We've been going at diving pretty hard recently, which is great. So have the sea snakes. two Sundays ago my buddy and I counted 12 snakes over the course of a short 30 minute dive. As I read when I was researching them, these Colubrine sea kraits are indeed quite docile. New Caledonian children play with them and they are unaggressive toward divers. They are a curious sort that are fun to observe swimming around and surfacing for air.
And their venom is 15 times more potent than that of the king cobra. Cheers.
The previous Friday I spotted a reef shark of some sort. Couldn't tell what it was exactly. Not too large, however-- perhaps only 1.5 m or so. Didn't hang around.
I've taken up spearfishing as well. Like most things new to me here on Miyako, I experience painful disappointment with this activity because of my inability to do things well. But on this past outing I managed to jump a nice-sized parrotfish that was preoccupied with eating something on the reef. I landed what appeared to be an ideal hit-- straight into the gill area-- and pinned the fish to the rocks. It was a tough catch with a pole spear because of the depth of the water, and I was very pleased with myself. As images of tempura danced through my head, the parrotfish thrashed about and managed to tear its own body apart off of the spear and dash into a hole. I was pissed. I think fishing is great, but, like most people, I don't particularly enjoy killing or causing animals grief unless I am going to eat them; I'm not there just to ruin some fish's day. Damn.
On that same dive I reached a depth of 11.9 m. That's a new high score.
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