Space Oddity

After a few days of winter storms, with strong winds and large waves, my dive buddy Krystal and I decided to try to go diving in a calmer weather window where the currents at this site were good for a night dive, because we really wanted to get in the water. When we showed up the waves were crashing loudly on the rocky beach, making for a rather exciting shore entry. Once we got down to depth, everything was very stirred up. After seeing some stubby squid and exploring the sand for a bit, out of the black we spotted this hooded nudibranch drifting towards us in the current. I hurriedly adjusted my strobes and camera settings while swimming to get ahead of it and line up the shot. Unlike other hooded nudibranchs I have seen in the water column, it was not actively swimming, just slowly rotating as it drifted through all the stirred up particles in the water. It really did look like an alien floating through space. I have read that hooded nudibranchs were observed to be 20x more likely to swim at night rather than during the day. I wonder if this one was knocked off of some eel grass from the storm, or if it was just drifting along in search of "greener pastures" to settle down. As it caught up to me, I moved around to get a nice angle of the "venus fly trap" like hood, with the body in profile. After getting a few shots, I had to leave it to continue along with its drifting in the current, and we headed back up to the shallows for an exciting exit through the surf. I loved how the strobe light really lit up the insides, making it look electric! All the branching in the cerata (paddle-like projections on its back) are digestive tract ducts, which is not exactly what I expected they would be, but very cool to see them in such detail. Overall a very unexpected but very cool encounter. That's one of my favourite things about diving - you never know what you're going to see!