I have on sea life, the more I enjoy them, they are an excellent investment. Their authors have done us all lovers of sea life a huge favor by gathering and publishing their knowledge, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Through my late dive buddy Capt Jim Black, an expert nudibranch aficionado, I had the opportunity to meet several of these authors, and they were a pleasure to be with. Their books are on my desktop as I write this. Amazon offers an excellent variety of books on reef life: https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon.com+nudibranch+reef+life+books&sca_esv=

If you glue it, it might be a good idea, as a backup, to also screw the broken pieces together. This is because the handles are subject to a lot of leverage and kinetic energy while being handled. I also use a rope handle attached to the top of the two handles, for carrying the housing assembily and for making it easy for the boat crew to grab and handle it.

AliExpress sells several camera trays with handles. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2255800263870562.html? and https://www.ebay.com/itm/326241866657?chn=ps&_trkparms=ispr%3D1&amdata=enc%3A1QR66X5RNT_iE0Q7vl5K34w40&norover=1&mkevt Might it be possible to adapt one of these tray handles to fit your housing.?

Have your tried Bluewater, Backscatter and similar equipment stores?

Or, I should have added: Read, partake and enjoy both Wetpixel and Waterpixels.

I just now looked up the O-Ring Store with Google and the price is $0.17 per 2.5 x 4O ring, an acceptable price. https://www.theoringstore.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2032 You might want to use another search engine, or give more practice to your O-ring searches, your search Kung-Fu as you call it.

Thank you, jlaity and RichN, for clarifying the finer details of the on-off-on again of Wetpixel, and the opportunity it opens to scammers. The safest and best use of one's time may be to bypass Wetpixel altogether, ignore it and let it wither. Instead, allow me to suggest that we read and enjoy, and contribute to, Waterpixels.

Wetpixel is up and running again, the advertisements are to be up to date. But the masthead is still the same, with Adam Hanlon as publisher and editor! One hopes it is now possible to implement the changes suggested by RichN in his post above .