Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

A good day for octopi. I spotted a reef octopus during a drift dive. Once it noticed that I'd seen it it started nonchalantly moving a few yards and camouflaging itself as whatever kind of coral it was near by forming itself into different shapes and changing its color. When it became clear that that strategy wasn't going to work, it wadded itself up into a crevice in an actual piece of coral and turned sandy white.

Divemaster Ali spotted a tiny blue ring octopus on one of our other dives. It shot around, pulsing its colors at us and tried some mimicry too, but we stayed there watching it until I ran low on air. The blue ring is a rare species with an extremely strong poison. A bite can stop an adult human from breathing within a minute. So that's the second creature in two days that could kill me with a bite.

I did a total of three dives (skipping the night dive again). In addition to the octopi, I saw a really cool boxfish with black and white patterns like brain coral on its back, a sleeping stingray under a coral head (its tail was sticking out, which is how I knew to look under there), a turtle, and a lot of fish. On one dive, the fish were so thick that there were times when I couldn't see the other divers because too many fish were in the way.

I'm feeling somewhat better, perhaps because I've brought out the big guns from my medkit. Pseudoephedrine, Ibuprofen, and Anefrin together make it possible to nearly ignore a head cold. The only problem is that they lose efficacy if used too much. So hopefully I'll be able to sleep off this cold soon.