Dive Day #1 - Blue Heron Bridge + Blackwater

31 Aug 2022

When I started researching this trip, I knew I wanted to hire a guide for my first dive at the bridge- almost all my diving has been from a boat, so I wasn’t quite sure how some of the logistics of shore diving worked. Then I found one of the shops offered a Blue Heron Bridge specialty class! I love taking dive classes!

Dive #1 – Blue Heron Bridge

My instructor, Paul, was great- he didn’t judge me for way over-thinking shore diving and was super patient. He also carried our flag (required when diving in Florida) and managed to snap some pictures of me!

Photo by Paul

Afterwards, he said it was fun watching me swim into odd positions when I wanted to take a picture of something:

Photo by Paul

Unfortunately, there was a lot of particulate in the water, and it seriously messed with my camera, so my pictures didn’t turn out great.

Most of the time, filefish swim away from me- I don’t know that I’ve seen ones mouth before!

A new-to-me fish- a Belted cardinal fish:

A juvenile Cocoa Damselfish- as he gets older, he loses his cool purple/yellow coloration and becomes a dark gray-ish brown:

A whole school of either Silver porgies or Spottail pinfish (they look really similar to me):

There was a whole school of these Sheepshead, but too much backscatter in the water for a group shot:

Me and a sea star!

Photo by Paul

Another sea star!

This sting ray cruised through several times, but never quite close enough for my camera to get a good focus on (until the end of the dive after my camera’s battery had died):

A “hidden” Bearded fireworm:

I photographed almost every one I saw for the first half hour or so, then realized they were super-common… and still kept photographing them… oops 🙂

Giant crab:

Two flounders chasing? a crab:

I’m really not sure what this behavior is- the crab would scuttle along, and the flounders would pounce after him, but never actually touched him… strange, but fun to watch!

Plus, flounders are just silly looking fish!

This bristle fireworm was easily 5″ long!

I wish I had been able to get a better shot of this juvenile angelfish but he was not interested in coming out of his hiding spot 🙁

A juvenile Porkfish!

Bandtail puffer:

Scrawled filefish:

My instructor Paul and a pack of spadefish:

So many spadefish!

Little yellow stingray:

I don’t know who this guy is 🙁

This Redtail parrotfish was sleeping and did not look pleased with us disturbing him:

I don’t remember seeing this Cottonwick before:

One final bristle worm before my camera died 🙁

My camera has never not made it through a dive- I can usually take it on a 2-tank trip and still have battery power left, but this ended up being a 100 minute dive and I couldn’t help photographing all the bristle worms!

Dive #2 – Blackwater!

Blackwater diving here is much different than in Hawaii- instead of being tethered to the boat, the boat throws out a float ball with a ladder of lights hanging down from it and we just swim around wherever we want in the general vicinity of the lights, but a few people got distracted chasing a cool critter and ended up pretty far out. Fortunately, you can see the glow of the lights pretty well from the boat, so the crew was able to track the stragglers pretty well.

Another major difference is that the water isn’t nearly as deep off the Florida coast so whereas in Hawaii there’s a mass migration of pelagic critters coming up from the depths, here, we mostly see larval fish carried along the Gulf Stream. It ended up being a lot more hunting and looking for critters- there’s much less life out and about, so being untethered makes sense and gives you the freedom to search out things to watch/photograph.

The most common (easily photographable) thing I saw were jellies: