Kaykaing and Diving in the Rain! Caribbean Island: St. Lucia City: Soufriere February 23, 2000 by Wayne & Karen Brown

Things were not as bright as they could have been if there had been sun, but it was still pretty. We dove down to 25 feet underwater and found that we had anchored our Cobra Traveler kayaks at the edge of a sandy slope. On either side of this 70-foot wide slope was a coral reef that Hurricane Lenny missed. Even in the shallow areas the waving sea fans, colorful tube sponges and delicate finger corals all seemed healthy and undamaged. (Why do you think this reef was unaffected by the big waves, while Fairyland and Anse Chastanet Reef were affected?)

We swam across the sandy slope and over the reef, downward into a steep, almost vertical wall and saw an amazing variety of hard corals, including beautiful brain, star, boulder and flower corals and lots of soft corals such as sea plumes, sea rods and sea fans. The strangest things we saw were sponges. These are living sponges, not like your kitchen sponge! Sea sponges are a colony of thousands of tiny sponge animals that act like a giant filter. Water flows into its side; the tiny sponge animals eat the plankton passing through; then the filtered water comes out the top. We saw glowing purple fluorescent tube, yellow tube, red finger and gigantic barrel sponges.

We dove as deep as 87 feet underwater along the steep slope and then slowly moved up the slope back to the shallow reef. We watched several small schools of fish cruise past us. At about 25 feet deep, we saw lots of colorful reef fish swimming among the corals or poking their heads out from under corals to check out these strange, large, noisy, creatures (us)!

Returning to our anchored kayaks, Karen stopped and began moving her hands up and down in front of her like she was riding a horse. This was a signal I did not expect to see! It meant Karen had found a sea horse. It was about five inches long, and it was curled around a short gray tube sponge. The sea horse was dark brown with white stripes that looked like rings around its body. A seahorse is a fish, but it does not look like a fish. We know it is a fish because it breathes with its gills like all the other fish.

A seahorse has a head like a horse and a mouth like an anteater so it can suck up little bits of food floating in the water. It has an outside skeleton called an exoskeleton, like an insect, and a long, flexible tail, like a monkey, for holding onto things. But the strangest thing of all is that the father seahorse has a pouch on its front like a kangaroo! The mother seahorse lays her eggs in the pouch. So it is the father seahorse that has the babies! After 42 min. underwater, we surfaced to find it still raining. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.

We are paddling in the rain, about to anchor at Trou-Au-Diable. Our scuba tanks are strapped to the back of our Cobra Traveler Kayaks.

Karen is holding a sea biscuit. A sea biscuit is a large sea urchin with short spines. Sea biscuits feed and hide buried under the sand. Sea biscuits eat organic sediments in the sand.

At 60 feet underwater, along the steep reef slope, Karen looks into a gigantic living basket sponge that is about as big as she is.

At Trou-Au-Diable, 40 feet underwater, Karen uses her dive light on the colors of a beautiful variety of corals and sponges. Can you find the flourescent purple tube sponge, finger sponges, finger corals, and flower corals?

At 25 feet underwater, Karen finds a seahorse trying to hide in a gray tube sponge. This sea horse is about 5 inches long.

This adult seahorse is about 5 inches long.