I've only been here once before about 14 years ago. I came back on the Ocean Guardian dive charter boat on March 4, 2023. Aside from an enclosed cabin/seating area, it also has a diver elevator at the front of the boat, which makes getting out of the water with my cameras easy. Visibility was an amazing 80' or so. I swam down the wall to visit the clusters of feather duster worms that this site is famous for. I remember them starting at about 70' deep last time. Today, there were clumps of them starting as shallow as 40-50' deep. I didn't go all the way to the bottom of the wall. My max. depth was about 90'. I was joyfully taking advantage of the great visibility by taking photos of the colourful wall with other divers for once in the background with my semi-new-to-me Sigma 10mm fisheye lens. After the dive, I noticed that the switch on the lens has switched from autofocus to manual focus as I was putting it in the housing. So it turned out that all the wide-angle photos from this dive were completely out of focus. I decided to include them here anyway since, if I ever wanted to feel really bitter in the future, I could look at them and feel really bitter.
I think this dive site is even better than I remembered it. One strange change is that the amount of strawberry anemones down on the wall has really dropped since 14 years ago. My memory (and my old photos) show them covering much of the wall, filling the gaps between the yellow sponges back then. I noticed this same dramatic drop in strawberry anemones at the Whisky Point (End of the Road) site as well. Some other nearby sites don't seem to be affected. Anyway, I don't often get the opportunity to take photos on such a colourful wall in such good visibility. The fact that they were all out of focus still leaves me quivering with rage. At least I can still look at the blurry messes and imagine the photos that could have been.
