Off beaten track

A curious crab peers out from a crevasse on Degalmeda reef. You can often see these crabs skittering away into the shadows as you approach so getting a good sighting of one is difficult!

Since I don't have much time to blog regularly these days, I've decided to do a small showcase of my underwater photography. Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a good start to the year! A shy Blenny on a reef in Colombo (probably a colour morph of a bi-colour blenny) Equipment used: Sea & Sea DX-2G

Shards of living glass Dive any reef or wreck in Colombo and you will see them. Small shoals of shining glass fish, shining that is when the light hits them. They blink in and out of existence as the light hits them for a kaleidoscopic experience that is sometimes unreal, especially when they congregate in a huge shoal that engulfs you and surrounds you in small shards of sunlight. Glass fish on a reef Glass fish and cardinal fish on the Cargo wreck Usually the glass fish aren�t so spectacular, they hang around in a group of about a dozen close to any sort of crevasse on the reef or �caves� formed on wrecks by the structure of the sunken ship. Presumably they do this for shelter with a place to retreat to if a predator attacks. What they don�t seem to realize is that their shelter is most often where the attack is launched from. You don�t have to look too closely at the crevacess and cracks to see them. The groupers lie there innocuously, seemingly somnambulant. Blue line groupers are ...

Is generally all you have at 36 meters before your bottom time runs out. At 36 meters you are under 3.5 atmospheres of pressure. This means that your ears will pop like crazy as you descend and more importantly you will use your air correspondingly quicker. Your bloodstram also will absorb nitrogen faster at greater depths, and you become saturated with nitrogen (for a super analogy check here . Coming up too quickly in such a situation will cause the nitrogen to bubble out of your blood stream like a coke bottle with its top removed. This is mildly unpleasant to say the least, leading to the dreaded �bends.� Bubbles in the brain, not a good thing The combination of faster air consumption and nitrogen saturation means going into decompression on deep dives is especially dangerous as you run the risk of breathing your tank dry during an extended decompression stop. For the uninitiated this is the period of time you spend hanging at around 3-4 meters of water while the absorbed nitrogen ...