Jordfall 30/5 2020. Hydroids and half-nights.

Hi and ahoy!

This weekend the weather was extremely nice, with the first days of summer-like temperatures of the year, as well as shining sun. So me and some buddies decided that this was perfect weather for diving. We decided to go a bit later in the day due to various stuff. This time we decided to go to a regular haunt of ours, the Jordfall marina, as it is easy to get in and out, as well as there being some benches to kit up the diving gear on there.
So after kitting up and paying the parking fee, sweating quite a bit as it was sunny and warm, we got into the water and prepared to start diving.

Nodding hydroid, very abundant on the soft mud bottom this time.

Dive 1:
Time: 58 min. Depth: 18 m, Temp: 10 °C

This White sea urchin was sitting on a a really shallow depth

Me and my buddy decided that we were too lazy to swim to the cliff and descend, instead we decided to descend as soon as the depth was great enough for descending and follow the bottom down instead. As we descended, we saw that the vis was around 3-5 m in all of the water column. When we got down to the bottom, I almost directly discovered that there was uncountable numbers of  Nodding hydroids (Corymorpha nutans) sitting in the sediment, so I began photographing, as i usually do, trying out some different settings on the camera and stuff. After a while, we continued to swim, following the bottom and the cliff walls of Jordfall. During this dive, we saw lot's of Common dragonets, however, as it was quite light in the water, they were rather skittish, as was many other organisms that I usually photograph. After around 30 minutes, it was time to turn around and swim back to the starting point again. When we neared the starting point, we observed a White sea urchin (Gracilechinus acutus) on a depth of 7 m, which is a depth you usually don't see larger sea urchins at in Sweden.
As we got up, we put away the gear and rested some on land before preparing for the second dive.





Dive 2:
Time: 46 min. Depth: 18 m, Temp: 10 °C

Orange brown aeolids doing aeolid stuff

After a small surface intervall, we decided to go into the water once more for a second dive. As it was getting rather late in the day (about 22:00) the waters were much darker, making it a semi-night dive, but that was honestly quite nice, as night dives are usually better for macro photography.
We descended in a similar fashion to the previous dive, a bit closer to the cliff this time though. The visibility was similar to the previous dive, with around 3-5 m of vis in the beginning of the dive. We kept following the cliff wall, looking in all nooks and crannies of the boulder fields and cliff crevices. After a while, it became time to get back to the starting point, as to not make it too late getting back home. It was around this time I started to see many a Common dragonet, resting on the seafloor, so I slowly crept up to some of them to try and get a good photo, especially the colorful males. So we kept swimming, with pauses every now and then as I photographed. When we reached the depth for the safety stop, around where the Eel grass grows in Jordfall marina, there was a great abundance of Orange-brown aeolids all around the area. So I spent the safety stop time photographing them.

All in all, this was a super nice dive trip, even if it got a bit late due to various things.

So until next time! Keep on Swimming!

Common dragonet males sure are colorful