Watching sea turtles move through the water is an amazing experience. Their movements become almost meditative to watch as they calmly move around the reef with their flippers slowly rising and falling, intermittently stretched out for gliding, then rising and falling again...
When something alerts them or for what ever reason they decide to flee an area, the meditative trance turns to excitement and awe as they accelerate and move with impressive speed, overcoming and passing everything else moving around the reef.
When at rest on the reef they can be difficult to find. When they find their way into a crevice or under an overhang they conceal themselves out of your view. But they can be just as difficult to find when resting on top of patch reef below you with their cryptic coloring allowing them to blend in as your eyes pass right over them without noticing.
As you look from a distance across the reef they can become even more cryptic, I was watching multiple turtles when I took the photo above.
Watching them forage brings about fascination as they slowly pass over the reef stopping to feed on the macroalgae scattered in the reef. Often I find myself reflecting on the patch in the reef a turtle is feeding and realize that I just swam over that spot yet never noticed any algae in the area, after they depart and I take a closer look I often have to search with effort to find where the algae is.
Although photos and videos don't quite capture the experience of their movement, the video I recorded below may do better than the photos.