Snorkeling at Seven Mile Beach (Feb. 26th, 2011)

Snorkeling this day was pretty fun! Some cool stuff to see.
However, a big barracuda kept hanging out and made the experience unnerving.
You can catch a glimpse of the barracuda's silhouette in the background of the above picture. He never came close enough for me to get a good shot, just close enough to make his presence known.
The coolest part of this day was that there were a bunch of squids hanging out. These are Caribbean Reef Squid. They're fairly common and can grow up to 1 foot in length. Some people think these are called Cuttlefish but, they are not. Squids, Octopuses and Cuttlefish are all types of cephalopoda. I found a good description of the differences between squid and cuttlefish on yahoo answers.Here's a Honeycomb Cowfish. It's a type of trunkfish. They're cool because their 'skin' is actually a hard carapace made up of a hexagonal 'honeycomb' pattern. I've tasted this fish before in a salad and its flesh is very light tasting.

Here's a Ocean Triggerfish. It's pretty big compared to most other fish around the reef. It's a solitary fish and can grow up to 65 cm in length. They're pretty skittish so I was lucky to get this close.
Just a bunch of jack fish hanging out near the sandy bottom.
This was pretty sweet! A big school of little fish swam past and I was surrounded. I guess they're a type of herring?

Good Stuff!

Scuba Diving in Cayman Brac (January, 2011)

Cayman Brac!

Decided to take a little weekend vacation over to the diver friendly island of Cayman Brac. We stayed at the reasonably priced Alexander Hotel. There was no diving at the hotel, but it was only a short ways to the hotels that did offer diving. I was surprised at how the island of Cayman Brac differed from Grand Cayman. For instance, it was much dryer there, so there were many cacti growing. It is a rugged island formed by cliffs of coral. See:These cliff ran along the whole island (approximately 11 miles) sometimes offering caves to explore. I also took pictures of a house I found interesting:I named this house "Orange House." The intrigue & attractiveness of the houses and caves in Cayman Brac quickly waned and I was glad that we were certified divers. I wouldn't recommend going there unless you are a diver because there's not much else to do. Fine by me!

The first dive we did there was a shore dive. It was a really cool place. A wreck dive. The wreck was called the Captain Keith Tibbetts and is an old Russian war ship purchased for the the purpose of sinking in order to attract divers.
The Ship was resting at about 70 ft deep and a 200 yard swim from shore. It was cool to explore.
The best wreck I've ever seen. Lots of places for fish to hide.

The following day. We did two boat dives.It was luxurious in that the dive masters helped us with our gear. One of our diver masters was certified lion fish culler, so, we witness some spear fishing (killing). I was dissapointed that they didn't eat the fish that they killed.
I was exited to get a picture of this white spotted filefish. This was a new species of fish for me! Kind of feels like a real life Pokemon. I've heard that there's about 28,000 species of fish. Got to catch them all!
This little turtle followed me for a while.
Here's a Queen trigger fish. I had never seen one this big before. That was a common theme while diving in Cayman Brac. A lot of the fish were the same as in Grand Cayman, only bigger. The coral and plant life seemed to be bigger as well.

It was a great trip!

Scuba Diving at Lighthouse Point (November 11th, 2010)

Lighthouse point is a pretty nice place. It's in Westbay. It's nice place to do a shore dive. Look at all the tanks.
To enter the water, you have to jump of the end of the dock because there's no stairs. But, the main attraction to going to Lighthouse point is the battery powered underwater scooters the you can rent. Just like James Bond 007 or something!
I recorded our dive using my GoPro video camera. Please Enjoy!

The song from this video was taken from the soundtrack of the movie "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." Funny!

Scuba Diving at Eden Rock (October, 2010)

Today's post will be all videos. The names of the fishes are in the videos. Enjoy the assortment of fish and the sweet jams!



Hope you noticed that parrot fish taking a munch outta that coral.





Eden Rock is a shore dive that is easily accessible from downtown George Town.

Snorkeling in Westbay (Oct. 2nd, 2010)

This blog post is going to be kind of a different one...Fish Art Gallery: This is what happens when pictures of fish meet digital editing software.
These are some kind of mackerel fish.
Here are more of those mackerel-like fish except they've been crystallized.
Here's a french grunt in front a squirrel fish.
This is a green moray eel.
This is a sting ray. I'm not sure if it was laying eggs or something because as I got close, it seemed to get angry. It arched it's back kind of like a hissing cat. I didn't want to take my chances with this one so, I promptly left her be.
Here's a lobster. No digital trickery here. The unsteady camera ended up giving this shot a cool effect just 'by accident!'
Here we have an artistic contribution by an anonymous guest artist. The piece is called 'puffer'.

Have a nice day!

Snorkeling in Westbay (Sept. 19th, 2010)

I gots me a new camera! I bought one of those GoPro cameras that are so popular nowadays.
Saying "I went snorkeling in Westbay" is pretty vague since there are so many different snorkel locations. To be more specific, I went snorkeling in Westbay behind the gas-station near the four-way stop. The reef there is pretty sweet however, it's a good 200 meter swim to get out there.


There's no doubt the camera works well under water for taking videos. You gotta love that wide eye lens. Not quite a fish eye, which is too bad since this blog is all about fish and stuff but, it's close enough.

I surfaced and snapped this here picture:
I like this picture because you can really see the effect the wide angle has by looking at the horizon. Also, that cloud in the middle is pretty crazy. Probably a strombocatacumulo cloud. Just kidding. It almost looks like a mushroom cloud! The point is, when using the GoPro, realize that the still pictures above the water's surface are much more clear versus the still pictures you'll take below.
Here's a gray fish. I've blogged about this fish in the past and I still haven't found out the proper name for it. I was just saying that these pictures aren't that great underwater but zoomed out like this one is, it still looks pretty cool. One challenge with using the wide angle lens is that the subject of your shot has to be closer to the camera then you'd 'normally' expect.
It's tough to tell from this zoom level but, here's some sergeant major fish.
Finally, a nice coral specimen. One additional comment about the GoPro camera....There's no preview LCD display. I think this is good because it conserves battery life. However, it is slightly inconvenient because you don't know if you've captured a 'good' shot or not. Conversely, it makes for a nice surprise when you return home to see if you've got any good footage.

Thanks for reading. Become a follower of my blog.

Snorkeling at Seven Mile Beach (Sept. 12th, 2010)

Awesome!
SHARK! SHARK! SHARK! Saw a shark!This is a Nurse shark. It was hiding under some coral. I swam in real close to snap this picture but then it got scared and swam away.
This is the nurse shark swimming away. I was surprised at how fast it took off.
Shark wasn't the only thing seen on this snorkeling adventure. Here's a lovely school of blue tangs.
Here's a baby spotted trunk-fish.

Sharks are cool!

Snorkeling at Barkers (July 20th, 2010)

Spotted a little rock off the tip of Barker's and decided to swim to it. It took about an hour each way. The water was pretty shallow and below head-level for the majority of the way.
Unfortunately, there wasn't much see life to observe.


This little stingray showed up but that was about all there was to see while swimming.
I brought my fishing rod with me because I thought I'd do a few casts from the rock.
There were some fish swimming around the rock but they didn't want to bite my lure. Also, the rock was really sharp and that made it tough walk on. During this adventure, there was lots of stuff to step on. It would have been good to have shoes.

There were jelly-fish and I got stung. It wasn't a big deal though.

Snorkeling at Barkers (July 20th, 2010)

It was really hot out this day and the ocean felt like bathwater. Almost too warm. There were some fish around.These are yellow grunts. They are really common. I was surprised to see that they were being sold at the downtown fish market because they're pretty small.Here's a sea anemone. I'm surprised that there are so few of these here in the Cayman Islands.This big barracuda showed up and wouldn't leave me alone...so this cut my snorkeling short.

Scuba Diving at Sunset House (July 11th, 2010)

Hi,

Went to Sunset House today. They have an Indian restaurant there called SeaHarvest. It was delicious. Also, Sunset house is a good place to go scuba diving. The appeal of Sunset House is that they sank a metal statue of a Mermaid. Unfortunately, we were unable to find it! Oh well. Now there's a reason to go back. It's a pretty deep dive site. Most of the time was spent at about 60 ft.Here's a gray angel fish. The picture turned up fine because this fish does not have many colours. The thing about photographing at a depth of 60 ft is that blue seems to be the only colour that makes it down that far. I guess expensive underwater photography uses lights and special flashes.

This was one of the first noteworthy things I saw on the dive. It's a school of surgeon fish. Looks like there's a grouper hanging out there too.
Spotted this little barracuda hanging out in the reef.
This fish it one of my favorites. It's a trumpet fish. The trumpet fish is a solitary ambusher of small fishes and crustaceans.
I believe this fish to be a queen parrot fish. Notice how there's no red in the picture. The yellow also seems absent. In the future I could use a red filter, a better flash, or more exposure compensation. I tried some post-editing using photoshop but, my photoshopping skills are lacking (so is free time), therefore, you see the pictures just as my camera takes them.
Here is a great specimen of a honeycomb cowfish. You can tell it's a cowfish and not a trunkfish because it has two spikes on its head. Looks like a tasty one.
This is a bicolor basslet. I guess the flash on my camera was working as the yellow was captured nicely. That's it for this dive. Enjoy the following video of a bunch of different fish swimming around some coral.

One last note about underwater photography: to photograph this dive I was using my Stylus Tough 8100. The camera is only supposed to be used up to 33ft but I brought it down to 60ft. At 60 ft the camera stopped working. The lens cover wouldn't open when I turned the power on. So, I swam up to about 50ft and then it started working again. It didn't break which is pretty sweet! I'd be worried to bring it any deeper though. The LCD view finder looked distorted and I was worried that I had ruined the camera.

Stingray City! (July 1st, 2010)

Hey,

A group of us took a boat ride to Stingray City. It was awesome. I snuck a few beers along for the ride! When we got there, there was a big mess of boats full of tourists. It was fine though as there were plenty of stingrays to go around!The plan was to check out the stingrays first and then do two more snorkels on our way back to shore (for a total of three snorkels).
Stingray city is a pretty cool place because it's at a sand bar way in the middle of the ocean. I'm not sure why so many stingrays congregate there. My guess is that the tourist company dropped food there over time and trained the wild stingray to 'show-up' in the same place all the time.

It was pretty fun when the stingrays would swim right up and rub against you.

Funtimes!

Before we left for the next snorkel site, this trunk fish showed up

Once at the second snorkel site of the Stingray city excursion, we encountered a school of black trigger fish.

Here's a curious school master. (Sorry pal, no food for you)

In this video I'm swimming after a Gray Angel fish.

At the third snorkel spot there were a bunch of sergeant majors.

End