Diving on Baitballs on Palm Beach!

The baitfish are running in Palm Beach now....for the next several months, half a dozen different types will be here for several weeks each, coming through in MASSIVE dense clouds of fish which will block out the sunlight if you are below them, or make your buddy dissappear if the two of you get separated by even a coupe of feet....Diving on these encompasses several types of SHOWS.
One is just watching "the collective" activng like a single minded organism, like some huge amoeba, constantly changing shape, and often enveloping you!
Another is watching the dinner guests arrive and begin their "strafing runs" through the baitball...this being the marauding Tarpon, the Mahi Mahi, and a dozen other kinds of upper trophic level feeders.

baitball-at-the beach.wmv - YouTube This is a video I shot yesterday, right off the Singer Island Beach, a few hundred yards south of the Hilton Dive Resort, and about 100 yards north of the Pumphouse. Depth of the water ranged from 10 feet when they were really close to shore, to about 15 to 18 feet at the furthest out they were running. Anybody that enjoys snorkeling, would have the best snorkel of their life here! This does NOT just have to be for scuba divers....if you are on a dive boat, and they see one of these bait balls, you will probably want to use your scuba tank, so you can relax a bit under them, and not have to be so "rooted" to the surface.....In this video I shot, I am freediving/snorkeling, as is photographer Douglas Kahle, and crew member of Dive Boat Sirena( Pura Vida) Mark Sowash...all we wanted to use was snorkeling gear, as no one really knew how fast the baitfish would be moving...as it happens, it is not all that fast for the "cloud itself", so the speed of scuba is just fine...it really does not have you swimming much at all once you get up to it, and pick your vantage point. The video is about 6 minutes long, and is barely edited.. I just wanted to get this up fast, so divers could see this and start getting on dive boats to experience this asap.


Best if watched in 720p or 1080p of course

Wow !! Thanks for posting. Is this where you live ??!! Incredible water !

This is 20 minutes from my house. It is just off of the beach of my favorite place to tell visiting divers about..., Singer Island... Technically it is part of Palm Beach or West Palm Beach Florida, but it is a separate Island, and has a strong exotic getaway feel to it, along with an enormous mangrove forest and preserve, with huge estuarine nursery ground on the intracoastal side of the island.
Here are 2 shots of the Island..

The baitball was about 200 yards north ( to the right) of the pumphouse at the end of the beach.... ...which is a short walk from the Hilton Dive Resort...This would have been easy to swim to from the beach, as a snorkeler, but easier still from thew dive boat Sirena

very nice

This is the segment that came after what I edited yesterday...and is much better baitball footage..;
baitball-at-the beach.wmv - YouTube

My computer is acting up, but I saw your earlier vid. Thanks for posting. I love bait ball diving on SCUBA, particularly when the Jacks show up.

A couple years ago, I picked my daughter up at her middle school in the afternoon for a daddy daughter surf session. It was in March, before daylight savings. It was knee to waist high and very clean and glassy. Perfect for a not so in shape middle aged guy like me. I had polarized glasses on, sun was setting. We were surfing the break on the sand bar off Xanadu (Double Roads) in Jupiter. We caught a few waves, the bait was running through between the sand bar and the beach (Sun Set!) They looked like a huge black cloud from the surface. On our last paddle out, I saw a 4 or 5 ft Bull perfectly framed in the face of one of the waves. He took off behind the bait popping them up. He was invisible to everybody but me. I saw him follow the bait between two kids sitting on short boards and between a couple old guys (snow birds I was thinking) frolicking in the water, down from one of the condos.

What I learned..don't wear polarized glasses while surfing..ignorance is bliss.