The other day I had spent time using the hookah to clean the bottom of the boat. Usually Mary Margaret is in the water with me and does the upper most portions of the hulls while I go deeper, staying underwater using the hookah. This time, however, she stayed in the salon and cleaned the stainless steel in the galley. I did not think she would like cleaning the hulls since we have around 25 to 30 large remoras that have made our boat their home. As you can see from the photo above, they are really big suckers (please excuse the pun) and, as it turns out, very aggressive. While I was underwater, they repeatedly would come up to me and a few would get right in my face. I swear I saw a couple of them licking their chops, just looking for a place where they could attach to me. I had a scrapper in my hand and thrust it at them repeatedly to scare them away. They were not happy with me doing that and a few of them kept shadowing me as I cleaned the hulls, looking for an opportunity to get up close and personal. Fortunately, most of them were just attached to the sides of the hull just like they do to sharks. They reminded me of bats in a cave, just hanging out, resting or sleeping, waiting for dinner time to come around.

Normally, predatory fish like barracuda and sharks don’t faze me too much. I have a healthy respect for them and keep a sharp eye on the lookout for them but I don’t hesitate to be in the water with them in normal situations (I will not go in the water when there are hammerheads, lemons, tigers or great white sharks around since these all have a reputation of biting first and asking questions later and attacking even when it is not mealtime). However, given how a small remora attacked Mary Margaret when we were in the Chagos and left large hickey on her neck, I was not very happy being surrounded by so many aggressive large remoras.

We no longer throw our dinner scraps into the water since these guys just turn the water white fighting over leftover scraps of food and we don’t wish to encourage them staying with us. To our dismay, this strategy has not worked very well since they have been with us now for a week. I was thinking of fishing for them but do not know if they are a very good eating fish. Do any of you know?