We had a bit of a tough time with snorkeling this time around. After 17 years of not doing it, we and our equipment were a bit rusty. My snorkel actually crumbled when I took it out of the storage box. We visited Snorkel Bob's to fill in our equipment gaps. (You can see videos of reef fish at the SB site.) It took us a few tries to work out the bugs and find a place where we could get in without being dashed on the rocks by rough waves, and there were good fish to see. The fish above are raccoon butterfly fish. They didn't mind posing to have their photos taken. Below is a school of convict tang.
We took these photos with a little disposable underwater camera, thus the lack of focus. (I'm fresh out of focusing solution too, dang!) These raccoon butterfly fish are with one of their cousins, a threadfin butterfly fish. They were more elusive.
Above we have an orangeband surgeonfish with a bluespine unicornfish. You can sorta see the unicornfish's little horn on his head. Here's another one.
You can see the blue spines on this guy. They are bright and stick out from the body.
This was my favorite fish. It's a bad view of it, but it's a yellowtail coris or clown wrasse and a saddle wrasse at the bottom. Click on the link to see what the face looks like. It has green stripes radiating out from it's eye. Wicked cool. This photo shows how bright the colors are on these fish, almost like neon. You can also see some colored coral and some sea urchins. Some of the fish shapes were very strange, reminding me of some of the creatures from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.
This fish is called a Christmas wrasse, I guess since it's red and green. Pretty huh?
I think this one is a ringtail surgeonfish. I love the shape of its tail.
This surgeonfish was gorgeous. Click on the link for a better photo of the face.
There were a lot of these big fish swimming around. Not sure what they are. Gray chub?
A lot of these big fish too. (That's me flashing the shaka.) All these photos were taken on our last day at Beach House Beach. Wish we had known how nice the snorkeling was there from day one. Or that we had stayed another week. Once you get your mask to stop fogging up and/or letting in water, and you start going with the flow, snorkeling is really relaxing. Pretty much all you can hear is your breathing through the snorkel tube. It's just you and the fish. Steve said it was almost like meditation.
2 comments:
Dorothy, I cannot BELIEVE these photos. It's another world. I've got to try this sometime.
Thanks. It took several hours of Photoshop "magic" to fix up these photos. I scanned the negatives at a higher res, zoomed in on the fish and fixed the levels, etc. But it does give you an idea of how totally amazing it is to snorkel there.
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