Bryan Chu
Courtenay, CA
Member since December 31, 2019
Most Viewed
Rush Hour at Seven Tree
Juvenile widow rockfish at Seven Tree
Jewel of the Sea
Himatina Trophina nudibranch
Rainbow in the Dark
comb jelly
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!
Gentle Giant
This is a huge male wolf eel towards the end of his life. His head must have been about 1 ft tall, and the body maybe 6-7 ft long! He definitely looks a lot scarier and meaner than the younger wolf eels, but this is not the case! Wolf eels are gentle, shy, slow and sedentary, the opposite of how ferocious they look, and this old guy was no exception. If you look into his mouth past the front teeth, you'll see a thick, bony plate on the roof of his mouth. And he has something similar on the bottom of his mouth too (included a few photos to show from different angles). This allows this amazing animal to do the unthinkable - grab whole sea urchins, crush them in his mouth, and then swallow them, without sustaining any injury. Other favourite foods include crabs and shellfish... must be nice having built-in shell crackers in your mouth. What a cool fish! And yes, despite their name, wolf eels are fish, not eels. They just happen to be really long, eel-shaped fish who fill the ecological niche of an eel in our waters. But you can tell they are a fish because they have pectoral fins, unlike true eels (such as morays). So what was this guy doing out of his hole? Hard to tell, but running across him is a sad story. On the very last dive of my most recent Port Hardy trip, after fighting with the current a lot at depth, I decided to come up into the shallows and drift along the wall. As I cruised along, I spotted this huge guy out in the open. It was very surprising as he would normally be in his den, and he was only in about 10-15 ft of water, while normally they are found a lot deeper. In fact, I let out a gasp of surprise when I saw him. I swam over to take some photos, approaching slowly and carefully as I didn't want to scare him off. He just looked at me, opening and closing his mouth regularly (to keep water flowing over his gills). After I took some photos, I noticed something seemed off. There were some swells from waves overhead, and he was moving back and forth with them. But then he got rolled over, onto his side, and then upside down. Not good, not good at all. I am not sure why he was out in the open at such a shallow depth, but something was wrong with him. I think maybe he was just very old, maybe disoriented and catching his breath? Anyway, he eventually righted himself, and then swam down to about 80 ft, where he basically ran into another diver. I followed along behind to see where he was going to go. After sitting still for a bit, he picked himself up and undulated down past 100 ft. The deeper he got, the better he looked. I turned and left him at about 90 ft as I didn't have a ton of air left. I didn't take any photos after the shallows but it was cool to see him getting his bearings and then swimming strongly into the deep. I hope he is OK but I think he was probably reaching the end of his (estimated) 25 year life-span? So, a bittersweet final encounter of the trip. Amazing to see such a beautiful animal out in the open, but sad that he seemed to be approaching the end of his life. Hopefully, he still has some more energy to make a couple more sets of super cute babies, and he was out on a bachelor crawl (that was the theory of the diver he ran into)!