My Favorite Tour Guide

My Favorite Tour Guide!  This is actually him. 
(He is about 1.5 feet from tip to tail.)

So yesterday I took my last snorkel of the trip to say goodbye to the fish.  It is always the saddest part of a scuba/snorkel vacation for me.  I really enjoy the underwater creatures and I always want to stay out as long as possible to get my fill - hoping it will hold me over to the next warm water vacation.  My snorkel yesterday was an unusually wonderful 'goodbye' snorkel for two reasons.  The first reason was that I saw some great creatures exhibiting some really interesting behaviors.  The second was that I had a very attentive, almost to the point of being annoying, snorkel guide.

First let me tell you about the sea life.  During the first half of the snorkel I saw a juvenile French Angel fish that had a cleaning station going on.  It would swim up to the bigger fish and take little bites of whatever it was eating, and the bigger fish (parrot fish and yellow tails, mostly) seemed to be fighting over who would be in position to have this service rendered.  I had never seen this behavior before with an angel fish.  I watched for several minutes to verify that it really was a cleaning station.  It definitely seemed to be.  When I turned to come back to the dock, I encountered a HUGE (3-ish foot long) porcupine fish hanging out in 3 to 4 feet of water.  He let me get extremely close to him before he swam slowly away toward the dock.  It was quite nice to follow him to my destination.  Lastly, I saw a really cool spotted moray eel hunting for his dinner.  He was swimming along the retaining wall of the resort almost jumping out of the water attempting to dislodge some crabs that were scuttling just above the water line.  I watched the eel for about 15 minutes as he went up and down the wall trying to catch a crab.  He never did catch one, but it was really cool to watch.  I was within a foot or so from him most of the time and he was so focused on his task, he was completely unaware that I was even watching him - or so it seemed.

The second thing that made the snorkel so enjoyable was my personal tour guide.  Everywhere I went, there he was - a very large adult French Angel Fish who had decided that he was so beautiful that I should not be wasting my time looking at anything else besides him.  He kept swimming back and forth just inches in front of my mask.  I literally had to push him out of the way to see anything else.  It got to the point where my mask kept flooding because I was laughing so hard due to this ridiculous behavior.  Several times I actually whacked the fish unintentionally with my hand as it changed direction to get back in front of my mask.  Since then, I have gone out of my way to watch him around other snorkelers and I have not seen him do this with anybody else.  It seems he just REALLY liked me - and given my wonderfully fun personality, who could blame him?  ;-)