Summer Diving and a Wildlife Explosion

Summer is when we can expect a glut of wildlife around the Cornish coast. Everything is bursting with life and it’s a great time to take photos and see what creatures can be found. I’ve tried to make it out when I can to go snorkelling and doing the occasional scuba dive, and although this year there’s not been anything too unusual there’s still been lots to see. On one dive, we came across a very striking gurnard, with its red-orange colour, modified fins as ‘feet’, and blue fins that it uses to glide. This was alongside some huge nursehound sharks, one being 1.6 m and chunky.

It has also been fun to come across a large number of extremely colourful dahlia anemones, which combined with some of the seaweed colours wafting in and out of the background and foreground with the swell made for some pretty images. It’s been fun to try a range of lenses, from a 17mm f1.2 portrait lens, to the usual wide angle set up, and then both conventional 90mm macro and a manual focus ‘bubble bokeh’ lens (albeit challenging).

And of course there has been plenty of jellyfish - this year has been a good year for them, albeit shorter than in the past. After a couple of quiet years, the compass jellyfish came back in bigger numbers and larger individuals, alongside many blue jellyfish. They’re always wonderful to photograph, before they head out to sea somewhere again as the autumn draws closer. That said, they disappeared especially early this summer, so I’m happy to have made the most of them while they were here. Still no barrel jellyfish, nor any mauve stingers, and crystal jelly numbers are way down on a couple of years ago. I guess time will tell whether they come back again.