auchmeddan

After my enforced break from diving (while my gum healed) and all the nights I’ve spent studying for my CCDA it was nice to knock the exam on the head on Friday, and start to relax knowing I was going to spend Saturday and Sunday diving in seas that were predicted to be about 1ft - perfect diving conditions. 

Saturday ended up being even better than I hoped as we headed out to a reef site Jules had told me about** where she had previously seen a bunch of grouper in a cave/swim-through, and it didn’t disappoint.  We were diving with Dave and Carmen and I was excited for all of us when we hit the cave and found 7 Grouper (mostly Black Grouper, but by size and markings one or two looked like Goliath Grouper to me) and a school of Horse-Eyed Jacks and Gray Snapper.  To put this in perspective of Size:

Horse-Eyed Jacks and Snapper are 1-2 ft long.
Black Grouper are 3-4 ft long.
Goliath Grouper are over 5 ft.

To be among this many big fish was very exciting, and while the Grouper tend to stay a little distance away we were practically able to swim through the Jacks and Snapper and look them in the eye. The only downside was my Camera was fogged from previous dives and unusable, but considering how much fun the dive was I could live with it.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning we were both woken by a thunderstorm that went on for some time and, unbeknownst to us, knocked out our internet connection at home.  The storm brought the seas up on Sunday from the predicted 1ft to more like 3-4 ft swells.  While this makes the diving less fun, it ended up forcing the boat to go all the way back to (the slightly calmer) the same site again and this time I had a working Camera!

The rougher weather on Sunday created a much stronger current in the cave than there was on Saturday, and in turn this created a lot of particles in the water which cause “backscatter” from camera flashes and made most of my photos unusable.  Fortunately, I took one photo of a Grouper without using my external flash and ended up with a nice silhouette.  I’ll post the photo when we get internet access back at home.

** - I removed the name of the dive site as I know people who might read this and then head out there and try to fish.  Groupers have not been common sightings here for the past few years and appear to be starting to come back again.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 11:48 am 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.