Adam’s blog day 3

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, we spent today travelling to, diving and photographing Conception Wall, on the south side of Conception Island. The day started early, and we departed for the marina by 8.00. Once again, the mode of transport was an old school bus!

We embarked on the Sol Mar III again and set out for the famed wall at Conception Island.

In order to get there, we had to travel all the way up the west coast of Long Island, around the north and back down the east. This took some time, in fact, we steamed for about 2 hours.

Alex has a camera with an intermittent fault, so decided that hugging it while he was catching a nap might cure it!

Conception Wall is a drop off, which starts at around 50’ (17m) and then drops off very deep. There is also some current on it. This makes for a photographically challenging combination! The crew from Stella Maris Water Sports had sensibly elected to run the dive as a drift dive, but the depth meant that bottom times were very limited.

The wall itself is very pretty with large sea fans and some very pristine corals. There were also a few Caribbean reef sharks (Carcharhinus perezi) cruising along the wall and it was very obvious that not many people get over here to dive. Certainly, there was none of the damage that you often unfortunately associate with more popular dive sites.

Alex and I drifted and shot images along the wall, and the current was not strong enough to interfere with getting images. As we started working our way into shallower water after around 20 minutes, we heard a diver’s rattle sounding. Moving generally towards the sound, we were greeted with the sight of the rest of our group “hanging out” with a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). He seemed quite interested in us and we were able to get a few images.

Having met up with the rest of our group, Alex turned into group photographer mode and marshalled them into formation to shoot an underwater group shop (a groupie?)

We also took some pictures of each other!

Lunch time and surface interval was spent moored off a very beautiful white sand beach.

Alex and I shot some video that will be aired later and then he set off to go and take some over/under images, including this one of his fins!

The second dive was similar, with both of us spending some time photographing a particularly pretty sea fan.

Alex had also been hard at work doing some interviews with the crew and transcribing it on the journey back.

Conception Wall is a long way from Stella Maris and the whole day out lasted around 11 hours, during which we only got two fairly short dives. The counterpoint was that the wall is so pretty and pristine, that this probably makes the time and effort worthwhile. Certainly, we all found that we had enjoyed a great day out.

Tomorrow, we bid good bye to Stella Maris and fly over to San Salvador to stay at Riding Rock Resort and dive with them and Club Med. Many thanks to Ian and the dive team at Stella Maris Water Sports and to the staff at the Stella Maris Resort for being so helpful and making us feel so welcome. We plan to fly over fairly early and dive tomorrow afternoon. If the plans work, stand by for more images and a report from our second Bahamian Island tomorrow.

1. Introduction.
2. Adam’s blog day 1.
3. Bahamas Photos by the photographers.
4. Adam’s blog day 2.
5. Press conference and kickoff.
6. Adam’s blog day 3.
7. Adam’s blog day 4.
8. Abi in Grand Bahama.