Lighthouse Reef: Naming Fish

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

017-11.700 N
087-35.940 W

And yet another report from Lighthouse Reef, Belize...

Yeah, I know that most people probably think that we're aground out here as we never seem to move. What can I say? If you're a diver this is probably one of the best sites in the Caribbean if not one of the top in the world. We love to dive and have been diving 2+ times a day.

There's an old Chinese proverb that goes something like "The beginning of wisdom is getting things by their right name." That became one of my primary goals: learning to name the things that I saw while diving. For years I've looked at all of the pretty fish, coral and sponges and have been happy to just enjoy their beauty. In some ways all of the marine life is a bit overwhelming as most of us don't have names for the things that live under the ocean. Yeah we know basic names like coral, sponges and several species of fish, but that doesn't begin to assign proper names to the incredible variety of marine life that densely packs an active reef.

A key to doing this is a series of books by Paul Humann (I just love the irony of his last name). His four books, Reef Fish, Reef Coral, Reef Creatures and Reef Fish Behavior comprise 1,000 pages of dense photos and descriptions of the visual characteristics, abundance and distribution, habitat, behavior and other pertinent data. These are an amazing set of books that are invaluable to anyone trying to identify marine life. Once you've gotten the names down and want to understand why the fish are doing what they're doing, the Reef Fish Behavior provides wonderful insights, although the verbage is often quite dense for the non-marine biologist. So this year armed with my well worn copies of Paul Humann's books and a new digital underwater camera system, I've been rolling over the side of the dinghy in an attempt to become "wise" by "getting things by their right name."

One of my first challenges was learning how to use the new Olympus C-8080 camera in an underwater housing. Believe me, it's not like typical point-and-shoot photography where you let the camera do everything. This is all manual settings where you're controlling the f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, flash angles, etc for each shot while diving. It took me quite a while to get the technical part down, but now that's pretty straight forward.

And lets not forget that unless you're photographing coral or sponge, your subject is trying to get away from you! The underwater world is a huge food chain and most fish view a diver as a possible threat and try to get away. Unlike what you see in an aquarium, fish on a reef dart all over the place. I have more pictures of tails of fish or nothing at all than I prefer to admit. The wonderful thing is that when you shoot digital film, there's no cost for a bad photo. Some days I shoot up to 200 shots to get a few good ones. It takes a lot of time to edit and select the photos and then a lot more time to identify and document each photo. I probably spend 4+ hours a day working on this and would spend more if I had the time.

Days at the reef are pretty typical. I get up at 6:00 to start the program which downloads weather charts over the SSB radio. That runs until 7:45 and during that time I'm working on photos, composing e-mail or reading. Some days I have to provide weather forecasts for the NW Caribbean SSB network, so that takes a solid 1.5 hours of studying the charts and putting together a forecast which covers the Gulf of Mexico to FL down to Mexico and Cuba down to Belize and Honduras and then down to the SW Caribbean which includes Nicaragua and Panama. The NW Caribbean net comes on at 8:00 and runs for about 45 minutes. The net provides a means for communication between cruisers. It starts off with emergency messages, then boats which are underway check in; weather; information offered or needed; boats by region check in, and finally boats which want to talk to one another get connected. One day a week I'm the network controller, who basically controls all of the above. After that it's breakfast, putting scuba gear together, diving at 10:00, returning at 11:45, cleaning gear, filling tanks, lunch, an hour rest, putting dive gear back together, a hour dive a 2:00, back by 3:45, clean gear, fill tanks, off-load pictures from the camera, edit photos, and by 6 PM we're probably headed over to another boat or having people over to BlueJacket. By 10 I'm exhausted and probably asleep.

The N end of Lighthouse Reef is lined with dive balls which make site selection easy. We just pull up with the dinghy and tie on. The top of the reef is typically 25 to 45 feet below the dive ball. Once we're in we determine which way the current is flowing and swim into the current while descending to about 75 feet. I try to stay at that depth, but regularly end up 90+ feet down for brief periods. My favorite dive sites have vertical walls that descend hundreds of feet. When one of us hits 1500 lbs of air or 24 minutes, we turn around and head to the top of the reef for the return trip. I like to get back to the boat with about 800 lbs so that I can hang out in the coral heads while decompressing and photographing little fish.

I've never been able to convince Sue to do a night dive, but the other day I convinced her to do a night dive at a patch reef 100 yards from the boat. About half an hour before sunset we headed over, donned our gear and dropped over the side. This is hardly a real dive as the max depth is about 15 feet if you're laying on your stomach, but it provided the feel of diving in the dark. This patch reef is packed with fish and we got to see a lot of different behavior and some species that don't come out during the day. Sue had a good time and wants to do a real night dive which will probably be this next full moon.

I've probably rattled on too long and bored most of you to death. But I just wanted to let people know that we're alive and well. Oh, for those of you interested in diving photos from here, please check out www.geoffschultz.org and go into the "2005 Sailing" section. We hope that you're enjoying spring. We'll be back home from 5/10 to 5/24 and hope to see a bunch of you then!

-- Geoff & Sue
Log ID: 662