Lighthouse Reef: Abundance, Intimacy, and the Unexpected
Tag Archives: underwater
Have you been diving in St. Martin?
Warm blue water with a ton of marine life to me is a great hook to go visit an island. In early July 2022 we sailed around St. Martin and got in a pedestrian 8 dives in a week. Nevertheless, we still saw a good variety of reef live. Some of my favorites were the turtles. All were green sea turtles but there were quite a few of them. Most were eating on the reef. Only one was swimming apparently looking for a meal.
But we also saw a variety of fish. Some were the usual pretty grunts that would show up in relatively large schools.
But the colors on the reef were not limited to browns and yellows. Instead there were also reds and other colors.
And of course, often on the edge of visibility there were grey reef sharks patrolling around the divers.
Is it better than scraps?
Have you been to the “bad lands” in Belize?
Belize is about the size of Massachusetts, so we are not talking about a large land mass, at least for someone from Texas. Belize is lucky because off it’s coast is the second largest reef system in the world. The Meso American reef stretches the entire length of the coast of Belize and carries over to the Riviera Maya in Mexico to the north, and down to Honduras to the south.
There are quite a few islands off the coast of the mainland. Perhaps the most famous islands include San Pedro, and Caye Cauker. What becomes obvious if you fly into Placencia, is that there are quite a few islands not far from the mainland. Many of the islands and islets have interesting names such as Ray Caye, South Caye, Silk Caye ect. Some are have houses or other buildings on them. Some are not much more than a palm tree or two and maybe a mangrove tree or two. But sandwiched among a number of the islands is an area that from a sailing perspective is a fairly difficult area to navigate. In the “bad lands” the water tends to be shallow, and the reef is not particularly well charted.
Ten years ago when we first sailed into the bad lands with a very capable South African captain, he told me that he really watched his gps chart constantly because he did not want to run aground. He explained and it became pretty obvious fairly quickly that the reef was very shallow and rose and fell without a lot of warning. Our captain 10 years ago followed exactly the same track on each trip, just so he would not run aground. Ten years later we sailed with a Belizean captain. Captain David knew the bad lands like the back of his hand, but still he was careful to watch the shadows in the water to make sure the reef did not reach up and grab our boat.
But because the bad lands are pretty shallow they make an excellent place to go snorkeling.
Are the bad lands deep enough to dive, perhaps, but they are probably better just to snorkel and save our gas for a part of the reef that is not so shallow.
Ever notice the diversity of crabs?
The Eye’s have it?
Is it time to go back to Fiji?
The islands of Fiji 
Broadclub cuddlefish 
The cabbage patch 
blue green damsel fish and stag horn coral 
Blue chromis in the afternoon sun 
Rainbow reef 
Rainbow reef in Tevouni with loads of soft corals 
A juvenile anemone fish trying to hide in an anemone
Have you been diving on the Lesleen M?
My grandfather used to say quite often “Sonny using the right tool for the job makes all the difference.” My grandfather was a very skilled repairman who could take almost any mechanical device apart and repair it, most of the time without any schematics, diagrams or other description of the devise. When he took something apart he was very systematic. When he was done dissembling a device it looked like an engineer’s exploded schematic of the device. Of course for him the device went back together with no left over parts and almost always worked better than when he found it. Coming from my grandfather, advice about using the right tool for the project had significant meaning to me.
On the other hand, some of my family members motto has been adapt and change to meet the situation. Or if you don’t have the right tool for the job, improvise.
So I guess it is somewhat telling that one of my reoccurring nightmares is going on a trip to take pictures of whales underwater and discovering the camera rig is set up for macro or worse yet super macro. How many pictures of a whale’s eye do you need or want?
The same thought applies to ship wrecks. When I think about shooting a ship wreck I am thinking about what is the environment like where the wreck is located?
Is the reef near the wreck, is the reef interesting? Has the wreck begun to grow over the wreck?
In preparing for a recent trip to St. Lucia I had looked on the internet to see what the most important wreck off the coast of St. Lucia was. I found some reasonably helpful information about the Lesleen M which pointed out that the Lesleen M Wreck is an old cargo ship that was sunk in 1986. The resulting artificial reef is home to numerous species of coral and aquatic life. The Lesleen M Wreck lies evenly on its keel. The wreck is approximately 165 feet long and rests at a depth of at a depth of 60 feet. From inside the engine room of the Lesleen M Wreck, there is a ladder that takes you into the cabins of the main deck. I think that is a reasonable good description of what I saw when I dove the Lesleen M.
But wouldn’t you know the day I dove the Lesleen M instead of having my wide angle lens, I had a 105 mm macro lens. So how did I adapt and adjust? I had no choice but to shoot macro. Here are few macro shots I took.
And there were a few other interesting shots…
But alas, no pictures of what I would call an underwater wreck. I guess I will have to go back.
Have you been to St. Lucia?
green moray in your face
Have you been to the Cistern dive site in BVI?
The first dive we did in British Virgin Islands (“BVI”) in 2018 was at the Cistern point off of Cooper island. We dropped down behind the boat and swam to the mooring line. We dropped to the bottom which was at 27 feet at the mooring ball. The area around the mooring ball was mostly sand. It looked like the cat. 5 hurricane last year had beaten up most of the hard coral. But the hard coral is slowing making a come back.
The soft corals are ok, but a bit sparse. It was a sunny day to start, but later in the dive the sun started to go behind the clouds, meaning that I had to turn up the strobes a bit . I found quite a few large lobsters in various overhangs. They looked to be in the 5 + pound range.
There were several dips in the ocean floor. I dropped down to see the various animals hiding in the hole in the reef. The fish seem to be making a bit of a come back. We saw several scrawled file fish. I saw one queen trigger fish. I saw quite a few box fish and one adult barracuda. We saw three large tarpon near a cave mouth. Inside the cave were some silversides and there were two lion fish hunting the silversides.
Later in the dives we got reasonably close to the tarpon.
Late in the dive we found a turtle. I took quite a few shots of him and got a few with my daughter Megan in the picture.
Near the end of the dive we found one spotted moray who was pretty well hidden.
At the end of the dive an eagle ray that was easily 6 ft across came through the site. He was missing a tail.
I swam hard for both the turtle and the eagle ray. The turtle wasn’t too hard to catch. The ray was pretty fast and it was hard to get close to him.
I was a bit tired after the dive since the swim back to the boat was through some surge and the wind had picked up and was blowing us away from the boat.
The new housing and strobes worked well. I took over 200 images on the one hour long dive. Maximum depth was 42 feet. Viz was maybe 50-60 feet, less at the beginning and end of the dive. Better in the middle of the dive.
Have you been diving in the Exumas Cayes in the Bahamas?
The Exhumas are a group of islands that are part of the Bahamas that begin about 30 miles of the southeaster tip of New Providence island where Nassau is located. The Exhumas are a beautiful chain of coral islands. On one side is the Atlantic Ocean, on the other side is the Gulf. On the Gulf side it is easy to sail in 20+knot winds and the water is still relatively calm. On the Atlantic side, with the same winds whip up the seas and it is easy to have 5-6 foot swells.
By staying on the gulf side of the islands, we managed to move relatively effortlessly without getting beat to a pulp by the seas. The diving on the gulf side, well it was relatively shallow, but the sea life was relatively diverse.
Red tipped sea goddess nudibranch, of course shows up while I have a wide angle set up on the camera.
The creatures also included a rather large slipper lobster, who I thought was as large as I had ever seen.
For diving, it was important to be at the dive site ready to dive either on slack high or slack low tide. Most sites are near the channels between the islands. if you try to dive the sites without being on slack tide you are going to be doing a serious drift dive with currents ranging from 2-5 knots. Given that we were not particularly well set up for drift dives it meant that we had to time our dives well to be on slack water. Of course in between we were able snorkel and saw eagle rays, green sea turtles and even swimming pigs and native iguanas.
Most days early morning and sunsets were spectacular.
Do you remember the King Cruiser accident?
The only wreck dive in the Phukett area of Thailand, is near the Phi Phi islands. The MS King Cruiser was a car ferry. On May 4, 1997 it sank off the West Coast of Southern Thailand. The ferry was operating between Phuket and the Phi Phi Islands in southern Thailand when she hit a submerged collection of rocky pinnacles at Anemone Reef, 10 miles off Phi Phi Island. The impact tore a large hole in the hull, and the vessel sank within two and a half hours. Nevertheless all of the passengers were rescued.
The ferry was on a regular crossing in normal conditions, and the Anemone Reef was charted and well known by captains in the area. This has led to various unproven theories as to why the accident occurred. Theories include insurance fraud due to the owners experiencing financial difficulties on the unprofitable route, and also that local dive companies paid the captain to sink the vessel as, up until that time, there were no wreck dives around Phuket. The captain was found to be negligent.
The vessel sits upright on a sandy bottom in around 30 meters of water. Originally the shallowest part of the wreck rose to ~10 meters, but today most of the superstructure is collapsed making the shallowest part of the wreck currently deeper than 18 meters. The wreck remains largely in one piece, although all of the upper deck has collapsed.
When we dove the King Cruiser we had a calm day, with very small surface waves. Although we were diving the wreck at slack high tide, the current around the wreck was moving. Getting to the mooring ball with my camera was a chore. We all descended on the mooring line which ties to the wheelhouse. Once we got to the wreck, the wreck for the most part blocked the current. The thing that struck me was that the first school of fish we was a school of giant porcupine fish. Now in the past I have seen a couple of porcupine fish swimming together but I’ve never seen a school of several hundred swimming together. Now here was the disappointing problem, besides the current moving pretty quickly where the porcupine fish were swimming, viz was maybe 20 feet. Instead of burning my air to try to get a picture that would at best have been difficult to see the school, I opted to follow individuals around as they swam around the boat. 
As we dropped down over the leeward side of the wreck it was pretty obvious that the hull was covered in oyster shells and other mollusks. I could see an enormous number of sea urchins. That was reason enough to be careful not to touch anything. But there were also other reasons like lion fish and stone fish on the hull. If you look closely beneath the lionfish in the middle of the screen you can see the tail of a stone fish who is right next to a sea urchin. 
Soon we were in the mist of an enormous school of big eyed snappers. The schools of fish were crazy and the were everywhere.
As we made our way around the wreck we found the ship’s propeller which is at about 93 feet. 
The current near the bottom was not nearly as strong as it was towards the top of the wreck so I stayed near the bottom, but had to watch my deco time. I stayed over 20 minutes at 90+ feet and then had to move up once I got back to the leeward side of the ship.
Where there were once windows in the ship there were large cutout where you could look in and see some of the schools of fish. 
When I reached the stern of the wreck again it was time to start the ascent. No I didn’t go into deco, but I did have to do three stops to avoid doing so. This was a very good dive to be diving a shearwater dive computer since it made determining the end and stops on the way back up very easy.
All in all the King Cruiser was an interesting dive. I was really wanting the rebreather so I could have extended my bottom time and not had to rush through certain parts of the dive.