Hi and ho!
This weekend we once again decided upon doing some night dives, and as usual, the site was decided upon on the way to the sites. Once again it was decided to be in the Jordfall marina, as one of us was there doing their dive master examination, which fit us rather well. Said and done, we arrived at the site late in the afternoon with food and drinks for our buddy at the site, got our gear out and started preparing for the dives. After setting up, we divided into pairs, made our dive plans, geared up and started to get into the water.
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| Close up of a squat lobster, look how beautiful the colours are. |
Dive 1:
Depth: 31 m, Time: 36 min, Temperature: 11°C
Me and my buddy got into the water and swam out to the end of the jetty before we started descending. Like the week before, the surface waters were somewhat brown due to the freshwater flow from land bringing humus into the top layer, but as soon as we got underneath it, the vis cleared up much more. We immediately started following the slope downwards in order to search for squid. As we were swimming downwards, I spot something peculiar at the edge of my light cone, as I got closer I realized it was a crab, and a species I've never seen before. So I started photographing it, unfortunately it was very skittish and started running as soon as I got closer, meaning that there was no close up photo of this one. Later when I had gotten home and had access to my books and sources, I found out that what I saw was an Angular crab (Goneplax rhomboides), a species that is recently immigrated to Swedish waters.
After leaving the crab be, me and my buddy continued our dive, looking for squids and other creatures, but no squids were to be found in the deep this time. After a while, it became time for us to start ascending, as we were both getting low on No Deco Limit time and gas, so we followed the bottom upwards again. As we were starting to come more shallow, with our NDL and gas still good, we decided to start swimming towards the left, and so we did until we found the cliff wall and boulders, there we spent some time looking into the crevices for various creatures, as I was photographing a crab, my buddy started signalling that they were seeing something, as I took a look, I first did not see anything, but after a few seconds of looking, lo and behold! A squid!, so I spent some time there, photographing the critter before I decided that I had harassed it enough and let it be. We ended the dive soon after, as we decided that it was simply time to get up for a nice thermos of hot beverage. Said and done, we got up, took off our dive packages and began discussing the things we had seen during the dive over some hot coffee.
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| The Angular crab is a species new to the area, the first records of it are from 2008 |
Dive 2:
Depth: 22 m, Time: 44 min, Temperature: 11°C
After a surface intervall with discussions and warm beverages, we once again got into the water for another dive. This time we went down in the same spot as before, however we started swimming left quite quickly, finding the walls early. We followed the walls during this dive, keeping on average above 20 m. As we were swimming around, I spot a shape close to the bottom, which turned out to be another squid, so we spent some time around the squid as I photographed it. After a while, it became time to turn around as we had been in the water for a while now, meaning that we needed some time to get back to the starting point as well. As we were nearing the end point, I was taking a closer look on some rocks when I spotted a small shape on top of one of them, turned out to be an Bryer's Nut crab (Ebalia tumefacta), a miniscule species of crab that I've never seen before as well, so that one got photographed as well :)
We ended the dive at 44 minutes as we simply had gotten so shallow that i thought it wasn't worth prolonging the dive anymore by then.
All in all, it was a super duper dive day, especially since I got to see two species I've never seen before, as well as squids, always love seeing them squids :)
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| Bryer's nut crab, a species about the size of a pinky finger nail, thus making it easily overlooked |
So until next time! Keep on Swimming!
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| Love the Common bobtail squids, they are so cute when they dig down into the bottom like this |
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