I came back to Arachne Reef as a second dive-of-the-day on the MV Inde charter boat (April 29, 2023). My plan was to dive around the North-West side of the reef (the spot I dove last time) since in my opinion it had the most obvious coating of current-loving invertebrate life, including carpets of white plumose anemones. While sorting out my disconnected drysuit inflator hose (thanks Lucas), we descended in what seemed like the right area to a rocky-rubble bottom about 50' deep. Visibility was about 20-30'.
From the past dive here, I knew that the plumose beds that marked the start of where I wanted to dive were mostly shallower than 50' deep so I started swimming South up the gentle slope towards the peak of Arachne Reef.
At about 40' deep, we reached an area with plumose anemones and some yellowtail rockfish that I assumed was the area that I was looking for, so we turned right and started following this "wall" to the West.
As we continued to swim along, I started to get confused. This area seemed nothing like the place I remembered. The dense covering of plumose anemones was missing and the invertebrate life on the rocks seemed much less "currenty".
We reached a wall that went down to about 100' deep. There was a similar wall at a similar depth on my previous dive. This one seemed much more bare compared to the one I remembered that was almost completely covered with plumose anemones. There was an area on this wall today with some plumose anemones, but it was obviously a different wall that the one I was hoping to find. I didn't see it at the time, but looking at my photos later, there was a basket star on this wall.
The wall tapered down and we rounded the tip of it. We started swimming back up a bit shallower. Many of the rock surfaces around 60-80' deep were covered with red burrowing cucumbers.
In hindsight, after looking at the sidescan image, I think we dropped down in a kind of trench between the area I intended to dive and another rocky finger that we ended up diving instead. These reefs ran in the same direction and were at similar depths, which probably contributed to my confusion. I'm still not 100% sure though, but the sidescan image below is my "best guess" interpretation of where we were. At the time, I started to swim back up into the shallows near the marker to try and figure out where I was.
Up shallower (30-40' deep or so), I started to see more plumose anemones.
I swam above the area that we saw near the beginning of the dive. I continued to swim past it.
Eventually I looked down the slope and started to see the familiar area that was covered with lots of plumose anemones. I didn't have the air to follow it down deeper so I stayed at around 30' deep and just looked at it from above.
I swam back up the slope through the shallows towards the marker.
Even though I got lost and didn't end up diving the area I wanted to, this was still a pretty good dive. Some of the other divers saw wolf eels and an octopus. Next time, I still want to try diving around my favorite area (the plumose beds down towards the deeper wall that I saw on my previous dive here).
