March 20th, Destin dive report.

Ok, I am sick, have a swollen ankle and really should not have been diving.... but, boy was in nice out...and I had camera gear I wanted to test out.

We dove two spots....Liberty rock (love that place if one likes to spear fish), and they had checkout students... so the lovely Miss Louse (which I hate).

Water temps were 64 (warm) degrees...

Liberty had tons of "you cannot hurt me" red snapper, lots of medium black/grey/mangrove snapper (some of which were really huge), sheep head, one 4 ft amberjack and several large grouper...

But I was testing out a new camera with the zoom lens set a 7mm, so everything thru it looked really tiny.

Vis, before everyone got down, was around 40, but quickly went down to around 20...

Here is one of the divers, from just over three feet away:



Ok, chunky water and lighting a wide angle leaves a lot of back scatter..

I did a video, but everything looks so small it is silly.

Ok it worked, I was getting bored, and then a huge southern stingray swam by... maybe 10 ft long.. 7 ft wide...perfect for a wide angle lens:



I took a couple more test shots and then when swimming back to the line, saw that it had settled down in the sand... so a slowly, carefully got close to it... at something inside 3 ft, it sensed me and got up, and I shot this just as it started to move:



That is a full grown queen angel, and adult remora's... notice it has three barbs on it's tail?

Next dive I switched back to small camera... and macro stuff.

Vis was not as good, water roughtly the same temp, but there was some interesting stuff.

There was a 4 ft or so red drum inside the wreck that had some serious damage done to it.. I don't think it will live...sad to see.

There were lots of nesting blenny's...

Soon there will be 10s of thousands of new sea weed blenny's in the world:



There were also lots of different tube anenomes....some on the wreck, some in the sand....









That last one is what happens when I get bored, I get all artsy... never a good thing.

And just to end the dive, I got a very pretty fish face:

Love the Blennys and the last shot. Sure am glad that the Gulf is starting to wake up. Lets dive together sometime soon!

GLENFWB:

Love the Blennys and the last shot. Sure am glad that the Gulf is starting to wake up. Lets dive together sometime soon!

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Any time you are available my friend...next weekend am back in Knoxville, but the weekend after should be back in Destin (weather permitting).

I must have taken a dozen pregnant Blenny images before noticing they all were carrying eggs...

nice! We dove the bridge Fri., Sat., and Sunday Jim. And it was COLD! it was 63 degrees. There were tons of Blennys there too. I am jelous of the sting ray. We saw NO big fish at all. That was my first time at Destin Bridge. I can say it was interesting and I might do it again when it warms up but not till then. There were lots of little baby fishies around but nothing huge. Loads of pipe fish though. Glad you had a good dive and hopefully soon the waters will get warmer

Good to see you are back in business. Great shots as always. I have seen some big stingrays in Destin, but not as big as that one.

oceanbound:

nice! We dove the bridge Fri., Sat., and Sunday Jim. And it was COLD! it was 63 degrees. There were tons of Blennys there too. I am jelous of the sting ray. We saw NO big fish at all. That was my first time at Destin Bridge. I can say it was interesting and I might do it again when it warms up but not till then. There were lots of little baby fishies around but nothing huge. Loads of pipe fish though. Glad you had a good dive and hopefully soon the waters will get warmer

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Would trade a stingray for a pipe fish any day...love the little guys.

Hey, it is warming....

Dave C:

Good to see you are back in business. Great shots as always. I have seen some big stingrays in Destin, but not as big as that one.

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Thanks Dave... looked rather prehistoric... you can see the bottom being kicked up as it swam by in that first image...

slowly.....ever so slowly. Hey but on Friday the water looked like pea soup but on sunday when we got to the bridge it was much clearer. There are lots of pipe fish.

oceanbound:

slowly.....ever so slowly. Hey but on Friday the water looked like pea soup but on sunday when we got to the bridge it was much clearer. There are lots of pipe fish.

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We need pictures of them so they can be ID'ed....you have to show me where you saw them....I see them every so often on a reef, but never get that good of an image....