Happy New Year!

Cozumel has always been on my top ten list of scuba diving spots. Since I live in Puerto Morelos, Cozumel is an easy ferry ride away.

My dive buddy, Linda Elliott visited me in Puerto Morelos where we did some cenote dives which I will write about at some point and in the new year, we headed to Cozumel.

Cozumel is known for massive coral formations, variety of rays, turtles, nurse sharks, eels, and reef fish including angelfish, groupers, grunts, and more.

For this trip, I didn't have my usual Olympus OMD camera as it was acting up and I had to take it to the shop. I took this opportunity to dust off my Olympus TG6 which is a small but very powerful camera for shooting macro. Not only did I capture nice macro but I was also able to get some decent medium and wide angle shots like the pictures below.

Grouper hanging out inside a sponge
Arrow crab hanging out inside a barrel-like sponge
Linda Elliott posing for me
Ray with fish
Juvenile lion fish

In this next picture, we got lucky with this loggerhead turtle. It didn't mind us paparazzi coming up close to it. It was happy chomping away at coral and not phased by our presence.

Close up of a loggerhead turtle's head

As advertised, the Olympus TG6 did very well with smaller macro subjects. Cozumel isn't known for macro but there are a lot of cool tiny critters. Our dive master and an extraordinary photographer himself, Juan Vega from Hammerhead Cozumel was an awesome spotter of these little things.

Among them were my favorites - blennies! Here's a picture of a female roughhead blenny

Yellow blenny peering out of its hole

and this pikeblenny.

Pike blenny peering out of a shell

I was able to get a close-up of an arrow crab. Check out the color detail on the crab's claws.

Arrow crab hanging out inside a sponge

He also spotted various slugs/nudibranchs like this painted elysia which is the size of a rice grain.

Tiny painted elysia
Tiny painted elysia near sea grass

The highlight for me was spotting this flying gurnard in the sea grass just happily chomping away while we were photographing it.

These fish have wide pectoral fins that can spread out like wings. We were hoping that this guy would spread out its fins but alas, he didn't cooperate.

Check out the other photos of Cozumel's cool critters here.