The first full week of July I still hadn’t found my new treasure trove of fish snorkel location. I was however beginning to swim further away from where I’ve snorkel previous years. I was getting adventurous!
The sea floor had changed during the winter storms covering last year’s rocks in sand. Areas that were sandy last year were pebblely this year. In fact the middle part of the foreshore along the beach kept changing all summer from pebbles to sand. I won’t lie as much I as I get excited seeing even one fish snorkelling I was missing the variety of fish I was used to seeing. I was being to get ever so slightly disappointed bored. I wanted to watch blennies, and gobies run all over the rocks, arguing with each other, getting crazy over feeding spots. That changed when I saw red mullets wiggling along the bottom! That gave me hope there was a larger population somewhere along the beach. I was so excited to see them! I just needed to find the fish hang out. Sadly I didn’t find this until the end of July. Anyway, the few fish that still hung around the old hangout…
Striped sea breams or lithognathus mormyrus are camouflage expects or are when they’re young. Sometimes in the light, they’re almost transparent. The camouflage didn’t always work as the school got smaller as summer progressed. I think they fought back. Some in the next few months had bite wounds, bugling eyes and sadly 2 had a parasite attached. I think anilocra physodes that I so badly wanted to remove.
They like to face the current to snack on plankton.
White sea breams or diplomus vulgaris happily swim with striped sea breams. I noticed later on a lot of fish will happily follow different species all grazing together.
Saddled sea breams are my favourite as they’ll always come up and say hi. Sometimes swimming back after finding the new fish hang out spot where there were hundreds of baby sea breams, out of nowhere adults were coming up to checkout the weird looking land fish. Sometimes it was almost like they were ‘Stop!’, as I was about to bump into another swimmer.
Somedays the visibility was just bad. The Mediterranean Sea is know for being clear. That is unless the area’s shallow with rough seas. Looking at Google Maps you can see that Northern Eastern Spain or Northern Eastern Catalunya’s quite open to the Balearic Sea so vis isn’t always guaranteed even on a calm day.
Poor vis just means looking up at the surface for blink and you miss it light patterns.
The red mullets or mullus barbatus. If there ever was a fish totally oblivious to everything apart from eating these are the fish. Well maybe salemas/sarpa sarpa are more oblivious.
The larger mullets were still around. Later on alongside the baby saddled seabreams swimming along side were baby mullets. I think these are thick grey mullets or chelon labrosus. They had gold flecks along their backs.
Sometimes the current (I think here’s in the riptide) lined up the sand dunes with the rocks. I saw this piece I think of old tile a lot. Now I think it’s buried again under the sand.
I participate in a weekly beach clean up at another beach, so I can’t leave any floating plastic I find there to float some more. I stuff pieces I find up my rashie sleeves or underneath it. Sadly a few days there was so much plastic and rubbish floating I couldn’t remove it all if I tired. The amazing thing was on days when there was so much plastic, sometimes the next day the waters were crystal clear with no traces of the day before. I very much doubt the council scooped it up and no plastic was found along the shoreline. It’s like the sea took it all back out the sea again.
Thanks for stopping by!