Hi all, I'm Roddy Grimes - Graeme. I'm a photographer and filmaker from Antigua. I just got a little waterproof camera, the GoPro hero. It shoots stills and video and is tiny enough to take anywhere. The video is low resolution but honestly its a relief to shoot without the burden of quality sometimes!!!! Haha.
Anyway here is a look at a couple of spots on our coast. Sunken rock is below Shirley's Heights - its the closest thing we have to a seamount here. It goes from 120 feet to about 8 feet and is home to lots of soft coral, jacks, mackerel, a huge octopus, some eels and more. On this dive Nico had a reef shark come and visit at about 60 feet. He just got a hero cam too so maybe he'll put his footage up one day. The water was very green and dark with plankton this day.
The reef outside of seatons is very old and massive. It has some of the biggest caves and channels in Antigua but has been in really poor shape since the Hurricanes in the '90s. It is heavily fished with spear, pots and old nets have washed all over it. The fish life is a fraction of what it was and I no longer see huge monsters in the holes there. I've seen big Cubera snappers, huge groupers, Jack crevalle, tarpon and African pompano here in the past. Just seeing live Staghorn coral nowadays is to be celebrated!
This dive shows the balance between live coral and algae. They compete for space on the shallow seabed. When algae eating species are held down by fishing pressure as parrotfish are in Antigua, it makes it that much harder for coral to reestablish in a storm damaged area. I saw no large parrotfish on this dive. They are one of the best algae cleaning species and they also make much of our sand by grinding bits of coral skeleton up and pooping it out. The algae bubbles at the end should be oxygen as that algae has been photosynthesising all day in the sun. I should take a sample and test it next time, back to the high school chem lab!
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