Alex, gusty, hot...
Something akin to a horror movie, or most certainly one of those B-Rate movies, when you think, just for a moment, of a group of innocent tourists, alone in their picture perfect and deserted anchorage. The wind whistling (perhaps a tad ominously) through the trees, the surf pounding white water spray on the slightly submerged rocks. The anchorage bay isolated in a cove, with a few mooring balls available for pick-up, and over morning coffee the group decides to go for a snorkle.
Smiles and laughs all around we jump into the water, one at a time, with a bit of a whoop and yelp as well as the water is kind of "cold". One of us points in the general direction we're wanting to go, towards the beach and underwater reefs, however, we are all completely oblivious and unaware of THE. BIG. BAD. THING lurking underneath, watching our splashy arrival. Long and grey and sleek he lies in wait nestled between the mooring ball lines. Watching. Not making a sound (well if a fish were to make a sound, would we hear it? Do fish hear it? Do fish have ears?)
And as the camera zooms in, the Barracuda stays put, long and sleek and all predator like. They're easy to spot with their large underbite ! We're watching it, and it's watching us.
We carefully circumnavigated way around him and continued closer to the reefs to spot the cluster of rocks with the crevasse and the large array of shells blocking the entrance, home to what looked like it might be a rather good sized octopus. It's beady eyes were really the only thing that we could discern, and perhaps just a hint of some pinkish/coral colored tentacles. We watched him with curious amazement, and his dark eyes watched us right back, with rather lifeless abandon. If I don't move, they won't know i'm here right?
And this is where the horror part comes in. What do I see as I do a habitual 360 look-see around me, but yikes,
"Barracuda" i yelp, as I come up for air "OMG he's followed us" !!!
Long and sleek and silver, his eyes most certainly seeing us as a rather large and most certainly healthy meal. And then I saw him glide ever closer towards shore (perhaps twoards us) and as the sunlight pierced through the few feet of water, he opened his mouth, wide, wide, and then wider, maybe to gulp some little fishy as an appetizer... but for lack of a better thing to say, my oh my, what big jaws he had. I could see the different sized, fang-like teeth clear as day ! And they looked very sharp. And very large.
My heart started thumping and I think I got out of there, but fast... however, on the way back to the boat, we saw another barracuda by the mooring ball lines, and knew that the one we had seen by the reefs was a different one. Still, that's two too many in my books.
We did see some cuttlefish,
and this guy was just too cute,
There's a well known axiom in the cruising world that is a gentle reminder to cruisers: "Keep one hand for the boat and one hand to use". We lovingly refer to anything that happens when things go wrong as Boat Bites, and sometimes you can wake up in the morning with many of them, having no idea where they came from. And sometimes you've bang yourself so hard, you know exactly where they came from.
Poor Christina suffered a serious Boat Bite the other day as the fridge door slammed shut on her middle finger, breaking her nail horizontally and not prettily, at all. As shockingly painful as it was, and after applying way too much ice, for way too long, and way too many Advil's, and a long sleep later, it turned out to be (thankfully) a "could've been worse" scenario, however, bears watching and supervision, which we're all giving probably way too freely. I cringed with sympathy and total knowledge, as the same thing had happened to me, with the freezer door, not long after we had left on our trip. Never a good day when somebody gets hurt.
The evening sunset had us almost forgetting the Big Bad Barracuda and Boat Bites bandaged once again, we went to sleep, glad we had survived.