How does he find them? Tiny seahorse

I'm back in Roatan diving again after two years off.   I come back here mostly because the divemaster is incredibly good at finding things for me to photograph.

Yesterday (unfortunately while I had my wide angle mounted), David suddenly stops and excitedly waves me over.  He points, and I look.  And look.   And look some more.  Then I get closer and finally see it.  He's found a yellow Longsnout Seahorse about an inch long.

Here's another shot, with an extreme crop.

We were not in a usual seahorse area, and David was just finning along about 6-7 feet above the bottom looking for whatever.   This guy finds stuff like this almost every dive.  He's a legend.

I spent 2 weeks here routinely, and I never spot critters that small.  I do home in pretty well on lionfish.

Travel was relatively easy, though masks.   Biggest issue I had was my layover in Houston.  Got in around 11pm, and all the restaurants were closed.   Left Phoenix at 6pm, and I'm glad I grabbed a sandwich in the airport. 2.5 hour flight, and time zone change.

I stayed overnight at the Houston Airport Marriot (11 hour layover) rather than sit around all night.   Used to be easier because there used to be a 4am Phx-Houston flight so you could make the 9:45am flight to Roatan.   Alternatively take the Miami route, with a 5-hour flight plus a 5-hour layover.  (I hate the Miami airport.)

As a side effect of an 11-hour layover, my bags were checked through to Roatan, so I didn't have my usual bag for the overnight.  I packed a toothbrush with the camera gear.

A lot of restaurants were shut down - even at 6pm on Friday in the Phoenix airport - so that's a real concern now as you travel.

Flying out of Houston was odd, and I'm not sure if due to covid-related issues, or construction, but there was no TSA checkpoint anymore in Terminal E (international one) and you had to walk to Term D to get in, then walk back.  I also saw signs in Term D telling United arrivals they had to pick up bags in Term C.

Security itself was a breeze this time.  I do have TSA Precheck, and in Phoenix I was through the checkpoint in less than 60 seconds.   In Houston (Term D) it was a couple of minutes.  The whole Houston TSA operation looked like the end product of a terminal redesign, with a lot of dedicated space in what seemed to be an intermediate floor.

Flying - masks, and empty seats on the plane.  Friday's plane Phx-Hou was about 1/4 full, with most of the passengers in the rear cheap seats.  I had an empty row in front of me and beside me.   Flying Hou to Roatan was not as empty but I still had an empty middle seat next to me.  I did pay extra to sit in Row 7 near the front, so I could get off quickly and get through Roatan security.

Because I was flying to Roatan, there were a couple of times I had to present my vaccination card.   Once before planing in Hou, again in the Roatan airport.  I got through immigration 20 minutes before my bags showed up.

Now that I'm back at the Reef House (my 9th time), things are mostly normal.  There is a somewhat-enforced 9pm curfew, but that's "Roatan midnight", so kind of meaningless out here in the boonies in Oak Ridge.

While I don't see much difference, things are not normal.  Schools are all doing remote learning, and here that means sending assignments and work via PDF to cell phones.  I can't imagine it's working very well.   And businesses are, and have been, struggling.

One last annoyance that you may see - when we planed in Houston, everyone needed to step in front of a camera & monitor and get face recognition, I'm pretty sure based on your passport scan.   For more people, including me, it worked.   But it also took 2-3 seconds, at best.   So everyone getting one that plan ended up with about a 3-second extra delay, more like 60 seconds when someone had a problem.  Combined with confusion about 'What am I doing?  Oh, you want me to pull the mask down for this" and the procedure. it definitely slowed boarding way down.   It was listed as 'experimental', but I have no idea who's idea it was (government or airline.)  It's the first place I've seen that.

Coming back into the US I'll have to have a $50 covid test done, which the resort here arranges for me.   Thankfully I'm not Canadian as they are required to take a $250 test.   The Reef House has not seen a single Canadian visitor since Covid hit.

PHXAZCRAIG wrote:

I spent 2 weeks here routinely, and I never spot critters that small. I do home in pretty well on lionfish.

When searching for critters, it helps that many of them have certain preferences in their habitat. For example, sheep nudis, while ridiculously tiny (~5mm at most, and usually smaller) tend to congregate on fairly prominent green leaves, so you don't need to sieve through the whole sandy bottom, only the leaves of the specific type. Experienced guides usually know lots of such relationships.

kelpdiver wrote:

With so much time out of the water, how long did it take for you to feel competent with the 850 in the water?

Hehe, for macro, no problem at all.  For wide angle, I'm definitely needing to work on it.

Video - now THERE'S a ... situation.   I decided I should try a 20-30 second video on each dive, and on the first 2-3 dives I remembered to do that.  However, post-processing (grading) the video is totally new to me.  I figured this would be a fine time to learn.  I had to find new software to try after finding that Davinci Resolve wouldn't work on my laptop.  Ended up with Lightworks.

And what did I get from my first few videos?  Well, I guess I never checked the settings, because I shot them all in 4x slo-mo. SIgh.

I'm pretty familiar with the camera, but intentionally am leaning toward a lot of wide angle this year, partly because I feel I have much more to learn there than macro.  Both in shooting and in post.  Since my camera gear was all working ok, I didn't pay that much attention.  I've had all sorts of other issues.

Currently I'm down with some sort of ear problem and missed the last 4 dives.  No idea if it will clear up by tomorrow.  Feels more like I'm coming down with something.  I had 10 dives, and most of them were painful.  My left ear barely wants to clear, going both down and up.

On top of that I have dive computer issues.  Two years ago I bought a new Suunto D5.  This is the first time I got to try it out.  I was confused as to the functions, and I couldn't get it paired to my tank pod when I got here, so I just went on a checkout dive without an air gauge.  Figured 20 minutes would be fine.  I do a shore dive Saturday afternoon when i arrive to check out my gear before starting the boat dives in the morning.  This was really a solo dive too - I had someone help me into the water, then I was on my own.  Getting out with the camera was a real pain.

The next day I switched back to my old Cobra2 and loaned the D5 to my divemaster, who wore it on two dives.   We couldn't figure out how to get some things to display however.  That night I downloaded the manual and found out the D5 was set to Gauge mode.

So I reset it to Air/Nitrox, and also fixed the pairing issue with the tank pod.

And then it bit me.   When you dive in Gauge Mode and switch to Air/Nitrox, as a safety measure it LOCKS ITSELF FO 48 HOURS from displaying any kind of deco info.  And when you dive with it in that condition, it just resets the timer to 48 hours again.  Now I can't dive with it until after the two morning dives tomorrow, if I'm able to dive again.

Something else happened that was probably due to 2 years off diving too.  I ran out of air - twice!  Both times as I was handing the camera up to the boat, and I knew it was coming.  The divemaster and I have dove together extensively, and we always have 60+ minute dives.  The dive pace is planned around this.  On two dives we hit unexpected and unusual current, and my out-of-shapeness led me to get back to the boat with about 100 psi, then run out handing things up.

Considering I was also barely able to change depth for the last several dives, and it was just pushing things too close to the edge and I decided to take a good day or two off and rest.  Also started a course of antibiotics.

So my concentration has not been on my photography very much on these dives.  Still had a lot of fun.

If I can't dive tomorrow, I can instead snorkel (great snorkeling here) and practice over-under shots and some video.