For most of last year we were restricted to shore diving at Goat Island, Tawharanui and Matheson Bay, (and they're great dives), but now we've paid off the visa bills for our gear, so we've been able to spend up on some offshore adventures at the Poor Knights Islands, (including the Pinnacles)! Wow.

» Underwater, fish
Friendly fish, all from marine reserves. Well, not all of them are that friendly - the scorpionfish have a particularly malevolant glare, bigeyes just always look nervous to me and the big snapper at Goat Island will bite at anything you're carrying because they think it must be food. Tiny triplefins to cruising kingfish, dull grey sweep to vivid pink maomao and lots in between.

» Underwater, morays
Yes, eels are a kind of fish, but I thought these ones deserved a space of their own. They're iconically creepy-looking, but really quite mellow (unless you're a small fish).





» Underwater, nudibranchs
They may be small, but they're startling and strange! Some are lividly vivid and others cryptically colourless, but they're all fairly cute.





» Underwater, filter feeders
Imagine that you could stick your hand out the window of your house and catch food as it drifted past - not a bad lifestyle, though perhaps a little sedentary. We don't have the coral reefs of more tropical latitudes, but there are some corals here, and lots of ascidians, anenomes, hydroids and gorgonians



» Underwater, stingrays
Magnificent and alien and big! Stingrays are cool.







» Underwater, critters
A collection of crawling, creeping, slithering and sliding things like crayfish, kina, starfish, sea hares, sea cucumbers and the like.