A week of diving at the Blue Heron Bridge.

Funny enough this week the Bridge was voted #1 diving location in the US for photography by a big diving magazine. For us it is an ideal location, just a short drive way and with the dive shop just beside it where we can rent those big 100cf tanks for just 15 bucks, park the pickup with the tailgate as a nice place to get ready and walk 100 feet on the beach to get in the water. Also did I mentioned free parking and an outside shower to rinse all your gear.
The dive time is set by the tide, we can dive 1 hour before until 1 hour after the high tide giving us a 2 hours dive window. That time changes everyday advancing by 45 minutes, this week being the best times in the month, Monday the high tide was at 10h00 and tomorrow Saturday it will be at 14h00.

This week we managed to go diving 3 times so far, one day I couldn't because I was to congested with the cold and another day because again my sinus were blocked and I had a sore ear, also Sebastien my son and diving buddy had a sore back. Today Friday we decided to take a day off from diving so I could try to rest and get rid of my cold and for him to get his back better.

The main goal of our dives at the bridge are Photography and practice, so we both are taking pictures, Sebastien with my small point and shoot Canon D10 and me with my Sony Nex-5N in a 10 Bar housing with 2 Sea & Sea strobes. It's taking me some time to get used to my new camera system and using flashes a new thing for me, so much so that on the first dive Sebastien's pictures are better then mine, as the week progressed I got better and got some great shots. We also took some videos during the dives some of them we posted on facebook and some on my Youtube channel that can be found easy either by searching for bigphotodan on Youtube or by following he link on my website under the contact tab.

Of course we had a few adventures as always the case, one of the things that happened is that on monday at the end of the dive as we were almost on shore our dive flag that is installed on a small raft became untied and started floating away, pretty fast because there was strong wind and current, lucky for us I noticed before it disappeared from our visibility range and darted after it swimming as fast as possible it took me at least ten swim cycle before I could grab the end of the rope and drag it back to shore. You see the raft has a small compartment in it where we store the car keys while we dive so it was quite essential to retrieve it. I have since this incident made modifications to the attachment of the cable to the raft and let me assure you it will not happen again.

The reason diving at the bridge is well known in the diving community is the diversity of small sealife to photograph and we saw some interesting ones indeed. There was for instance this big Hermit Crab that live in a Conch Shell the size of a football, I noticed it and started taking pictures after a few shoots the current had carried me past it so I decided to swim a circle in order to get back to a better position, when I got back in position the water had gone cloudy with a lot of matter in suspension so I was not to happy with myself assuming that I had not been careful with my fins and had lifted all that matter from the bottom, but after observing the Crab it became evident that he was the one creating the dust storm on purpose in an effort to better camouflage itself. Sebastien even got it on video, I managed to take some of my best photos so far using my new system.

We've been seeing those big spider like crabs, after some research I learned that they are known as Yellow Stripes Arrow Crabs so on our last dive I spotted one that was in a good position and was able to observe it for a while, during that time I took some good pictures and also a video.
We plan to go back diving at the bridge tomorrow Saturday and maybe on Sunday.

Next week the tide times are not as good so we plan to go diving in the Keys for a few days.