Water, warm and blue.

Hello again, and welcome to another exciting episode of "Stuff I got to do and you wish you could too"! Today we travel deep into the depths of the ocean and explore the deadly but beautiful reef environment. Remember not to attempt such a quest without the proper professional breathing gear, such as a snorkel or bendy straw. Another important item to remember is some goggles, at least if you want to see anything clearly. Some have said that the goggles do nothing, but any experienced diver will tell you otherwise, myself included. With that taken care of, here is the first installment.



This guy was interesting. If you can't see quite well, it's a Parrot fish, and I think he was about half as long as my arm. They're named that because they have a fairly prominent beak-like mouth, and are very brightly coloured (at least I assume that's why, I'm just making this up as I go but it sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it?) Anyways I must have followed this guy around the reef for a good 10 minutes trying to get a decent shot of him. I'd try and get beside him and every time he'd stop to do something he'd turn in weird directions making it hard to take a picture (probably on purpose too) and this was the best I got. Anyways he was still interesting to follow around because it's quickly apparent why they have those beak things: they like to chew on rocks. Not like little pebbles or things on the sea floor, no, these guys just swim up to the big boulders and coral things and just gnaw on the solid surface. It's very obvious because you can hear them underwater from like 20 feet away, sounding like rock grinding on rock. I guess that's why the rocks aren't all slimy and covered in mossy stuff down there..



This little guy was interesting. He just came out of nowhere and started swimming in circles right in front of us. Speedy little guy though, I must have taken 5 pictures of his tail trying to get him in the shot. I saw some others later poking around in the sand, but they did what all nice looking fish do and kept moving just as I was about to take a picture and then went somewhere else and put them selves in a perfect position until I tried to take a picture again. They're all sick twisted maniacal things, I swear. Oh well, I would be too if people kept taking pictures of me and following me around all the time :)



This here was one of the neatest things. Under the boats and docks, there were like entire walls made up of these huge fish. They must have liked the shade or something, but whatever the reason, it was really neat to see. They weren't really even moving or anything, just kinda.. floating there, moving enough to keep position. I wanted to see if I could swim down there and go right up to them, but I didn't want to give them any reasons to A) get scared and go away B) eat me.
I've seen too many movies and documentaries to know what little, seemingly harmless animals can accomplish in large numbers, and I'm not the strongest or fastest swimmer among them, so I was content to just float by and take some pictures. In fact since I liked them so much, I'll post an extra picture of them, just for you. It's a little grainy though, because I'm without a graphics program for the next day or so, but it'll do. Until next time!