Sometime I like amuse myself by going back through my accumulation of thousands of underwater images to find the ones which I first rejected as real.  Usually this rejection has to do with some technical fault such as bad focus (usually an image-killer), impossibly filthy water (sometimes fixable by laboriously removing the spots) or motion blur. Of the faults, motion blur is the easiest to turn into art. It sometimes generates a very interesting image. Here is a Many-Spotted Sweetlips (Plectorhinchus chaetodonoides)  which I tried to capture with a shap shot at Magic Passage:

The attempt, as you can see, failed miserably. Both the fish and the background are blurred. Nevertheless, a tiny, nagging tickle in the back of my skull kept mumbling, “Play with it, idiot.” I always pay attention to these messages from my id. As you can see, with a little work, the wasted pixels redeem themselves. A mistake becomes art. I don’t know if I’d want to hang it on the wall, but it provided me with a few minutes of not  thinking about computer networks. That’s a blessing.

Here is another one that I saved from the bit dumpster. The Silver Sweetlips (Diagramma pictum),  one of my favourites, hangs out in mobs at Magic Passage. You can find many more images of them here on Madang – Ples Bilong Mi by putting “pictum” in the search box. Is is a very beautiful fish:You can see in the shot above that the background is relatively unblurred (relatively, as I say) but the fish was moving quite smartly. This transforms the beautiful yellow spots of the sub-adult into concentric yellow arcs which give the image the impression of some kind of weird, mustardy fingerprint. Fingerprint? Okay, let me reboot . . . nope, still reminds me of a fingerprint. What can I say?

At any rate, a strange piece of chintzy art is better than wasted pixels. I might actually hang this one. No, wait. I’m far too lazy.

Here’s a shot of the Silver Sweetlips sub-adults hanging in the current. These are very chilled-out fish:

They gang up like sulky teenagers on the corner by the liquor store, waiting for some sucker to buy them a bottle. I’m sure that if there were an equivalent of Mary Jane for fish, this mob would be toking up.

I did mention something about Barrel Sponges.

Here are two Barrel Sponges (Xestospongia testudinaria)  at Magic Passage, right in the area of the highest currents:
When Barrel Sponges get really big, they are very heavy and present a huge surface area upon which a strong current can push. It’s not surprising that they occasionally get knocked over. Here you can see one that is hanging on and one that has been toppled. Not to worry, the severely tilded sponge can continue to grow. When knocked down like this, the sponge continues to try to grow up towards the light, so some of the ones which have been over on their side for a long time have very peculiar shapes.

I’ll wrap up with this anemone with one little anemonefish guarding it:
I have one hour left to load the boat and get to the pick-up point for our regular Saturday dive. I’m outta here.

Though diving is all about relaxation and discovery to me, it’s nice to enjoy the occasional adrenaline shot. Yesterday, Anita, Wouter, Jos and I decided to go for a little more excitement. To my knowledge, The Coral Queen,  a large freighter resting on the bottom on the inside of the barrier reef near Rasch Passage  has not been dived for possibly a decade.* It was once a very popular dive, especially at night, when it was occupied by many thousands of flashlight fish. As it became more popular, the flashlight fish were frightened off to another hiding place and The Coral Queen  gradually faded back into dim memory.

The truth is, unless you are a wreck fanatic, the site doesn’t have much to offer. There is little growth and few fish because the hulk lies in a place behind the reef that has little exposure to nourishing currents.

I had the wreck located by sonar on my GPS readout on Faded Glory,  so we opted to give it a try. Having bought a long rope, we attached some dive weights to it and threw it over the bow as we passed over the top of the wreck.

On our first dive down, we discovered that I’d missed it by enough that a thorough search pattern, lasting about a half-hour, failed to show us the wreck. I did get one interesting shot of a rather rare Beaded Anemone (Heteractis aurora)  during an otherwise miserable dive:When we returned to Faded Glory  I told Wouter to have a go at locating the wreck again while I prepared to drop the shot line a second time. When Wouter saw the image of the wreck pass under us, he told me to heave the shot line over. As the barrel that it was wrapped around stopped spinning when the weights hit the bottom, I geared up for a quick trip down to see if we had the wreck. Voila! The weights were about two metres from the hull of The Coral Queen.

I came back up and we cruised around for a while to give us a little more surface time. We then descended again into the murky water. Here is a photo of Wouter tying off the shot line:Anita watches in the background. Wouter is a very experienced diver and is a bit of a wild man. By that I mean that he dives wrecks regularly in the North Sea, something which I find amazing that anybody would want to do. Deep, cold, murky dives in raging currents to see rusting hulks is not my cup of tea. However, it has been nice to have an experienced technical diver along. Anita has nearly two hundred dives, so she is no bother at all – she simply does her thing.

Here are the weights and the knife set aside so that we can bring them up when we finish the dive:There being little light and nothing much to photograph, Anita and Wouter put on a little demonstration of their customary “Titanic” maneuver, which they swear that thet do every time that they dive a wreck:Belgians are a strange lot.

Wouter did manage to find this lonely cleaner shrimp:I’m not sure what it was there to clean, as there were few fish about.

Here is a ventilation funnel. Whoopee!

After ascending back to Faded Glory,  Wouter went down again to attach a float to the end of the line leading down to the wreck. Here you can see his bubbles coming up and the yellow float:The marker will float about two metres under the surface and allow us to easily find and tie up to the wreck without playing the guessing game that we played yesterday.

It’s nice to be able to dive The Coral Queen  again. I’m looking forward to doing it at night to see if the flashlight fish have returned. The only problem is that you have to descend the line to the wreck after dark with no lights  whatsoever, not even a glow stick. I’ve done it several times and I can testifythat is a thoroughly spooky experience.

* Of course, I don’t know what everybody else is doing. If you have done The Coral Queen in the last ten years, please leave a comment. I’d like to know the recent history of diving the wreck.

UPDATE: I got this historical information from Jim Birrell: The Coral Queen  was owned by Laurie Crowley at Lae. He originally owned Crowley Airlways at the old Town airport. His hangars were located at the rhs looking towards the sea. He also owned various helicopters and small light aircraft. He used the Coral Queen  for backup support. He still lives in NSW somewhere. Growing up in Lae with his kids we sometimes went for rides on the small coastal ship Coral Queen.  It was later sold and ran up and down the coast between Lae and the sepik.

Thanks for that, Jim. We really appreciate the comments which we recieve from our readers. I’ve only been here since 1981, so my historical knowledge is woefully lacking.

Yesterday, I had a boatload of fun seekers, but no divers except me. So I took them to my favourite spot at Pig Island.

In case you’re wondering, here is how it looks from where we were anchored on a sandy bottom:

Since I was the only one diving, I decided to head out into the middle of the small bay where I know that the bottom is muddy. We seldom go down there because most people want to see a lot of colourful fish – not a bunch of muck. If fact, that’s what we call it: muck diving.

I don’t mind it when I have my camera with me, because there are a few critters down there that you seldom see anywhere else. You just have to cover more area to find them.

For example: here is a Beaded Anemone (Heteractis aurora):

I like the lovely pale colours. This is one of the anemones that you definitely do not want to touch. It stings. If you click to enlarge, you will see a tiny Periclimenes shrimp. I’m guessing at the genus, because I can’t find this shrimp in any of my references. My books are not all that great, though. Here is an enlargement of the shrimp:

If you can see only some dark and white dots with a white bar at the end, then you are looking at the shrimp. The rest of its body is entirely transparent. All that you can see are the pigmented areas. The dark splotch at the left is the tail. The long white bar at the right is the head. You can barely make out the legs.

While still on the muddy bottom, I stumbled across this Beaded Starfish (Echinaster callosus):

It is certainly an odd looking starfish. I don’t know why it was twisted around so. All around, you can see tracks of burrowing snails.

As I ascended away from the mud into the sandy area there were plenty of Gobies sitting on their verandas. Here is an Eyebrow Shrimpgoby of the genus Amblyeleotris:

Many Gobies have a commensal shrimp that lives in the same hole. I could tell that there was one living with this Goby because of the long ditch leading from the hidey-hole. The shrimp bulldozes the sand from the hole to keep it open, leaving a long ditch-like furrow in the sand. There will normally be a little roof of rocks on the opposite side to act as a roof to keep sand from falling in. Here you can see the ditch leading off to the left and the little roof of stones to the right of the Goby. The shrimp was hiding from me.

Back up on top of the reef, next to the trees that you see in the first image, I found this six legged Blue Starfish (Linckia laevigata):

I case you are wondering if I fiddled with the colour, the answer is no. They really are that blue. There is also a greenish variation of this species, but the colour is not nearly so bright. They make me think of those strange, brightly coloured plastic toys that Japanese tourists always seem to enjoy. These normally have five legs.

Diving in mud can be fun.