Frog Fish

Happy New Year Everybody!

I hope the new year is finding everyone in happy spirits.

Stacy and I stayed up (barely) to see the fireworks here on Bonaire and it was a great time.  They sell all kinds of fireworks a couple days before New Years Eve and it appears the entire island bought a few mortars to celebrate the turning of the clock.  Buddy Dive (where we are staying) shot some off their docks but rather than some professional company with a prepared show, it was a guy with a hand torch walking around and lighting the various mortars that were staged far enough apart to not catch each other on fire.  It appeared most of the resorts had some kind of show and, while they weren't the huge ones you can see in New York or Vegas, there were enough going off that it didn't matter!  Good times.

But hey, this blog wasn't to catch everyone up yet.  I will do another one maybe from Atlanta on our way back.  Instead this entry is being done to celebrate frog fish.  I have to be honest and admit that I haven't found any in the wild on my own.  I have always either had them pointed out to me (by someone who knew exactly where to look) or had directions on where to find them.  That's what happened a couple of days ago.

We were sitting on the tailgate of our truck in between dives and Stacy started talking to the guys next to us.  Quickly she had their life stories which included this was their 28th year of coming here over the holidays.  We spoke of our love of seahorses and frogfish and while they couldn't help us with the seahorses, they gave us "directions" to find a red and yellow frogfish pair that were at one particular dive site.  The directions were litterally "go to the left-most buoy and descend to around 47 feet and you will see these fingers of coral jutting out.  Follow those back to the reef and there are 2 frogfish there".

Now we followed their directions and descended to 47 feet and then swam back to the reef wall that was about 30 feet away.  The first problem was there were 3 different clusters of finger-like coral in the 40-50 foot range there so we hunted around all 3 of them with no luck.  I seriously thought they had been messing with us.  But we scoured all 3 of them one more time and on the last one before I was going to say "fuck it" I saw a hint of red and thought "that looks like a tail".  I followed it around to the front and could see its eyes.  I found the red one!!!!  The funny thing was, it was so close to the reef that it looked like a sponge and when Stacy saw me start taking pictures of it, she thought I was going to be disappointed when I realized I was taking a bunch of wasted photos.  But then I pointed right to it and you could see the "aha!" moment with her too.  I backed off to let her take some photos and then she rose up a bit and found the yellow one too!  Success all around.

With that, here are the shots.  To be fair, the flash makes the red one stand out WAY more than it did in natural light so you guys are going to say "how could you miss THAT?".  Trust me...they blend in.  The yellow one we should have seen from the beginning, but it both were on the reef above the finger-like coral and we had been searching in among it rather than around it.  Lesson learned.

With that, here are the shots I got (click to embiggen, right click -> open in new tab to get even more biggened):

This is the red frogfish head on.  You can see its mouth and eyes as well as its front fin.

Side shot of the frogfish.  You can see its tail is sitting on some red coral/sponge and blends right in.  The spots help it blend in even more.  

The yellow frogfish was more out in the open but there are chunks of yellow sponge/coral on these reefs that he would blend right into. On the right side of his face (or on his left side) you can see a very fine filament with a little white tuft on top.  When not being disgruntled getting his picture taken, he had  that out in front of him to attract a fish for dinner.

Side view of the yellow frogfish.  All that mottling really helps them blend in.   Hey they might be ugly, but they are cool!

Again I hope life is treating everyone well!  More to come.  Until then: Its our time, the people's time!

Love to all
Jim