Off beaten track

Hogenakkal Falls About180 km from Bangalore, the falls are a attractive tourist draw. Though the falls are not spectacular in themselves,  they have spawned an entire tourist industry around.  Of course as we are always wont to believe, the waters are holy, hence a dip in the falls is mandatory to cleanse one of accumulated sin.  Though a sceptic like me prefers sin to disease that the garbage in the water is likely to spread. The waters of the Cauvery, flow through two sets of falls here, a smaller one close to the touristy places and this gorge a little way in. The Upper Falls These falls are closer to Hogenakkal, here there is a complete tourist/religious township. The railing on the right is where religious are to wash off their sins.  Are those sins I see festooned on the railings? The Coracle This is the main form of water transport here.  A frame of split bamboo/cane covered by blue plastic and coated in black tar. Steered by a single oar i...

I could almost feel the fish�s pain as it flailed along sideways, jerking spasmodically above the Medhafaru�s deck. The fusilier had perhaps been the victim of a tuna or seerfish strike into a shoal and mortally injured but still alive had drifted down to the ship.   To add insult to injury the poor fish was being pursued mercilessly by two well meaning cleaner wrasses. It is a common site to see the fusiliers taking turns at a cleaning station to get picked clean by these helpful fish but in this case the �client� seemed less than happy, swimming away in stuttering, sideways spurts to try and evade the cleaner wrasses to no avail. Underwater life is tough indeed.

A visit to the Negombo fish market is eye opening, if somewhat of an assault on the olfactory senses. For those who want a taste (figuratively speaking of course) of where their seafood comes from, a walk through the market is a must. It is not a pretty sight, especially for those who like rays and sharks (more to come of those) and the glassy eyed fish staring at you is quite eerie. It is hard to pass judgement on the people making a living off this, but it certainly is a good introduction to one sector that is impacting the ocean environment immensely.

Since I alluded to the feeding action on my last Photo of the Week post about the stoned octopus, I figured I would post an image of the action. The Wall, a dive site which was ridiculously convenient to get to from Vinnie�s dive center in the Andamans was full of life and amazing action. The top was home to shoals of bait fish and shoals of blue fin trevally would come charging in and in a flash hit the bait balls. The focus lag on the DX-2G makes action photography a bit of a challenge but I managed to get some shots off. More to follow at a later date!

Big fish are rare nowadays. Even in the times of Arthur C. Clarke�s early ocean explorations, the big groupers were getting hit with unsporting (not to mention illegal) spear fishermen donning tanks and hunting these gentle giants out of existence. Every now and then I see a grouper that�s a couple of feet long and I get inordinately excited. It is sobering to think that 30-40 years ago these would not have been of much note. For a big fish to survive now, it has to be canny and clever. It is literally survival of the fittest to ensure it doesn�t end up with a spear from the likes of Kalu Mahathaya and Ikkiya amidships. There is such a fish on a wreck in Colombo and a sighting of it is a rare treasure. I have seen him a few times, most memorably on a night dive (more to come on that later) but the majority of the handful of sightings had been from a great distance and for a fleeting moment. The closest I got to him in 2011 was one day towards the latter of the season. It was one of my ...

Bait ball! Towards the end of the season millions of tiny fish congregate on the Cargo Wreck where they are pursued relentlessly by other fish. They all bunch up and move as one in an amazing ballet as they try to avoid being eaten.

The resident clown fish on the Cargo Wreck in Colombo. Resident at least until one of the fish collectors gets him.

The wonderful thing about diving is that you always come across something strange. A heap of sand with a slivery fish poking its head out, a spurt of sand as a ray darts past you. This however was possibly one of the strangest things I have seen. Out of the 2 meters of visibility on a small inshore wreck in Unawatuna, I spotted a tiny black shape where the sand met the wreck. As I moved in closer to take a look, the shape resolved itself into a small object with what looked like two wings on either side, splayed wide as I came closer. The shape of whatever it was so odd that I could not figure out what it was, fish or invertebrate. The surge across the wreck made it quite hard to get a good look or take a photo as no sooner had I gotten close to take a look or focused on the creature, the surge swept me past the creature. Finning furiously and almost standing almost on my head to get as close to it without inadvertently crushing it I noted with some surprise that it looked like an unde...

The bluering angelfish (Pomacanthus annularis) on Palagala reef. One of the most spectacular fish that are commonly seen on the inshore reefs. Keep an eye out for them in crevasses, hiding in the shadows.

Ok, it's not the best image (by any stretch of the imagination), but this was my 200th dive, I was in intense pain with imploded sinuses and int he middle of a baitball with tuna and seer hitting it. I completely forgot to switch my camera to AV out of Manual but I did get this one shot that showed some recognizable fish.

DJ and I had seen the net stretched taut on the crane like structure on the Medhafaru the last time we had dived and we knew it meant trouble. Sure enough on the next dive at the wreck, as Nish, Keerths, Daniel and I started our dive; the first thing I saw was an outline of a large fish, seemingly motionless next to the crane. Swimming closer the silhouette resolved itself into a blue-line grouper that was hanging off the net by a loop that had effectively created a noose. You could see where it had tightened as the fish had fought, white flesh showing through the blue and green skin. Initially it was hanging so still, swaying quietly in the surge that I thought it was dead but as I got right up next to it, its fins flapped and it tried to feebly get away. The nylon on the net was wrapped tight and taught against the fish. These groupers have a habit of lying in wait for prey and then shooting out at them and it looked like this fish had picked a very bad place to set an ambush, runni...

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 ...

The now familiar outline of the Medhafaru wreck appeared out of the blue-green waters, the bridge tilted at a Pisa like angle with the glass still intact though black with algae. DJ moved off to the front of the wreck as I stayed at the back, my more conservative Suunto demanding that I remained relatively shallow for our second dive of the day. One of the regular denizens of the wreck, a greenish yellow moray, a species we still have not been able to identify, poked its head out a small structure on the deck. It stared out, clenching its jaws repeatedly, as all morays are prone to doing. This does give these eels quite a vicious look especially with their jagged teeth but apparently all this gulping is just to help circulate water over their gills. It�s still not advisable to go sticking any body parts you are fond of near a moray; in fact that�s a good general rule with pretty much any animal. Best to stay clear of those teeth Unfortunately I was experiencing some issues with my came...

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 ...

When a person sits down to a fish curry or a portion of fish and chips, they rarely think of where that fish comes from. We rarely realize that when we consume fish, we are eating the last truly wild caught meat on the planet, our ancient role as hunters reprised in the role of modern day fishermen. Of course the new age fishermen are a far cry from what they were centuries or even decades ago. With engines, mechanization, longlines that stretch for kilometers with thousands of hooks and nets that could engulf the Empire State Building, the fisheries industry has become almost unrecognizable as has sadly our oceans, rapidly depleted and overfished what we see in our seas now appears to be but a sad remnant of the abundance that was there decades ago. Our surface interval chats with Uncle Sumathi used to really bring this home, 56 years old, he had seen foreign trawlers come and rape the seas off Colombo, taking so much fish that the numbers have never recovered. Apparently the local f...