Back Beach

If the Marine Park is my front yard, then Back Beach is my backyard. I went for a snorkel there after a hard day’s work cleaning and reorganizing the arts and craft storage. The cleaning involved getting rid of an ant nest, population approximately a billion and their three trillion eggs.  The reorganizing mostly involved lots of sweating and accidentally covering myself in hot pink paint and tons of glitter, so I was in desperate need of a swim.  Don’t worry, I rinsed it all off before going into the ocean so no marine life would be harmed by the toxic paint/glitter combo. (I do still have paint on my feet from repainting the kitchen two days ago, but that appears to be stuck on pretty darn well.) Back Beach is a short walk down the hill from base, just outside our gates. Mangroves line either side of the bay and it gets quite shallow during low tide, so you have to walk out a ways before you can actually snorkel.  I never actually snorkeled there as a volunteer, as I spent most of my time in the marine park, but there are some really nice granite rocks to swim around once you trek out past the shallow parts.   The mangroves and seagrass  in the bay provide nice nesting grounds for juvenile fish and even baby lemon sharks, so you never know what you might see.   We saw an eel slithering around in the seagrass in less than 6 inches of water; I’ve never seen one that shallow before.  It looked far too snakelike for me, I prefer to see them deep underwater where they look less snakelike and more like an eel.  Once we got out to the rocks and the deeper parts, there were tons of fish, a few eagle rays, really pretty granite rocks with hard corals and white fan corals. We even saw six bumphead parrotfish cruise by. Sadly the bumpheads swam off before I could get any good photos or video of them, but I did get some reasonable shots of the rest of the snorkel. Enjoy!

Shallow eel