Saipan Water

Here are our underwater photos from Saipan. Well some of them, we took quite a few on the dives we did but these will highlight those.

Here is Christine standing in the pacific ocean. I thought the way the flash illuminated the water around her was pretty neat.
Here is one of three of the holes under neath the Grotto. When you look at the pictures of the Grotto in the post below, these holes are in the rock overhang. The three holes lead out to the ocean. They wouldn't let us dive this area because we did not have an advanced dive certification. They would have let us do it if we had done a few hundred dives previously but we didn't. After snorkeling in this area we were actually pretty comfortable with that decision. It's probably a hundred yards through those caves underwater and as our instructor told us on our dives there are tons of sharks in there, and not the nice two foot long ones we saw in Guam. So we just snorkeled in the Grotto instead, but the whole time I kept turning around looking at those holes, it just gave me a weird feeling to know something could come through there at anytime.

Here we are sitting on the rock in the center of the Grotto.
I thought this was pretty cool. A sideways rainbow in the middle of the sky.And here is our dive. We did two dives actually, on the east side of the island. Our dive instructor was originally from Iowa, where he did ice dives, diving under frozen lakes. He said he came to Saipan six years ago and retired by postcard. He was definitely a unique character. He said he delivered his own two kids on the island, said it was a lot like delivering a calf. Guess he grew up on a farm. That kinda tells you about the state of health care if someone purposely chooses to deliver their own children.

Here is a baitball, a grouping of fish that seems to draw attention so that bigger fish can storm the circle and eat them. They can be thousands of fish large.

Here is an octopus. Our dive guide kept poking it with a stick trying to make it come out from underneath the rock. Well that didn't work, but as soon as our guide swam away the octopus came out. It looks much meaner than all the cartoon octopi that you see on tv. It kept puffing up and you can see it change colors.
Here is Christine before the onslaught of fish. In her hand is a can of sausages and as soon as she opened the can thousands of fish came out from everywhere. That also brought along the "Red Snapper". This huge, ugly, mean fish that went right for our fingers.

Here is the snapper circling, looking for fingers to bite!
And here is what it looks like up close. There were actually two of these guys, I didn't see them at the time but when I was going through our pictures I noticed there were two of them circling us. Christine was holding a sausage and the snapper went in and nearly took off two of her fingers. Luckily she was wearing gloves. The same fish bit my fingers later on and let me tell you, its not excruciating pain but you can definitely feel the bite through the gloves. Plus its ugly. Our dive instructor punched it to get it to go away, apparently this is a common nuisance here.
And here is a spiny puffer thing. Our dive guide was pretty cool and showed us a lot of neat stuff there. We got to dive through smaller underwater caves and see a ton of fish. We also got to see a turtle swimming around in the distance, an eel, and a ton of clown fish.

We have a few more pictures from Saipan, coming up soon.