Category Archives: Dominica

Dominica, Fiji

Hurricanes, Cyclones and more oh my

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arrow crab and basket star
arrow crab and basket star after the storm 

It has been hard watching the weather channel during the last six months.  So many places that I have been diving have been hit by hurricanes, tropical storms or cyclones.  These powerful storms have been just devastating topside and to the reefs surrounding them.   In the above image a coral head with a knobby sea rod had been upended by a hurricane.  I suspect both the coral head and the sea rod will eventually die.  (You try living on your side when you are designed to sit upright!)   And yet, at the time I shot this image several months after the hurricane went through, an arrow crab and a basket star had turned the sea rod and coral head into their home. (You have to look very close to see the basket star which is behind the arrow crab and it helps to look at the image at 100%).  

I was looking through images I’ve shot over the last year or so and it occurred to me.  I have been diving at certain islands before and after a storm has gone through.  Yep, topside and underwater often have gotten pretty beat up.   Sometimes when I have been places after a storm the blue tarps are still up on the buildings to shut out the rain.   But, I have seen that with the passage of time there is usually recovery.  Now there is no question the dive sites are different. And, I am sure the life experience topside is never the same.  For instance, below is an image I took of the Papa doc wreck in Grand Bahama about six months before a hurricane when through.  

It took a while to get both squirrel fish to venture into the image while shooting images at the Papa Doc site

  At the stern of what was once a tug boat the exhaust port for the engine was still intact and the fish, in this case long spine squirrel fish, were able to swim from one side of the hull to the other through the exhaust port.  The hull although cracked was still intact.  There also were quite a few sea fans and sea rods attached to the hull.  The sand the wreck sat on was pretty minimal.   Now consider what the wreck looks like a few months after the hurricane went through.  

papa doc stern
papa doc stern after the hurricane

The stern of the Papa doc is gone.  I could find no long spine squirrel fish any where on the wreck. Most of the sea rods and sea fans were blasted off the wreck.    And, there is an additional three feet of sand that the wreck is sitting on.  Where did the sand come from?  What was a sandy beach about half mile away, now has a whole lot less sand.  Oh, and the sand displaced the garden eels that otherwise were near the wreck before the hurricane.    It was hard to believe it was the same wreck.  And yet, there was some fish life around the wreck and you could see where the sea fans and sea rods were trying to make a come back.  

In February 2016 a class five cyclone (same thing as a hurricane only in the Pacific) went through Fiji.  One of the dive shop owners told me that Taveuni  after the storm did not have a single leaf left on any top water plant.  Now that was hard to believe because only sixteen months later Taveuni was a lush tropical island.   

The palm trees have leaves, the grass is green and the recovery looks good.  

Lots of leaves and greenery now after 16 months.  And underwater, well in Fiji my only word for it: spectacular. 

Rainbow reef after the storm
Rainbow reef after the storm

So hopefully, with time all of the islands in the Caribbean will make a recovery.  

Dominica, wide angle

Oh when can I go back to Dominica?

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Not a bad place to have to moor and go diving.

In 2014 we traveled to Dominica for the first time. We flew to Guadeloupe, got on board a power cat and motored the 20+ miles to Dominica the following morning. A power cat is like a catermoran, but instead of a sail, it just uses a motor to cruise. That way a power cat is not wind dependent and generallys is quite a bit faster in the water.

For the next week, we would dive than cruise to a new dive site pick up a local dive master and then dive some more. We set foot on the island of Dominica once that week, to have dinner and to return some dive gear to a local dive shop. The rest of the time we were either cruising down the coast, diving, sleeping or eating.

One of the songs that kept playing in my head during the trip was a song about Dominica that I had heard when I was a child. Here is a link to a video clip from the Ed Sullivan show in the early 60’s about the nun who wrote and sang the song “Dominica”.

Dominica has an abundance of underwater wildlife. If you like to find small sea creatures there are plenty of them to see. I don’t think I have ever seen so many banded shrimp and small crabs as I saw on this trip. I am relatively certain I have never see so many golden crinoid, a type of feather star as we saw in Dominica.

Sponges corals and crionoids with fish in the background Sponges corals and crionoids with fish in the background

And, if you have lots of small animals, you often have a variety of predators. We saw quite a few trumpet fish. Dominica trumpet-1

And, we saw large animals. For more than a half an hour as we were motoring along the coast of the island, we were escorted by a dolphin. dolphin

Dominica is a volcanic island. On one dive we took a couple of eggs from the galley and took them down to the sand 80 feet below the boat and buried them in the sand. We then went on our dive and by the time we came back the eggs were cooked and were hard-boiled. Dominica as the top of a volcano rises up out of the ocean. As a result, if you go about a mile off shore the depth of the water drops to over 1,000 feet in-depth. That deep trench near the Atlantic ocean makes for excellent habitat for whales. In Dominica, if you go with a local operator who has a permit, you can swim with whales. Swimming with Whales

Swimming with whales is done on snorkel gear but it is with sperm whales, a relatively rare animal. Unfortunately, we did not have time to go snorkeling with the whales. One of my friends visited Dominica a few weeks before we were there, and spent quite a bit of time in the water with several sperm whales, and of course had a great time. I am going to hopefully time my next trip to Dominica to try to swim with the sperm whales.

Dominica, Macro

Have you ever explored underneath a pier, jetty or bridge?

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Photographer under the pier
There are a lot of dives that I have done where the boat ride to the dive site can be quite long. Have long boat rides guaranteed a great dive experience, unfortunately no. Curiously, sometimes the shortest boat rides have yielded some great dives, particularly if there if there is some man-made structure in the area. Curiously, sometimes the local pier, jetty or bridge provide opportunities for divers to explore the underwater world and find some interesting sea creatures. Arrow crab

Not long ago we did a dive near a pier in Dominica. It started out late in the afternoon so the light was very low. When I reached the bottom at about 35 feet the first thing I found was an old paint bucket with sponges growing out of it. It was a little surreal, but it is not the first time I have seen what might seem like trash being re-purposed. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for trash in the oceans. Nevertheless, I am less surprised now than in the past that sometimes sea creatures are able to re-purpose what someone intended to throw away. Similarly, the posts that were set into the sea floor also create structure in which sea creatures may make a home. Upside down shrimp
Even larger animals seem to find hiding holes for themselves. dominica blog-1
cataloguing the creature we saw in a one hour dive was hard. In part because I kept switching back and forth between still shots and video, but in part because the sheer number of creatures and their variety. We saw a variety of shrimp and crabs. We saw several species of puffer fish. We saw a slipper lobster. And we saw several seahorses.
dominica blog 3-1

So the next time you are driving by a pier, jetty or bridge, maybe you should ask yourself: “I wonder if I ought to go explore it and see if there are any interesting sea creatures?”

Here is a short video from the dive.

Bahamas, Barbardos, Belize, Cayman Islands, Curacao, Dominica, Mexico, Roatan, wide angle

Are you the scourge of the Caribbean?

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Are you the scourge of the Caribbean?
Pretty but lethal?

Over the last decade or so we have been making our way around the Caribbean. My first encounter with a Lion fish was about 10 years ago when I heard that this invasive species from the Indo-Pacific region was slowing making its way around the Caribbean. I cannot say that I have been to every island in the region, but I have come close. I have seen them as far south as Tobaggo. I’ve seen them as far north as Florida. I have seen them as far east as Barbados. I have seen them as far west as Roatan, Cozumel and Playa del Carmen. Lion fish are eating and reproducing machines. A marine biologist in Belize told me that the female lion fish produces about 40,000 eggs every 3 days. The reproductive ability of rabbits pale by comparison.

One of my friends in Barbados let me know that last week his shop shot 90 lion fish while my friends in Roatan shot over 130 last week. There are lion fish round ups throughout the Caribbean. I have seen roundups in the Caymans, and Curacao and Belize. Ultimately, the lion fish has no natural predators in the Caribbean. Although there have been efforts to train moray eels, groupers and sharks to feed on them, often it still requires the spearing of the fish in the first instance. I don’t know what the answer is, but I certainly hope we find a better answer than we have now because from what I have seen we appear to be losing the battle.

Some might say so what. The problem is that with depleted native species, like parrot fish and others who eat the algae off the reef the reefs could eventually die out. I think about the great limpet that only resides in Monterrey bay and wonder, can we really afford such a loss. There are proteins that are created by the great limpet that make cancer drugs more effective and which at the present have not yet been synthesized. The proteins from the limpid sell for about $34,000 per gram or more than 600 times the price of gold. I wonder can we afford to lose even one species of flora or fauna in the Caribbean? I keep wondering if there is a better solution to removing this invasive species. Yet at the same time i think about instances in which people have introduced one invasive species to remove another and those efforts have gone terribly wrong,consider africanized bees….