Day 5 on Statia - Princess Corner

    My sixth day in the Caribbean was originally planned to be my first day on St Kitts, however with a lack of boat going across from Statia, it turned into my fifth day on Statia instead. Not such a bad thing - just an excuse for more diving!

 We managed to squeeze ourselves in to Scubaqua's busy schedule (busy, being as it was a Saturday) to do a morning dive and Mike led us on a dive to Princess Corner. This site is reasonably shallow (18m) and is made up of a large sandy area flanked by two fingers of solidified lava flow and coral gardens. A potential highlight of the dive was the chance of seeing yellowhead jawfish, which make burrows in the sandy area of the dive site.

Ready to dive! (photo: Hannah Madden)

 It was my first dive with Hannah and she brought along her GoPro, which meant the possibility of some good photos. Again I was diving with Nitrox, 32% O2. It always takes me a couple of dives to get back into the swing of it, so this being my fourth dive so far I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to prepare my equipment however that was soon dashed by the realisation I had attached my regulator over the bungee cords that were holding my tank from falling. Thankfully another diver in the party noticed and helped me out, as by that time I was already in my BCD. D'oh.

 A bumpy ride out to the site and we were first in the water and down to the bottom, just over 18m. Our first sighting was this sea cucumber. A nice big one just making it's way over the sandy sea floor.

A nice big fat sea cucumber (photo: Hannah Madden)

Sadly no jawfish at this stage, but it wasn't that we weren't looking hard...

Looking for jawfish (photo: Hannah Madden)

From there on we proceeded around the coral gardens. The dive site was pretty amazing, with a diverse range of fish, too numerous to mention them all, but highlights and favourites were porcupine fish, trumpet fish, smooth trunkfish (including a tiny ping-pong ball sized baby), french angelfish, queen angelfish and in the distance, a black-tipped reef shark cruising by at about 15m away.

No jawfish sighting for me as I had to end the dive after a total of 48mins, however Hannah managed to get some footage of two males in their burrows after I had surfaced. She managed a whopping 60 mins bottom time, so I've gotta train myself to breathe more slowly and get longer dives...

Visibility was about 20m, which means the water looks like it's clearing after the swell that was just calming down on the day of my arrival. I'm looking forward to more dives like this and more sharks. The plan is to dive the Charles Brown wreck on Monday.

In the afternoon we drove around the island, Little Miss Lalia showed us her skills with her scooter, and we wandered round the Berkel Family Plantation in the hope of spotting an Iguana, but no luck there. 

The Quill, seen from Berkel Family Plantation

However I did get to see what a pomegranate bush looks like, and added Green-Throated Carib and Pearly-eyed Thrasher to my birding ticklist.