Sunday, November 04, 2007

and water


We were lucky as TS Noel went by. It was grey and gloomy and rainy for three days (!Unheard of! but there you are). But NOTHING like what the south side of PR, down around Ponce, and then the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and the other islands got. It was just dreary here, not dangerous. We didn't even(!) have a flood. About the beginning of the third day I said to Elaine, "This is starting to look like fall in Michigan." She said, "yeah, but it's 80 degrees and we're in shorts and t-shirts." Good point.

The ocean has been very churned up, not very good for snorkeling or diving. All the rain has visibility pretty bad and the waves - great for surfers - have been too rough.

The mackerel scad photo above was taken on our last dive at Crashboat nearly two weeks ago. It was amazing. We were 25 or 30 feet down and completely surrounded by thousands of mackerel scad. We were inside a living moving swirling ball of fish. They'd whiz by one way then whiz by the other way. It was like watching speeding commuter trains going by.

We saw the huge schools of mackerel scad earlier in the year, when they were fry and only about 2-1/2 or 3 inches long. Now they've grown up and they are 6 or more inches long.

I entered one of the photos from this dive in the Lonely Planet Photo Challenge on Flickr. The challenge was to photograph traffic. I called the picture "Rush hour." It got a lot of views and a couple of votes. I was happy about that.

All the most recent underwater photos from both SCUBA dives and snorkeling are on Flickr. Check 'em out. And feel free to leave comments.

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