Although we took this photo of a large lionfish in the Noumea Aquarium, we saw one almost exactly like it 17 miles offshore on the outer reef when we went scuba diving.

October 11, 2011

On Tuesday morning at 7:15, the Abyss Plongee dive shop picked us up for a 2-tank dive. There were 12 divers and 2 bilingual (French/English) divemasters on board the red inflatable diveboat powered by two 200 horsepower engines. All the other divers were French. We donned 7 mil (thick) full length wetsuits which kept us very warm and then zipped 17 miles to the outer reef where we saw lots of colorful hard coral and Napoleon fish (Giant Wrasse). After an interval wait of 1 hour and after hot tea and cookies, we zoomed to the entrance to the north pass where we dove with lots of very large groupers which come here at this time of year to reproduce. Our divemaster said that in a few weeks there will be hundreds of them. We saw over 20 large grey sharks in one group and a large lion fish. Visibility was 80-100'. We enjoyed both these dives very much.