I think most of you know that Neil got me a Canon PowerShot S70 digital camera and underwater housing for Christmas. Today we took it for it's first dive to the Sunken Sailboat. I am please with how many of the pictures turned out for my first try. I only used a few setting, and forgot even more that I had read about, but that is why I am practicing so I can add more each time. These pictures are only cropped and optimized for the web; I didn't take the time to do any color tuning.

We were circled by a group of Ulua right when we arrived. The biggest and the leader was about 3 feet.

I am really pleased how the underwater white balance setting does seem to block out the underwater particles in the water! Theses shots of the boat structure were so much clearer than I expected.

Hiding inside is a really large spiny lobster. This is part of why we keep this a secret spot.

This scrawled filefish was hiding inside under the sail but I was able to get this shot as it swam out through a hole in the sail.

I was trying some close ups (and forgot about the macro mode) but I got a few pretty good ones.

We headed out over the sand and found a baby spotted eagle ray! It was only about 1 1/2 foot wing span.

And finally: Hole mystery solved! Remember how we had seen what looked like very rectangular holes in the sand and wondered what was making them. We caught the culprit in the act! First a look at the hole left behind (flashlight is just for size perspective.)

And the animal making this hole was a Hawaiian Broad Stingray! We frightened it away unfortunately, but saw the hole when it moved off, and there was still a crab inside the hole the stingray was working to eat (my 2 shots of it turned out fuzzy, have to learn to turn on that macro mode.)

Written December 2004