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We spend a lot of time in the water when we're cruising, and although most of it is snorkeling, we do carry SCUBA gear. Since we don't have a compressor, though, we're limited to a single dive each unless we can get airfills. We left Florida with both tanks full, and were a little bummed about the prospect of returning without using them, but we hadn't seen anything that inspired us to pull them out - until today.

It wasn't a particularly inspiring day, actually, as the promised sunshine is still nowhere in sight. Today's light winds barely rippled the water's surface, which reflected the gray and sullen sky like a sheet-metal mirror. Not so great for spotting coral heads, either for driving around in the big boat or snorkeling on from the dinghy, but we took what we could get and went snorkeling anyway.

The calm conditions meant an easy ride to the Dog Rocks, a bit more than two miles north of our anchorage. (The dinghy planes at 15-20 knots, so it's a relatively quick trip.) Our guidebook quotes an unnamed 1920s era surveyor as writing of these rocks that "they surve little purpose except to give the sea something to break over." Our interest in them is that they lie very close to the drop-off of Exuma Sound.

We dinghied out to the rocks and then to the east, looking for something interesting - and Britt spotted a dive mooring, so we tied up to it and jumped in. It was deep for snorkeling, of course - 30-50 feet on the shelf before it fell off into the deep blue - but we're pretty good free divers, so we swam around anyway, and what we saw convinced us to come back with our tanks: big schools of bar jacks, horse-eyed jacks, and yellowtail snappers, huge margates and groupers, two spotted eagle rays
(my favorite sea creature, and our first sighting this trip!) and one inquisitive shark.

We zipped back to the boat and got our gear together, which actually went amazingly smoothly considering we haven't used it in close to five years. (We had checked our regulators and BCs in Florida before we left, but it was certainly a relief to put batteries into the dive computers and see that yes, they work!) Then we zipped back to the Dog Rocks and spent an embarrassingly long time dinking around trying to find the darn mooring again. But finally we were tied on and suited up, and into the
water we went.

After following a deep canyon into a tunnel, we emerged over the drop-off just as two more spotted eagle rays swam languidly by. Two tiger groupers were either fighting or courting, and we followed them for a while. It was nice to relax and just hang out with the fish, which were a lot less skittish around us than usual, probably because we were moving more slowly. I also enjoyed seeing formations such as wire coral, which don't usually grow at our snorkeling depths. As we returned to the mooring
line, a big almaco jack came over to check us out. All in all, it was a great dive, a worthy use of our one tankful of air each.
- posted by S/V Windom @ 6/06/2007 [link]