Fish ID help: quillfish? in Santa Barbara?

[veek]

I was diving last night (~8 pm) in Santa Barbara, and in 12 feet of water, my dive buddy and I saw a really strange looking fish, swimming in circles within a foot of the surface. Its body was very long and a whitish-pink color, and because of its length, it was making 2-3 coils, with a ~6-8 inch diameter, so that we estimated afterwards that the fish was ~3 feet long. We watched it for about a minute, as it swam in place.

One of my fish ID shows a picture of a quillfish (Ptilichthys goodei), and what we saw looks like that and with the behavior of coming to the surface at night, but I think that what we saw was longer, and the range is given as Alaska to Oregon, so it would be unusual to see it in Santa Barbara. Have any of you NorCal-ers seen one?

Here's some online info:

http://www.uwfishcollection.org/FishKey/ptil.html

 

[headhunter]

I was doing a little rearranging of threads up in the NorCal forums and ran across this post.

I'm not sure if Vanessa ever got an answer to this, but thought I would relocate the thread to the SoCal forum in the hopes that we could provide some answers.

Christian

 

[veek]

Thanks for moving this up, Christian!

I am really hoping that someone has a suggestion for what this fish could have been. The local marine biologist that we asked was perplexed. It didn't look like a pipefish, and we were both pretty sure that it was a fish and not some floating seaweed since we were able to swim pretty close to it.

 

[Rickster]

Hi Vanessa,

I have a couple ID books with alot of long skinny fish in them. I will bring them tomorrow. Maybe it will be in one of them.

Rick