My April Underwater

With an April vacation trip mixed in, I managed three dives this month. The water temperatures jumped significantly in my one week away, so that’s great news for my hands and feet while diving, but means that nudi season is coming to an end. Hopefully they’ll stick around for another month or so for some more photography.

Locations:

• 2 dives at Fort Constitution Pier in New Castle, New Hampshire
• 1 dive at Old Garden Beach in Rockport, Massachusetts

April 8 - Fort Constitution Pier (New Castle, New Hampshire)

I swapped my gloves around and I thought I had everything sealed up, but my right glove had a crease in it and leaked pretty badly the whole time. The dive was so good that I was distracted from my frozen hand for awhile. I found countless Onchidoris bilamellata, a pair of sea lemons in a head-on collision, and the log on the bottom was covered with small Dendronotus frondosus. The real highlight of the dive though was a single rock covered with maybe a dozen nudis of different species and 4 European rock shrimp! I managed to snap some very fun pictures of the rock shrimp including one with a Coryphella verrucosa cruising across its carapace. By the time we got to this rock, I was frozen and my buddy was low on air (we both only started with half tanks) so we had to turn, but I will be back to that rock!

April 15 - Fort Constitution Pier (New Castle, New Hampshire)

Figured I would give the low tide side of the chart a try - we entered at low tide slack to awful visibility. But my hands were dry and the sun was shining, so in we went. I wanted to make my way back to particularly lively rock I found last dive and we headed out the pier. With the bad visibility, it wasn’t really clear where we were, but suddenly I came to a rock and found a European rock shrimp on it. Sure enough, it was the one I was looking for. The rock had several dozen nudibranchs of varying species and at least a half dozen different European rock shrimp on it. I spent awhile there taking pictures before slowly ascending to the upper wall. The upper wall was covered in frilled anemones as usual, but there were also tons of Onchidoris bilamellata egg strings and individuals. We were cold, so we turned the dive and headed back. In the rough viz, I started to doubt my compass reading and navigation sense, so we popped up and were on the wrong side of the pier. We quickly dropped down, swam through to the other side and made our way out. Despite the awful viz, this was a great dive.

April 30 - Old Garden Beach (Rockport, Massachusetts)

I had ambition of double-dipping, but we bailed on our initial plan of Dog Bar due to a complete lack of water during a particularly low tide. We relocated to Old Garden and headed in amongst some stiff wind and waves. As we descended, the visibility wasn’t great and there was some surge. We kicked out to the rocks spotting a few moon snails of varying small sizes on the way and some super tiny sculpin around a clam shell. Once we hit the rocks, we moved very slowly, carefully inspecting every inch of the rocks and grabbing some macro photos of nudis, skeleton shrimp, and even two zebra lebbid shrimp that were very cooperative.

Pictures