Not long ago I visited Silke Caye which is south of Placencia in Belize. I had been to Silke Caye about a decade ago and when I dove there then the wind was howling and the water was pretty stirred up so underwater photography was a real challenge. This time Hurricane “Grace” had gone by to the north, but had still managed to stir up the water. Nevertheless, we still went diving. We had a warm day, but the trip out was basically windless and the water was glassy calm. We got out to Silke Caye and received the obligatory briefing from the park ranger about where you can go and where you can’t go within the park. After the briefing the snorkelers stayed on the island of silk caye to snorkel. Calling it an island is probably an exaggeration because it is so small it only has three palm trees and a single camp style toilet.
Meanwhile the divers got back in the boat and we motored out from the island maybe another couple hundred yards to a wall where we did our first dive. We back-rolled off the boat and started down. If you have been to Belize you are probably aware that the segment of the Meso American reef which runs by Belize tends to have a lot of soft corals which include sea fans and and sea whips. Yes, there are hard corals, but oftentimes they are surrounded by the soft corals.
One thing I noticed after a while was that there seemed to be a substantial decrease in the numbers of native fish stock on the dive. There were squirrel fish who were pretty well ensconced in the holes in the reef. But, what I did not see were the large numbers of grunts, snappers and other smaller reef fish such as blue chromis. We did find several lion fish which we speared . We also saw several nurse sharks one of who followed out group for much of the dive.
When we first came across the nurse shark, I thought well if we get one pass we will be pretty lucky. Well fortunately I was wrong. We would swim a ways and he would circle back to check us out. He tended to swim right through the group of divers. So I began dropping down to the level of the soft corals and positioned myself so he would swim right to me. In all he made maybe a dozen passes during the dive. Sometimes he would turn just as he got to my camera. A couple of times he swam under me.
So at least on the first couple of dives we saw a lot of nurse sharks and soft corals but not as many native species of fish.