Luis and I dive Catamaran Beach

Luis and I geared up and got in the water in front of Tower 4.  We swam out on about 100 degree bearing for 30 minutes, then turned North when I saw the bottom go to 25 ft and then start getting more shallow.  There was a lot of patch reef and some larger areas of reef.  Some of the reef looked like the swiss cheese area in Lauderdale by the Sea.


Found some reef with "melting" coral.

We swam for maybe 40 minutes and didn't see anything suggesting the presence of Euro Jacks, but a friend had told me that there was a second set of Jacks North of the ones off the fire house.  We turned West and swam for about 15 minutes, then headed South along a nice swiss cheese reef.





Saw a turtle and saw a Southern Atlantic Stingray, but the Stingray got spooked before I got any pictures and everything after that was sand and backscatter.






I did get some nice photos.

 This picture of a Gray Snapper came out well.

I really like this picture of a Sheepshead Porgy.  The strobe was not too hot but certainly set up some sparkle.

Found a little White Speckled Hermit Crab in his shell in the bottom of one of the swiss cheese holes in the nice reef.  I pulled him out and got this picture, but I think now I should have moved him onto the sand.  He's likely already fallen into another hole.

I like how graceful these Juvenile Jackknife Fish are.  Don't see a lot of them, but this guy was certainly posing.
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I was running out of ideas when Luis signaled that he was low on air and we turned the dive and headed West to the beach.

Dive time 126 minutes; RMV was 0.40 ft3/minute.


Turns out Kelvin was the Life Guard on Tower 4, so I went to talk with him a while.  Luis came to tell me he was concerned about the storm building to the West and wanted to get in if we were going to make a second dive, so we geared up and got in taking a 50 minute surface interval. We descended just past the swim buoy but kept heading East.  Came to that nice patch of swiss cheese reef and headed North along that reef.  We weren't really looking for the Jacks, but we were exploring the reef North and East of Tower 4, just to see what was there.



Lots of lobster.  Lots of hungry lobster.  They were everywhere, though looks like some poachers had taken a few, leaving what they didn't want behind.

This little Orange Spotted Filefish just watched me. They usually take off when I point the camera at them, but this guy stayed put even when the strobe went off.

 Nice picture of this Hogfish.

I like this shot of an intermediate French Angelfish. Usually the strobe washes them out or there isn't enough like to see their eyes.  This shot turned out well.

I tried to hold bearings so I would have some idea how to find things, but we really just wandered.  Nice easy dive.

Dive Time was 130 minutes; RMV was 0.37 ft3/minute and I came back with 634 psi in the tank.