auchmeddan

The Bait ball is a bit smaller than it was a few weeks ago, but most of the fish have been forced down to the cave/swim through at the site, packing the area tight with fish!

When we got to the swim-through, Jules gave me a “you go first” look, so I took the lead. I got a little bit confused when I entered it as I couldn’t really see any light from the other side. As my eyes adjusted I started to notice snapper lurking in the dark and then realised I couldn’t see because of the bait-ball that had been forced down inside the cave. As I edged through the swirling cloud of fish I could see a lot of snapper in the cave - occasionaly barging through the smaller fish and swimming very close to me.

When we edged out the other side, we saw a lot of snapper, Bar-jacks, Goat Fish, Butterfly fish, Wrasse - practically any sort of local fish you could think of seemed to have congregated here (the larger ones undoubtedly for an easy meal). We saw a few large (and I do mean LARGE) Grouper, and then as the Jacks charged the bait ball and it thinned before us I saw a very distinctive shape under an overhang in the reef. I grabbed Jules, pointed it out, and we both swam over to get our first up-close look at a Lion Fish in Bermuda’s waters.
I know the fish doesn’t belong (and shouldn’t be) here but it was a thrill to see it anyway. They really are very beautiful to look at, and are pretty shy.

We went through the swim through and back over the top of the cut twice, and just marvelled at the number of fish species we saw.

We had already seen a beautiful Blue Parrotfish earlier - easily the Blue-est one we’ve ever seen, but the variety of fish here blew that away! On top of what we had already seen we could add Trumpet-fish (lots of them!), Juvenile Boxfish about 1-1.5 inches in size, but I can’t identify the species), Parrotfish, Porgys, Sand TileFish. The only fish that was noticeable by it’s absence was Great Barracuda - I was really surprised not to see any at the bait ball.

In terms of seeing the local fish, this was one of the best dives we have had here. Unfortunately, due to particles in the water and the available light, I had a few problems with the camera exposure. I would have loved to have gotten a good photo of the Lion Fish, but it started heading for cover as soon as it saw us.

I’ve put a couple of photos below anyway of the Lion Fish.

The Photos below are a Trumpetfish, and some Soap Fish.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Bermuda, Diving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.