Every day out in the ocean is special, even the wavy, choppy, low visibility days. If nothing else, thousands of fish and coral and other creatures allow us to be guests in their home.
But some days a truly extraordinary, amazing, incredible, awesome. Yesterday was one of those.
We took Sarah and Greg and Tita and friend Scott to Wishing Well to snorkel. We were paddling around, enjoying the reef, when Sarah started shouting through her snorkel, "Hey! Hey! Come here!" When we all got to her, she said, "look at that sand moving!"
Sure enough, the sand was moving. As we looked to see what was causing it, slowly the outline of a Southern Stingray took shape on the bottom. It was amazing! Just lying there nearly covered in sand. We could see it's gills working and occasionally sand would blow out from underneath it.
Southern stingrays have a very distinctive shape. Unless divers bother or harass them, the rays pretty much ignore them. This guy just laid there while we swam all around him and dove down for a closer look. He didn't seem too interested in us, not nearly as interested in us as we were in him.
And the stingray was only one highlight of an incredible hour on the reef. A school of about a bazillion (okay, maybe it was only 10,000 or so) mackeral scad kept swimming by us. It is impossible to describe the sight of thousands of little fish streaming screaming past you. We all just hung there in the water, laughing with pure joy.
Oh yeah - then there was the scorpionfish. And a huge yellowtail snapper. Did I mention that right at the beginning, right where we get into the water off the beach, there was a pod of 22 - TWENTY-TWO! - reef squid? The pod included the tiniest baby squid we've ever seen.
There are more pictures from this amazing dive on Flickr.
Alas, we didn't see a turtle on this swim, but hey, ya can't have everything. We were pretty satisfied with an amazing day on the reef. Thanks, Sarah, for spotting the ray.
No comments:
Post a Comment