Description

It’s a lovely day when you can get close enough to normally skittish sea monsters to capture a photo of their eye sockets. This photo was taken on a Kata Beach Scuba Dive a few weeks ago and I kinda skipped over it while browsing my shots but bumped into recently on a recheck and though, hey this is alright!

The interesting part of taking this photo was the amazingly slow creep and crawl, when we stumble upon this Algae Octopus. If you approach fast or high, or fast and high, you got no chance, they will easily evade you by ducking down into their den never to return. So you gotta be methodical in your approach.

Daytime Octopus like the Algae, Mimic and Even Blue Rings I’m told, are day time hunters, this makes them rather good at hiding in the day time, because hunting is the most dangerous part of existence for Octopus. When they are on the sand hunting as is the case at Kata Beach, they are exposed and any myriad of fish enjoy a bit of fresh Cephalopod for brekky.

So if you are lucky enough to see one of these rare and majestic beasts, take a breath, ‘not too deep though as you might float away’ and calm down. Usually what I will do with daytime Octopus is stop completely, I might not even move for 2 – 3 minutes so he can see that I’m no threat to him. This gives you some time to plan your approach.

With these Octopus I’ve found you need to calmly and very carefully work your way slowly as low as you can to the bottom, toward them. If you get all that right, many times they will stand outside of their den and you can get close enough for uncropped shots like the one above!

Enjoy :)