I was able to get out yesterday and enjoy the great weather on my friend's boat. We did a couple of local sites; China Wall off Blakely Rock and KVI Tower Reef on Vashon Isand. The first was pretty ho-hum, I managed to find it ok, but my friend (who's dove it "dozens" of times), lead his group over the top of it and never went deep enough. Then when they surfaced to figure things out they found that the wind had changed and the boat's rudders were a foot away from the rocks! We did find some nice rockfish, sponge formations and other assorted critters.



The second dive was much better at KVI Reef, a man-made boulder garden off a small harbor on Vashon Island, southwest of Seattle. It's loaded with critters large and small. Viz was pretty good, as it has been cleaning up lately all over the sound. We saw lots of fish, nudibranchs, nice sponge and feather worms. My dive buddy spotted a large octopus, but I was too far away to see her waving her light at me.

These were the first few dives with my new Inon 240z strobe as well as the D2000, and it worked out pretty well. I tried shooting with it close-in in AE mode with the D2000 in manual. I was concentrating on trying to use the left for a key light and the right as fill, so as to not have flat lighting.

I don't know, the more I try the auto modes, the more I just go back to wanting manual mode and knowing where I'm at. I hate when devices think they're smarter than I (of course they usually are...).