Night Dive

This is from a few days ago, finally getting around to posting it...

Spent most of the day sleeping and fighting a cold, plus a bit of work. Then went for a night dive around 7:00pm.

The only difference in terms of the diving itself is that you have a torch (flashlight), and that the hand signals change a bit. But the underwater world is certainly different…

For starters, you see true colors all of a sudden. Water absorbs certain colors more quickly then others, so a red tomato looks green at 15 meters. But at night, you have the torch so you get the full color spectrum (or something thereabouts). So that was neat, the whole scene looks different right away.
Then just about all the little reef fish are sleeping. You see a fin stick out of the coral here and there, and that's about it. Really no fish whatsoever swimming around. I did see a cuttlefish from far away, they hunt at night and it was out and about (unlike the one I saw on an earlier dive which was just sitting on the bottom napping during the day).
Also saw little jellyfish (maybe 5-10 cm in diameter), which I'm sure are there in the day too. But since they're just about transparent, you only really see them at night. The shape is straight out of star wars – now I know where the people designing fantasy spaceships get their inspiration from. I'm sure that applies to a lot of movies. So many of the fantastical landscapes and creatures in movies now look awfully familiar.
During the safety stop at 5 meters, we turned the torches off and played with the luminescent algae for a bit. Nifty, all these dots of light in the water.
Another cool thing was that you could look deeper into the coral itself, just the way the light worked. Floating over this massive spiky green thing, and you look down among branches and branches, probably looked a good half meter into the thing and it was still the same.
Starting to get a hold of buoyancy. Basically breath a bit more shallow, not really deep breaths. And then increase/decrease lung volume to go up or down. So if I want to do down, breath out and then shallow with little air in my lungs. Want to go up, breath in a lot and then breath shallow with full lungs. Wheeeeeee. Now I have to practice reducing my air consumption, it's not terrible but not great yet either.

That's all for this dive. I kinda feel like I missed a lot on this one, concentrating on buoyancy and breathing too much. But as that gets better I'll have more time to pay attention to all the cool shit.
From what I've seen here the reefs are treated pretty well. The dive sites themselves have little/no man-made damage. Makes sense, they rely on tourism and diving makes up a lot of that. How many dives shops can you fit on one island? I haven't counted them, but I would guess there are at least a hundred people diving on any given day. One dive trip with Manta Dive has up to 20 ppl., and they do 2-3 dives a day. And that's just one shop of a whole bunch.