Scuba Diving - Tengan Pier

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Scuba Diving - Tengan Pier

For my second dive I went to Tengan Pier. This was the first time I dove here so I wasn't sure what to expect.

It took about 30 minutes to reach the end of the pier. We were fighting against the tide so it took quite a bit of energy. It's not usual for my calves to cramp up on me after swimming strenuously but today my quads cramped up a few times. No big deal...I was too excited about trying a new site to have some cramped muscles stop me!

Once we reached the end of the pier we dropped down and the current actually carried us off the pier. Because the visibility was about 7 feet my dive group and I didn't realize this. We searched around for a bit, resurfaced, swam over close to one of the pylons and then dropped back down again.

To my delight, Tengan Pier had the best sea fans I have since diving on Okinawa. They were huge and had many different colors (red, purple, yellow, green). We swam under the pier and through the pylons very slowly making sure not to lose anyone in the group. When I neared the bumpers for the ships, I found at least half a dozen porcupine pufferfish. They were no ordinary sized puffers too...they were massive! They were probably about a foot in length when not inflated. Edwin tried to catch one by slapping it with his hand a few times but it swam away really quickly. As it passed me I tried to bump it with my light but that didn't make it puff up either. Oh well...

Because the visibility was bad and it was dark under the pier, we all had our flash lights out. At one point I was swimming along and my light scared a porcupine pufferfish. He blew up while swimming beside a red sea fan and I was able to snap a quick photo of it. Due to the tide going in, swimming around in the pylons was a bit tricky and getting a steady picture proved to be difficult.

Unfortuntately, I wasn't able to use my Canon Powershot G11 on this dive because the strobe's batteries were dead. I ended up using my Canon Powershot SD1100 IS instead. This turned out to be a good thing due to the fact I was carrying a flashlight during the entire dive and the tide was pushing me around. Although the lighting wasn't great, I was still able to capture a few good shots and they turned out even better after cleaning them up with photoshop.

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Photos

Porcupine Pufferfish
These fellows were huge!