The Hol Chan Marine reserve in Belize is relatively well known among divers. It is near San Pedro on Ambergris Caye. The dive is not deep. Much of the reserve is less than 20 feet deep. The deepest spot I found during our dives was just over 30 feet.
On Abergris Caye the barrier reef is relatively close to the shoreline, in many places it is less than 800 yards from shore. While the reef forms a substantial barrier that protects Ambergris Caye there are “cuts” or divides in the reef where the Caribbean can wash through and boats can get out beyond the reef by sailing through the “cut”. In the Hol Chan marine reserve there is a “cut” which allows the Caribbean to flow through the reef. One of the things that the flow of water does is allow food to move through the cut. As a result of the movement of the water through the cut the amount and variety of marine life in the reserve is substantial. It is common to see large numbers of nurse sharks. It is common to see turtles and large schools of fish.
There is a wide variety of corals including one of my favorite corals, elk horn coral.
Grunts under elk horn coral in the Hol Chan Marine reserve
And, if you are lucky, you will find turtles both hawks bill and green sea turtles hanging out and eating turtle grass in the reserve.
It was not long ago that I was diving in Ambergris Caye in Belize. What struck me was the variety of soft and hard corals.
Nevertheless, on many dives, what got the attention of the divers in my group were the nurse sharks. Now don’t get me wrong, I find large animals, including nurse sharks, to be fascinating to see in the wild. Nurse sharks in the world of sharks are pretty docile and can be approached relatively easily. Keep your fingers to yourself and don’t harrass a nurse shark and you can watch them gracefully swim along the reef. I don’t think I have ever seen as many nurse sharks any where else as I have seen in Ambergris Caye.
Even though the nurse sharks got top billing, the corals were quite intersting. There were many healthy soft and hard corals which were also worthy of comment.
(Polyps of a sea whip unfurled and gathering plankton).
What is interesting to me is that coral are created by large colonies of very small animals. The texture and shape of corals has substantial variety. And, the means and types of food that they feed on can vary fairly dramatically. Some of the corals unfold their polyps and feed on plankton that drifts within reach. The most interesting feeding I have seen corals engage in I observed on a night dive on Grand Cayman. Blood worms were swarming my dive light during the night dive. The dive leader pointed his light at a coral and the blood worms followed the light down to the coral only to be devoured by the coral. It was not what I was expecting, but it was interesting. After a while I started to feel a little bit bad for the blood worms because they were being eaten at a rather rapid rate. But then I got to thinking about how annoying they had been a the beginning of the dive and it occurred to me that it was just part of the circle of life in the ocean.
Star coral was also quite common in Ambergris caye. For me star coral is interesting because it can become enormous. I also find the individual shapes to be quite interesting. Of course, the fact that star coral glows green under blue light also makes it interesting.
So next time you are diving in the deep blue sea and are templed to swim past the coral in search of other more interesting subjects, take a minute or two and look more closely at the coral, you may be glad you did.
Ever notice when you are diving that certain songs go through your head? Sometimes when I’m diving certain songs go through my head depending on the type of dive. For instance on wreck dives:
I like big wrecks and I can not lie
You other divers can’t deny
That when ship sails in with an itty bitty hold
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung
Wanna pull up tough
’cause you notice that wreck was stuffed
Deep in the sand she wearing
I’m hooked and I can’t stop staring
Oh, baby I wanna get with ya
And take your picture
My homeboys tried to warn me
But that wreck you got
Make Me so happy
Ooh, hull of smooth skin
You say you wanna get in my benz
Well use me use me ’cause you aint that average groupy
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
And, if you have lots of small animals, you often have a variety of predators. We saw quite a few trumpet fish.
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.
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 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.
In the Caribbean, there are 15 or so kinds of moray eel. Based on my antidotal observation, the green moray is the most common. Green moral eels tend to grow larger than their cousins so perhaps their ability to grow larger gives them an advantage in the wild. Based on my personal observation around the Caribbean, the spotted moray is the second most common moray eel to see.
Here is an example of a spotted moray eel.
Ordinarily, moray eels are relatively unaffected by the presence of divers. Quite often divers can get relatively close to moray eels before the eel will withdraw into the reef to avoid contact with a diver, but not always. As I approached the eel withdrew into the reef leaving the banded shrimp who had previously been cleaning the eel.
Sometimes during the daytime, eels will only peer out of their hiding holes in the reef and you have to be fairly alert to spot them.
Sometimes if you are very fortunate you will see a moray eel freely swimming about the reef. Generally speaking, you are more likely to see a free swimming moray eel during a night dive when they are hunting for food than you are during the day.
The relationship between divers and eels does change if there is food that is present or the eel believes that there may be food available. When food is present, the moray can become much more interested in the food than anything else. We were diving in Belize on the Turneffe reef when I saw a moray become much more interested in food than anything else. Our dive leader had speared a lion fish and were swimming along a wall when a moray caught the sent of the dead lion fish which was still on the spear. Here is how that interaction played out. Nevertheless some moray eel have no interest in lion fish as food even when dead.
Sometimes even if the feeding by has not occurred by humans for quite a long time, a moray eel will continue to look for a free meal. occasionally, the interaction between divers and an eel can be almost comical. Unfortunately, feeding wild animals can change their behavior. That applies not just to moray eels but to other animals as well.
Nevertheless, getting to see a free swimming moray eel, particularly in the day time, is quite a treat. And, while they are technically fish, moray eels are quite different from most fish that you see in the ocean.
Here is a short clip of some moray eels I have seen recently.
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.
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.
Even larger animals seem to find hiding holes for themselves.
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.
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?”
Often times I hear divers talking about the deepest dive they have done or the fastest current or describing some other feature that made a dive unusual. Sometimes divers look down their noses at dives that are less than 60 feet. After all any certified diver can go to 60 feet, you are supposed to be an advanced certified diver to go deeper.
Nevertheless, stingray city in Grand Cayman which is 12 foot in-depth to the sand is pretty spectacular.
The fishermen used to clean their catchs just outside the mouth of the harbor and throw the remains overboard. Rays oftentimes would feed on the remains and would gather for a meal when they heard the fisherman’s boats heading back to the harbor.
I dove Stingray City with Divetech, which is an excellent shop in Grand Cayman. Before the dive the briefing advised that we would want to be over-weighted by 4 to 5 pounds. (I added 4 pounts to my usual 12 pounds). We would drop to the sand and stay in one place while the ray wrangler would feed the rays. The rays would be southern rays which would range in size from about a foot across the widest part of their body to well over three feet across their body. We would all dive air as opposed to nitrox (oxygen enriched air) because nitrox would not change our bottom times because the dive was so shallow. Once we were down we would get into more or less a circle around the ray wrangler.
Once we were all on the bottom, and even before the wrangle arrived, the rays started to approach our group. The rays seemed a bit shy at first but slowly became more willing to swim near our group. When the wrangler decended with the chopped-up squid in a water bottle more rays came to see us. For about forty minutes the wrangler would move around and the rays would follow her in hopes that a small bit of squid would be squirted out of the feed bottle and they would get a snack. Along with the rays we also were jointed by yellow tail snappers and other fish. During the dive we saw at least a dozen rays who would swim around and put on a show for us. After the wrangler went back up to the boat we were allowed to swim around several large coral heads to see the local fish life. Within a few moments I had found lobsters and other creatures to observe and film. In order to get close to the lobster I dropped to the sand and crawled up close to the coral head to film the lobster. When I backed out from the coral head a weight pocket fell out of my bcd. I was so enthralled with looking for creatures, I didn’t miss it and only knew it was missing when one of the divers handed it back to me when we were on the boat. I guess I didnt’ need that extra four pounds after all.
Most of the tourists head to the sand bars with chest-high water to interact with the stingrays. The boats’ proprietors bring along with them pails of chunked-up squid meat, which they dispense by hand to the animals, thus attracting dozens of the creatures to the feeding spot. But for me the more interesting opportunity is to dive to 12 feet and hang out until the southern rays arrive and watch the action. To me what really makes the dive unique is the interaction with so many southern rays. On most dives, if I find one ray during the dive that usually means it has been a good dive; To see dozens of rays during a single dive is a special treat.
The grace and ease with which rays move through the water is best seen in video. It reminds me that they live there, and we are just guests.
Antigua is a very beautiful island. It is a volcanic island. There are mountains and there are many awesome places to hike and look out over the surrounding Caribbean water. As a pure diving trip Antigua is not in the same league as the Cayman islands or Cozumel. However, as an island to sail around and explore both land and sea it has may endearing features.
As a volcanic island the sand is very heavy and when it is stirred up it is like concrete. When the sand is stirred up, it is slow to settle and visibility can be quite challenging.
We traveled around the island on a live aboard for a week and dove at various spots along the way. We saw a variety of animals including an octopus feeding on a conch. We also saw a variety of land features such as the “Devil”s Bridge” and the Pillars of Hercules.
Some of the dive sites are quite shallow. For less experienced divers there are quite a few shallow water sites to explore.
Antigua is a beautiful island and one worth exploring, particularly from a live aboard.
Typically, when I get to a dive site that I have not been to before, my initial thought is to use my wide angle lens so I can try to take pictures of the large reef structures and any fish aggregations so that I will have a general sense of what a particular dive site is like. Most of the time I dive with groups, so if I am shooting wide angle the challenge is to only have one or perhaps two divers in the image. I usually do alright at keeping up with the group, although by buddy says I am pretty slow and tend to be at the back of the group.
Nevertheless, there are times when I pull out the macro lens to take underwater pictures. A trip we took to Curacao not to long ago was one trip were I was glad I had packed the macro lens. We dove with Ocean Encounters, which is an excellent shop. Good safety briefings, skilled and well trained staff and solid equipment. One of the dive leaders we dove with on several dives was Pol Bosh. Pol is extraordinary at finding the small critters that live on the reef system in Curacao. Curacao has quite a few sea hares which are shell-less mollusks. One such sea hare he found was a Petalifera Romosa. A sea hare my friend Pol pointed out in Curacao This Petalifera Romosa was perhaps at most an inch in length, yet with a macro lens it looks fairly large. This sea hare dwarfed some of the other sea hares that Pol found and were at most only about a quarter of an inch or a centimeter in length. (I wish my eyes were that sharp and could readily spot creatures that small).
Pol was also quite skilled at finding arrow crabs. Arrow crab and sea anemone
Curacao does have a multitude of macro subjects. So typically I was way at the back of the group with my buddy trying to hurry me along. Four-eyed butterfly fish and gobey
I hope we get to go back to Curacao to get lost in the small small world of creatures that live off of its shores. Blue tang grazing on algae
In the abstract, a 30 foot dive with artificial concrete reef structure does not sound like a very interesting dive, at least to me. Yet, when you have artists who are willing to spend countless hours forming the concrete into hundreds of different statues that resemble people engaged in a variety of activities, all of a sudden the dive does become interesting. The underwater museum in Isla Mujeres has 500 sculptures with three different galleries submerged between three and six meters of water. The museum began in 2009 and was completed at the end of 2013. The series of sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor and five other Mexican sculptors are located in the Cancún National Marine Park. The museum was thought up by Marine Park Director Jaime Gonzalez Canto with the help off sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor.
guadeloupe underwater
When we dove the museum, one of the divers on the boat was a doctor from north Texas. He was making his second trip to the museum and said he wanted to see how many statues had been added. We also met a new diver from the San Fransisco area diving the museum. She was newly certified and seemed to enjoy the dive all the while taking pictures of the experience.
Of all the statues that we saw the one that spoke to me was one I refer to as the barrister.
The Barrister
To me it looked like an English Barrister pleading his case underwater. He is surrounded by statues who may or may not be particularly interested in what he has to say. Oh, that is the life of a trial lawyer, something I have been doing for over 30 years.
Not long ago I read an article that talked about how divers often became mesmorized by looking where the fish are, mostly near the bottom and often under ledges and over hangs. The problem the author said was that sometimes the most interesting things were swimming over the heads of the divers who missed them because they did not look up.
With that thought in mind I recently dove the Odyssey in Roatan Honduras. As briefed the dive was to have a maximum depth of 100 feet. We would not stay there very long and then we would gradually make our way up a wall near the wreck. As we got down to the wreck I shot some video of the wreck which is quite large. Here is my dive buddy Tony checking out part of the wreck. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bcampbell65/20074724821/
Midway through the dive I turend off the video and switched to stills. I looked up and overhead there was an enormous grouper that was swimming. He was easily 5 feet in length. I thouht about leaving the strobes on, but thought a silhouette of the fish might be interesting. During the rest of the dive we saw some black groupers as well and they were also in the 4 to 5 foot in length range.
Glad I looked up to see such incredible animals. Here is some of the video from the wreck dive:
It was during the second week of a two week trip that we flew into Barbados, with the expectation of finding time for a few dives. We had done a few dives in Guadeloupe the preceeding week, and the diving had been less than stellar, in part because of the lack of visibility. In part because of odd things that occurred during the trip. So it was with some hope that we landed in Barbados and then drove to the Crane to stay for the week.
Barbados, unlike many of the Caribbean islands, is a coral island and is very flat. Many of the islands in the Caribbean owe their existence to volcanos which rose up from the sea floor to create the island. Oh, and Barbados was my fist experience of driving on the left (wrong) side of the road. Before we got to the dive shop my brain was already on overload. Bajian drivers are freindly, but they don’t drive slow. If you are already having to rethink right and left, it can be a bit of a challenge to do it, and go fast. (For me it was kind of like pat your head and rub your tummy). Thankfully we did make it through the week without any driving mishaps.
We dove with Ecco dive, an excellent dive shop that keeps its dive groups to a small number of divers. Andrew, the owner is exceptionally knowledgeable of the marine environment and gladly shares his wealth of knowledge with his guests. He is also a very talented underwater photographer. One of the ideas that Andrew passed on to me was that marine life do follow certain patterns of conduct; and if you see certain things happening, you can make educated guesses about what the marine life will do next. Now that is a very powerful observation for an underwater photographer because if we have an understanding of how certain activity is likely to unfold, we can position ourselves to try to capture it. Since I dive open circuit, which is very noisey, positioning myself to capture interesting marine activity is quite a challenge. That is, the fish can hear you coming and often times will scatter if you fin in to try to get close to them. On the other hand, if you are patient and wait for the fish, and can anticipate what they might do.
One other thing I learned in Barbados that I had never thought about before was that the water in some parts of the Caribbean is saltier than in other places. Barbados is one of the places where the water is saltier that other places, so plan on adding another 2 pounds of weight.
Below is a link to an article I wrote about the last dive we did in Barbados.
