Scuba Diving at Buck Island, St. Thomas
June 1, 2000
Continuing our Buck Island reef dive, we cruised along a reef at about 60 feet depth, looking at a variety of fish.
 We saw isolated blue tang like the one above, but none in schools. The spotted fish at right must be in the family of the coney, but I've never seen one like it before. | 
|
Mark heads for one of the larger coral heads on the reef. I hung around a while to get this side view of a rock beauty. Each of the species of fish has a personality, and the rock beauty will quickly move for cover and poke its head out in curiosity. It is hard to get shots of them in the open at full flank.
Below is a fine speciment of blue parrotfish. Some of them have spots of other colors, but this one is pure blue. Note the fine detail of the side fins. This big fellow show how small the blue chromis are in perspective.
As we neared the end of the dive, I ran out of air first as usual. As one divemaster said to me "You really hoover it in, don't you?". So I was hanging out at about 15 feet with Mark below me as we put in some shallow time as a decompression precaution. The reef is far below Mark now. We saw a turtle about here, but I couldn't get close enough to it to get off a shot.
| Return to start of Buck Island dive |
2000
St. Thomas