Solo Wide-Angle Dive on the Ledge of Turtles and in Poor Visibility

Took a while to get going this morning.  I had planned to get to the beach before sunrise at 6:48 am and maybe make two dives before the Lifeguards took the towers.  Didn't work out that way.  The surface temperature was chilly at 7:00 am.  I didn't get to the beach until 8:30 am, when the surface temperature was above 70 degrees.  I decided to shoot wide angle and set up the housing to allow me to change the focal length from 35 mm to 70 mm, which was sort of nice, but visibility was poor and wide angle really was the wrong choice.  Got some panorama shots, like the picture below of the North Edge of the Ledge of Turtles.  Post-Processing helped, but I should have been shooting macro or supermacro in this visibility.

This is a shot of the coral heads on the Ledge from the East.

From the Ledge, I swam over to Shark's Rock, a picture of which is below.  To the right is a picture of some fish in the Staghorn Coral along the way.

A picture of Shark's Rock from the South.  Notice the coral overlay on the rock substructure and the way it is receding.

Some Ocean Surgeonfish and Doctorfish combing the reef for food.

School of Porkfish above the Staghorn Coral.








This is a compilation of several photos of the Ledge of Turtles taken from the South.

While the air temperature had warmed up by the time I got in the water, the water itself seemed colder.  I checked the temperature on my computer, but Suunto tracks the maximum temperature during a dive and that was 75.2 degrees, which is what it has been for several of the past dives.  Whatever the reason, my air usage was terrible.  The whole dive was barely over 90 minutes.