Snorkeling

Snorkeling

Saturday Paul asked if I wanted to go snorkeling.  There is reef about 50 yards down the beach and is quite visible from the eating porch.  I wasn’t doing anything particular and it was hot anyway so I tagged along.  

John, the base mananger, had brought two sets of snorkeling equipment with him and it was available for anyone to use whenever.  So we picked up the equipment from behind John’s ‘house’ and went to the beach.  The water is fairly warm down here.  It cools a little further from shore in the deeper water, but by the reef it is like bath water, warm and a little murky.

Unfortunately, the reef was fairly dead.  In spite of that, I did see a few little highly colored fish, almost like the ones you would find in the little fishbowls at PetSmart or another pet shop.  I saw a bright little blue guy with a black stripe on his side.  He looked like something from the disco era.  There were a few dark gray fish and one yellow one.  Occasionally, I saw some green seaweed swaying in the surge; even though it was a small surge, it was still felt as the small waves passed over my head and made me bob like a cork in the water. 

Paul and I weaved in and out of coral, or maybe it was limestone I couldn’t tell, towers that extended from the seafloor to the surface.  They are the ‘rocks’ we see at low tide.  Some were fat, others were slender and they formed an informal maze of sorts that we could swim around.  At the edge of the reef these towers stretched some twenty odd feet to the sandy floor that could barely made out in the milky water.  Upon closer examination they are made of dead coral piled on top of each other.  The coral is hard as rock and gray in color.  I can understand why boats that stumble onto a submerged reef don’t make it through, they are sharp as a razor and as hard as concrete.

In between the towers the seafloor is littered with coral pieces similar to the appearance of bones lying everywhere.  Intermingled are brain coral and other specie that I don’t know. 

We wander around for an hour or so and I find myself inside the reef, or a shallow lagoon, where the water becomes too shallow to swim.  I stop, stand up and see I am about 100 from shore.  All around me I can see that the water is shallow so I end up walking to shore.  A few minutes later I see Paul on the far side of the reef, we wave at each other and I motion that I’m going in. 

Paul likes to snorkel, so an hour later he comes in and says that he saw his old friend, a moray eel, at reefs edge.  He watched it for a little bit as it hunted and then came in.  So, I guess there must be more life out there than I thought.  Perhaps another visit in a week or two; we’ll see.