WHILE THE FLORIDA GULF COAST HAS BEEN PART OF MY LIFE FOREVER, I’ve only been in the Florida Keys for one brief visit and diving my way down them has long been on my Bucket List. The Juliet, my favorite liveaboard ever, sailed down the Keys in mid-May, from Miami to Key West and I went with it.
It was a mixed trip – I can never say enough good things about the Juliet’s terrific, and terrifically attentive, crew. There were great dives, featuring wrecks, turtles, stingrays, barracudas.
But high winds – albeit on sunny days – meant poor visibility on some sites and in the end caused us to call off the last two days of diving.
A PLETHORA OF PORKFISHES
Saying I saw porkfishes may not sound like much of an achievement, but in 20 years of diving I had never seen more than occasional solitary specimens of this colorful fish. So on this trip I was happy to find them in sizable aggregations.
AND HIGHHATS
I’d never seen any highhats, relatives of the oft-encountered spotted drums, anywhere. At the Cayman Salvager wreck near Key West there they were, a whole posse of them.
ALLIGATOR REEF YES!
At Alligator Reef, off Islamorda, we had a great dive, hanging out with a big green turtle, a stingray, the aforementioned porkfishes and an enormous number of grunts. Dives on the 550-foot Vandenberg wreck and on the Benwood Wreck (especially the night dive) were excellent.
SOMBRERO REEF NO!
But visibility at Sombrero Reef, Molasses Reef and the Flagler Barge was so poor, due to sediment in the water column, that I had to turn off my camera’s strobes (the light’s reflections on sediment rendered unusable images), and shoot without them. Sometimes this produced okay images; sometimes it didn’t.
All told, we got in 10 or 11 dives (some of us skipped the last night dive due to the low viz) on reefs and wrecks. On Wednesday, we motored back to Miami. On Thursday, some of us went to Miami’s new Science Museum, which is primarily and aquarium.
NO MEMORIAL BUT A STINGRAY GREETER
Our introduction to limited visibility came on the first stop out of Miami, at the Neptune Memorial, an artificial reef built by The Neptune Society for subscribers’ cremated remains. Despite two tries from the mooring line, following a general compass course, my dive buddy Ted Nobick and I totally failed to find it.
Instead, on a broad sandy bottom, we encountered this friendly southern stingray. Maybe better, since he posed for us for several minutes, fluffing sand and being stingrayish. Unless in this case the fluffing thing was to tell us to go away. It worked; in the end, we did.
KEYS THINGS
Spotfin Butterflyfish (Chaetodon ocellatus), Florida Keys 
Banded Butterflyfish (Chaetodon striatus), Florida Keys 
Christmas Tree Worms 
Zillions of grunts, all over 
Grunts, close up 
Hogfish (Lachnolaimus maximus), Intermediate Phase, 
Hogfishes go through color phases, from pale white to blotchy red – and in-between. 
George (the turtle) up close. 
Goldface Toby (Canthigaster jamestyleri), Florida Keys 
Spotted eel, from a night dive. 
Nearby, this midnight has stuffed himself into a crevice for a n ight’s sleep. 
Same midnight, but I liked having the glasseye snapper in the foreground. 
Another reef, another southern stingray – this one with a posse of fish friends. 
After a while he took off. 
We’ve all seen this little fish, here cleaning a tang, a zillion times but nobody on the boat could definitively say what it is. Best guess is a juvenile Spanish hogfish. The pattern matches but the shades differ from the examples in the sources. 
Bermuda chubs. The spotted fish is the same species; they can change coloration at will 
My friend George Constantino tracks a green sea turtle 
During a safety stop on a mooring line, realized I was staring at these gooseneck barnacles throwing our their little cirri to filter food, like fly fishermen casting into the stream. 
In situations with heavy sedimentation in the water column, shooting with strobe lights results with great photos of the lights reflecting off the sediment – like a white curtain 
In processing the digital images, you can get a more of a picture, but it’s still crummy. Well, at least with my skills. 
Another approach is to turn off the strobes and shoot with natural light. You get a marginally okay result but it lacks true color, like this shot of a black grouper 
Or this aggregation of porkfishes and others 
Or grunts 
Sometimes it works better to pubklish in black and white 
Juvenile Bluehead Wrasses (Thalassoma bifasciatum), Bonaire 
Or these flamingo tongue snails on a sea fan. 
A passel of highhats, shot in natural light 
More than 500 feet long, the Vandenberg was a former missile tracking ship sunk as an artificial reef in 2009. We made two dives on it, one from each end. Never covered the entire ship. 
The highest point on the Vandenberg is the “Crow’s Nest,” a long deck rather than a small platform centered around a mast. 
It attracts fishes like this blue angelfish. 
Great barracudas hover a lot, vigilant for a opportunity to strike like a bullet when a vulnerable prey comes into view. 
Lots of barracudas 
See. Barracudas 
An artistic shot of ship architecture 
Ditto. Artistic 
In one of the big wells, once housing tracking antenna, I found a pair of Sergeantmajor fishes building a nest. 
The female scoots along the surface laying eggs, a procedure called “finning.” 
They could have just been aerating the water to stimulate thee eggs, but since the female leaves after the eggs are laid, I inferred this was egg laying. 
Rock beauty with corals, algae and who knows what on a Vandenbeerg railing. 
Blue angel with sponges and corals 
Found this green moray on one of the Vandenberg’s higher decks. The poor guy had a fishing line hooked into his mouth, hopefully without impeding his ability to function 
Obligatory closing slide of sunset in Key West, from the deck of the Juliet.