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Hassling the Fish
- Thread starter brnt999
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dumpsterDiver
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Dondon462
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I come from a background of Living, working and playing in Antarctica in summer for the past 20 years and have always respected the wildlife regardless of the strict rules associated with getting permits...Marine Parks are great but EDUCATION is better...it just needs total committment from everyone to simply make all divers respect and understand the "right" thing to do...we are in "their" world as visitors as soon as we hit the water....we just need to respect them and their place....then divers and friends will question all the photos people have doing "inappropriate" things so the Photographers will stop doing it.
Douche Waffle?!?! Love it!!!
261311
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Great, so when do you start your work on your environmentally friendly cars and planes?
PS: Beautiful canoe.
dumpsterDiver
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Not my canoe... just a pic of environmentally friendly transportation device.. By the way how many sea turtles have you killed? Eat any wild caught shrimp? Then you definitely have "turtle blood" on your hands... How about the dive boat.. maybe you should DEMAND that they use only jet drives or have cage over the props. I have killed several sea turtles while operating (or while passenger) on a dive boat.. It sucks when you slam into them and feel the prop crunch the shell and then come around and see a big plume of blood. All this enviro-nazi talk is ridiculous, people driving around on a "turtle chopping" boat worried about someone touching a turtle...
The places I have dove, Phuket, Cozumel, Isle Mujeres--some days if the wind is blowing wrong many of the dive sites are too choppy and so everyone ends up on a few reefs. You could have 100's of divers throughout the day on these reefs. If everyone "touches" the turtles, or one person from each group hassles the fish there is a cumulative affect. If nothing else the fish are going to hide or just swim away. In Isle Mujeres one of the dive shop owners--a local who grew up there-was asked by a customer to be taken out to take pictures of fish. The dive op set up a morning dive to start an hour earlier than everyone else because he said if you got there too late some of the fish would be spooked and gone. So since we are all one big family, just out of common courtesy to the diver coming after you maybe you shouldn't hassle the fish. Sorry I forgot--there are a lot of divers who are just self centered d**k heads just looking out for themselves.
chrpai
Contributor
Disclaimer: I didn't read the entire thread...
So on a recent dive there was a bass being very territorial over his little clump of rocks that he had placed right next to some cave line and a navigational mark. I came and left several times and each time he was right there. I just had to mess with him.... doing helicopter turns staring him down then head off in a direction just to turn it around and come back to mess with him some more.
I'm not sure what it says about my personality but for some reason it really made for a fun belly laugh of a dive messing with that poor fish.
So on a recent dive there was a bass being very territorial over his little clump of rocks that he had placed right next to some cave line and a navigational mark. I came and left several times and each time he was right there. I just had to mess with him.... doing helicopter turns staring him down then head off in a direction just to turn it around and come back to mess with him some more.
I'm not sure what it says about my personality but for some reason it really made for a fun belly laugh of a dive messing with that poor fish.
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Posts by dumpsterDiver and brnt999 illustrate one of my previous points. It does depend on where you are, what you are doing, and how many of you are around. Touching a turtle off a charter boat in the northern Gulf of Mexico in February and a hundred divers doing the same regularly in Cozumel are very different situations. Turtles do, as pointed out, get killed by boat motors, etc. We can prevent this only by not using those boats. On the other hand, as I first said, I would never play catch with a puffed up blowfish. The latter, though way less damaging to the animal, is just cruel. I have, on occasion, in Nova Scotia, and other places with very sparse dive populations, touched a fish lying on the bottom just to see how it swims --- only if it was the rare occasion that I did not recognize the species and it did not appear harmful (if it's a flounder, I poke spear and eat it). If 100 people do this in Roatan each day you've got a problem.
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