ABC of Lockdown – F for Fish

I will try to be a bit more specific as my fish knowledge is a bit better than my bird identification skills.

• Pacific saury [looking like Balau in the Caribbean] – there were big swarms of them around and they got chased by the tuna
• Tuna – yes we had few tunas chasing around the boat at anchor. They “confined” several fish swarms between the hulls and than attacked in teams like torpedoes. [Check out the videos of the tuna chases that we have posted on Facebook]
• Mahi Mahi – we were also very surprised to see Mahi Mahi or Dolphin Fish chasing fish swarms so close to shore. That’s also when we learnt that they have black stripes on their back when in “hunting” mode I guess they were their Camo like if they were from North Carolina. They came sometime pretty close to the boat but were too fast to be caught by Sebastien with the speargun waiting at the transom steps
• Green Jacks and other jacks: lots of them around the boat and they used the hulls to catch their prey which made loud bangs on the hulls. [There is also a cool video on Facebook of this happening] We caught some of the green jacks but after further research they didn’t identify as good fish to eat.
• Small Sergeant fish: At the beginning, before removing the rudder bearings for maintenance and keeping them clean in the cockpit, we noticed lots of colorful little sergeant fish. They were hiding from the bigger fish like the jacks in the rudder bearing “cave”. Once their secret hiding spots were gone, they could not hide anymore from their predator and probably found an other spot somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.
• Puffer fish one was doing its round of the boat on a regular base and like to stay around the chain.
• Snapper – there were also some snapper around but difficult to spot from the boat
• Flying Fish – sometime we could see them jumping and flying around quiet close to shore as well
• Other fish swarms – some sardine size silvery fish as well some small needle fish were swimming around in big swarms, not sure how to identify them.
• Some more predators fish other than Tuna and Mahi Mahi came around on a regular basis but they were not coming to the surface and were therefore difficult to identify.

When the Tuna or Mahi Mahi chase was going on, I was sitting on deck like watching “National Geographics” on TV just with more sound and occasional splashing.