This was so awesome that I pulled it out of the longer day's blog and put it in here separately. We were with one dive master on this trip, Adam, and he told us that Stork Perch had good sharks, rays, and other impressive stuff. Well, just about anything in the ocean is impressive if you are a scuba diver and you are a scuba diver because it’s impressive. Yep. Stork Perch was a ways off the shore so seemed like we were speeding in the boat a long way. Over the side finally and into the water.
I am following Adam and he goes underneath a ledge and through a small rock tunnel. I follow him and my hubby goes over the top instead. When I am halfway through the tunnel, Adam is already out and has turned around to gesture to me to hurry up
. Not knowing if something is chasing me or not, I scurry out of there. He points off into the blue (looking out into the ocean when underwater that everything just turns blue) and I see, moving away from me, a school of blue spotted eagle rays. They are superb, gorgeous, wonderful. Moving gracefully up and down and they slowly stroke their wings up and down, like flying only in water. My hubby is off to my side and except for the fact that we were underwater, I’m sure our mouths would have dropped open as our chins hit the floor. It was just so incredibly awesome. We watched until they were out of sight.
We continued our dive and here comes the school of rays flying towards us now! OMG. We get to see it again. All of the divers just stop and hang in the water watching the incredible ballet of rays moving up and down effortlessly in the water column. What a privilege to see such a thing. In all, the rays swam by us maybe 4 times. Each time it was just as breathtaking which isn’t good when you are underwater – ha ha – but everyone remembered to breathe.
Well, what can beat that! Surprise, but we had another wonderful thing happen on that dive. We had finished our dive with a pipefish, an octopus, some sharks, a small turtle, and had drifted away from the granite rocks that make up Stork Perch and we hanging in the water at 5 meters for our 3 minute safety stop
. A school of barracuda came round us. They circled us continually the whole time we were hanging in the water. Amazing! Barracudas look really, really mean as they have a very long mouth and it is alllllllll teeth! Big Teeth! There were probably about 125-150 barracudas swimming around us constantly. We were in the middle of a barracuda vortex. A virtual tornado of barracuda. I’ve never been bothered by barracuda and have been extremely close to them before so I wasn’t really worried but I’d never seen this many, nor have I had them circle me. They were probably wondering why we weren’t moving, just bobbing up and down to take care of our 3 minute stop. At the end of our three minutes, we all started slowly surfacing and the barracudas just disappeared, swimming off into the blue of the ocean and they were gone, or at least not visible anymore.
What an amazing dive with both such fantastic things happening for us to see and photograph. GEEZ diving is so cool.
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