On May 29, with June just around the corner, we went on our first night dive since Golden Week.
Sunset has gotten much later, so entry is around 19:30.
And! Happily, the water temperature has risen quite a bit.
It's gone up 2 to 3°C since a week ago.
Visibility has recovered too, and it looks like the spring cloudiness is over.
It feels like both water temperature and visibility are going to keep rising from here.
In June, we should be able to see a deep blue sea.
This time our target was the hatching of spear squid (yariika) eggs and whatever else we could find, but advance reports said the eggs weren't looking good...
So we decided to check the eggs first, and if they looked hopeless, search for dangouo (a tiny lumpsucker) instead.
Just as reported, the spear squid eggs were a disappointment.
There were plenty of eggs, but whether they were unfertilized or not, they hadn't developed at all and clearly looked like a lost cause.
So we switched our target to dangouo and the like and moved on.
We saw a pair of seahorses, an akabikunin (a snailfish), a strange shrimp and more, but no dangouo appeared.
Even the green dangouo, which has practically become my friend, didn't show up. Just as I was thinking we'd miss for the first time this season, one appeared.
A dangouo the size of a pinky fingernail!
Its color was pink and mottled, I think?
Having found a dangouo, we headed back, and there was one more.
This time a red one, about the size of an index fingernail, bigger than the first.
It was on seaweed in midwater, so I'm sure it was tough to photograph.
Here's the second one.
And the first one looked like this.
There was a bikunin too.
Here's the sea report.
Dive date: May 29 (Friday)
Dive site: Kotoura, Ryuodo night dive
Weather: Cloudy
Wave height: 0.5 m
Current: None
Underwater temp: 15 to 16°C
Marine life seen: dangouo, akabikunin (a snailfish), seahorse, sujihaze (a goby), Japanese rockfish (mebaru), amimehagi (a pygmy filefish), kusafugu (grass puffer), haokoze (a waspfish), juvenile oniokoze (devil stinger), sarasaebi (a hinge beak shrimp), touyou koshiori ebi (a squat lobster), etc.
