Tropical Fish Central

I returned from my yearly trek to the shores of Panama City Beach a few days ago.  Each year, I see a lot of wild life in the ocean, both on the beach out in front of the condo, and out around Shell Island, where we rent pontoon boat with a few other families and have a day at sea and on the island.

This year I bought an underwater camera and a mask and snorkel before heading down.  I chose the Pentax W90 from Amazon after a lot of reading.  Below are the pictures and video I took on the trip…

This is a picture from the balcony of our 4th floor condo overlooking the Gulf.

One of the really cool things about the beach is the schools of rays that come through.  I got up early one morning and took these videos

I had really wanted to take video of the manta rays that play in the surf every morning, but they chose to stay pretty far away from me.  However, the cow nose rays were quite a bit more friendly as you can see in the video above.

I spent 3 to 4 hours each day hanging out in the water looking for cool fish to come buy.  About the only fish that stayed around long enough for me to react with a camera was sheepshead.  I took quite a lot of video of sheepshead.  It isn’t easy to tell in the video, but these fish are quite large – roughly 2.5 to 3 feet long.  Several times, I found myself in the middle of a school of these fish.  They didn’t particularly mind me being in the middle of the school, and would only back up slightly if I attempted to touch them.  The demeanor of these fish reminded my very much of cows.  The herd more or less moved together, grazing on anything and everything laying on the bottom and moving on when it was all eaten.  I found one sheepshead, featured in the video below, that had what appeared to be a ramora or some similar fish latched on to it.  The sheepshead did not seem terribly pleased with his “friend”.

Mid week, we rented pontoon boats from a marina inside St. Andrew’s state park and drove the boats over to Shell Island.  Last year, we had a very close encounter with some dolphins and hoped for the same thing this year.  Fortunately, we did find some and they came up to see what we were doing.  It happened very fast, but I managed to get this video:

If you watch very closely, you can see that one of the dolphins that comes closest to our boat has a calf swimming right under her.  That was quite a find.

Shell Island is a barrier island, which means there is a channel of water between it and the mainland.  About 4 miles in is a relatively shallow place – 4 to 5 feet deep where many urchins and sand dollars live.  We dropped anchor there, and most of our group went exploring for shells and sand dollars.  I took off for a grassy area about 100 yards away.  The sandy area was crystal clear, but other than the urchins and dollars, it was desolate.  All of the activity will happen in the grassy areas.

The most interesting thing I found was a number of stingrays parked just outside of the grassy area.  I got some of them on video:

If you listen closely, you can hear me swear into my snorkel when I realize I am on top of a very large (6″) stingray.

We next went to a beach that has a pier.  There were a few interesting things happening there.  First, we saw a puffer fish cruising through.  My kids were giving it a hard time, but I made sure they did not hurt it and that it got released safely:

I swam over to the pier to check out what was living on in around the posts, and this is what I found:

The last place we went was was a very cool cove that is ring by some sand bars:

Behind me on this picture is the deep water channel that leads out to the Gulf of Mexico.  There are jetties at one end of this inlet, and I headed there to see what I could find.  This is what the tip of the jetties looks like above water:

After taking those pictures, I headed out along the channel side of the rocks to take some video:

I have many hundreds of other pictures and hours of video left to process.  As I have time, I will update this post with new pictures and video.

This was a fantastic vacation.  I am very hopeful that the current oil spill disaster in the Gulf does not disrupt this area, but it appears the oil is now headed to Panama City.  Hopefully, the beaches and water ways will be in shape for our visit next year.