Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little eyes. So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away. Then the male, driven by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs. So the truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of them that it doesn't make any difference. ------ Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know"
Super day, comfortable and relaxing. Can’t ask for too much more from a Sunday afternoon.
After lunch we headed out to see what was in Lake Riviera. We had been wondering for a while and today was the perfect day to take a look.
We suited up and walked down to the shore. A father and his 2 small sons were fishing from the beach and told us that there was a channel in the lake about 30ft deep and he heard someone caught a 30lb catfish in there once. The boys asked if we saw turtles. We were going to find out.
After my usual blonde moment of leaving my mask in my trunk we were on our way. The water has the red color of cedar and was 72F. We dropped down and swam out about 100 yards and duly noted the 9 1/4 inches of visibility, gray-brown silty bottom and stringy lake grass. We took a heading and tried again ........ and then again. With both our flashlights on, if one of us sneezed and moved 6 inches we would have been lost forever, so I kept a hand on Marks arm to keep us together while he carried the flag and kept us on target with the compass. This worked out kind of well since all I had to do was hover and he kicked and kept us moving along. Not a bad deal for me but.......we never got deeper than 6 feet or found a channel, never saw a fish, or a turtle, or a shopping cart or an empty can or anything else for that matter. I am sure they were all just 20 feet farther but we turned back .
The sun was shining and it was warm and just too nice a day to give up, so we headed to the Railroad Bridge in Point Pleasant.
When we got there 4 teams of divers were already in the water. Stewy from Handicapped divers was there with a little autistic girl who was sooo excited to be in the water she was animated. She never stopped talking or grinning and her mother never stopped videoing. She told me all about the crabs and how she got to feed a blenny and the crabs and how her tank came loose and they took care of it with no problems. She would pop back up again before we were under the water to report some more and then go back down. Stewy really does tremendous work with these kids. He really deserves our support. Ray was also there with the little girls father who was not taking to diving as quickly as she was. He is another volunteer who should be praised and today he had his hands full.
We got ourselves organized and dropped down. Things were looking up. There were schools of blenny swimming about and tons of little sea bass. The starfish have thinned out a bit but there was an ample supply of large ones scattered about. We wont be running out any time soon. The mussels formed a thick carpet about a great deal of the bottom and hundreds of crabs were nestled in among them. Several of the blue claws needed to rent a room, it was embarrassing to watch them! There were quite a few of the crabs carrying tiny baby crabs in their claws. I still find it hard to believe that crabs care for their young this way. I thought they just laid their eggs and moved on.
There were several enormous horseshoe crabs burrowing themselves into the sand (what are they doing guys, anyone know?) and two late bloomers having one last fling.
Nestled in and about were many tiny hermit crabs and several quite large moon snails. I find it hard to believe that these fit back in those shells but they did, except for the last one who, after I patiently waited for her to climb on my hand, just stayed there quite content.
Scattered about there were several of these......organisms, that is the best word I can come up with right now, that looked like semi-transparent white onions when they pulled themselves in. I held a few for a while but they never came back out.
And I occupied myself for a while just chasing mini little flounder about the sand. It is amazing how they nestle themselves against the sand and blend in almost perfectly. We stayed quite still and just watched until we picked one out and scooted them along.
There were several large patches of sea lettuce growing and one large stereo speaker which the mussels were taking a shine to along the bottom. We just looked around and lazed about enjoying dive. Respectable visibility, 20 fsw, almost tropical 68F water temps and 46 min later and we called it a day.
A cold beer and a burger on the way home and life is good, truly good. Proof it doesn’t always take 100fsw and a boat to make a good day in the water.