I grew up living near the Great Lakes. It was not until much later in life that I saw my first shark. The shop I was diving with at the time had told us to expect that we would see a shark or two on the dive. We did see a shark, but he took one look at us open circuit divers and swam the other way. Before his tail had completely disappeared into the distance, I thought well that wasn’t too bad. That sighting was over 20 years ago and since that time I’ve seen many varieties of sharks, but seeing a shark never gets old for me. And no, it is not because in my day job I’m a lawyer and I have enjoyed professional curtesy with the sharks in the water.
Before last year, I used to think oh there’s a nurse shark. Whoopi, a very docile animal.
Well, last year I was on a night dive where we knew nurse sharks would be feeding. In the briefing we were told to stay off the bottom which was only maybe 35 feet below. So we stayed in the mid-water about 15 feet off the bottom. I’m glad I stayed off the bottom. What I observed were a handful of nurse sharks pounding every hole in the reef looking for a sleeping fish to swallow. I have been in a cage and watched bull sharks go after fish bits that were tossed into the water near the cage. The bulls sharks were not that much different from the vigor with which the nurse sharks crashed the holes in the reef to find fish. The thing that startled me the most was the speed at which the many attacks were launched by the nurse sharks. Had Micheal Phelps been in one of the holes in the reef he would not have stood a chance of out swimming the nurse sharks.
In the murky water of the harbor where the shark cage was it was stunning how fast the bull sharks came at the cage and how careful I was at keeping everything well inside the cage.
Then there was the dive where we were watching and taking pictures of great hammerheads swim in water that the visibility was not great. After having visibility that was awesome a few days before, I began to feel very uncomfortable when I realized that a 12 foot hammerhead could swim up behind me while I was focused on a similar sized hammerhead in front of me and missed the one that was on my blind side. Glad my buddy was watching out for me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t attribute some ill will to sharks. They just do what they have been doing for hundreds of millions of years. They are a top predator and they are just looking for a meal. They are intelligent predators and they are designed to move through the water far more efficiently than we are. And, they do an excellent job of cleaning off the the sick or otherwise unhealthy reef critters.
Of course as top predators, the existence of sharks in a particular dive site I always take as a good sign that the reef is healthy. That is, if the top predator is doing well then all of the fish and creatures that are on lower levels of the food chain must be in at least decent shape otherwise there would be little in the food chain to support the top predator.
Over the course of the last 20 years or so, I have traveled to most of the islands in the Caribbean. Generally speaking, the water is warm, the visibility is good and the locals are friendly to divers. What’s not to like, right? I can remember when I first started diving and even before that that I often heard this chewing sound while under water that I eventually came to recognize as the sound of native reef fish species caring for the reef by feeding on the algae that would otherwise overtake and over come the reef. The fish thus kept the algae in check, got a good mean, and the reef stayed healthy and life on the reef seemed to be in balance.
I had been to Roatan before nearly a decade ago and I was somewhat disappointed at that time because while the dive shop was friendly, the water was warm and there was relatively good biodiversity underwater, I still came away with a sense of gloom. During my prior trip there just seeemed to be something that was missing.
At the time I first thought maybe my day job was just weighing me down. Later I thought maybe the fact that the group I was with, who speared several hundred lion fish during the week, bothered me because it occurred to me that each invasive lion fish had eaten way more than its weight in native species of reef fish. Still later I thought maybe it was the fact that the divers who were spear fishing lion fish had missed many of the targeted lion fish which meant that many of the native species of fish would remain at risk for predation by lion fish who had no native predators. It was only towards the end of the trip that it hit me, I had not heard what I had become accustomed to hearing, the feeding of the native fish species chewing on the algae that was growing of the reef. Yes the reef did not have an over abundance of algae, but I had notice there seemed to be many juvenile reef fish that were missing. That is, there were quite a few adult reef fish, but there seemed to be a gap and what was missing were many of the small colorful reef fish that I had grown accustomed to seeing.
Roll forward a decade. I had an opening in my work schedule so my wife convinced me to jump on a liveaboard that sails around Roatan. Okay it didn’t take much convincing. The week before the trip, I looked at the weather map and saw there was going to be quite a bit of wind and a potential storm or two that might affect the trip. I thought to myself well I wonder how many dives we will get in with the expected weather. As we were waiting at the airport to catch flight down to Roatan, we met a group of divers who were going to dive from a resort in Roatan. I talked to several of the divers and figured I would probably see them on the return flight back to Dallas the following week so I thought I would talk to them on the flight back to see how their trip went.
When we got the the live aboard later that day, they told us about the weather system and that the captain would be sailing us around Roatan which has some tall hills which he hoped would hide us from some of the wind that had been forecast. He also predicted that we would see alot of dive sites that the boat typically did not go to because they were quite a ways away from port, but that was how we were going to avoid the worst of the storm and wind. Our crew, with the exception of the engineer, were all from Roatan and went above and beyond what I have often seen crew do to make passengers comfortable.
A week later, and 24 dives in the book for me, I think the captain and crew did a great job keeping us out of the wind, and finding interesting dive sites with a good amount of reef life for us to see. And, for me all of it made interesting subjects for me to break in my mirrorless camera rig.
For me the highlight was the one day that we could go out to a sea mount and dive around the Cocos sea mount. The reef life was spectacular. Yes there were schools of creole wrasse. And yes there was the largest school of Atlantic spade fish I have ever seen.
From what I could tell from talking to the other passengers, everyone seemed to have had excellent trip. Did I see a few lion fish during the trip, yep, but they were speared fairly quickly by the crew.
And I was also glad to see some of the usual suspect such a nassau groupers who seemed inquisitive and healthy.
