[Photo by – a passing stranger] –
[Yes, that’s me in the middle of that crew] –
When I was in college in Oklahoma, my parents lived in the greater Miami, Florida area. As you can imagine, my house was popular at fall and spring break. My favorite trip was the sophomore year spring break trip. My good friends, Chuck Wills, Kenny Mann and Jessie Trail came with me and we had a blast.
The best two days of our trip were the days we went snorkeling along the way to Key West and back. We were traveling together in a Nissan King Cab with a camper. We would drive part of the way, stop wherever the water looked particularly great (because it looked great everywhere) and jump in and snorkel. We were making our own snorkel adventure.
At a certain point, on one of the keys, we found the mouth of a freshwater creek that was flowing into the sea from the key. We swam up through the brackish water into the stream to see what unique aquatic life we might find. It was spectacular. We found large marine fish and creatures that would swim part of the way up into the creek until it was uncomfortable for them (without the salt) and then they’d go back. We could see clearly and it was really truly beautiful. We learned later that it probably wasn’t the safest place to swim–as that is the type of territory that alligators like a lot. Thankfully, we did not encounter any of those.
Further on down the keys we stopped to swim out on the Atlantic side of the island chain. As usual, we found a lot of really beautiful fish and sea creatures. This time we also found a lot of barracuda. Now, just about everywhere you swim up and down the Atlantic side of Florida, there are barracuda. I also knew that they didn’t generally find people of interest. So, it didn’t bother me that there were barracuda there. It was the large number that we kept spotting that concerned me.
Still, we were quite a bit out from the shore when I noticed a particularly large barracuda that was seemingly paying attention to me. In case you aren’t familiar with barracuda I’ll have a few shots of them in this blog story. In the water, they look like a living torpedo with teeth. Even though they are scary looking with their big teeth sticking out of their mouth all the time, they are usually only in the 2 to 3 and a half foot length (at least they were when I’d seen them up and down the coast). This one was much, much larger than that.
I first noticed him when he was out in front of me by about 30 feet. I noticed he looked at me and kind of turned his head/body to study me like a dog does when it’s confused. I thought that was weird, but kept swimming (but checking back on him). He’d swum back and forth in the same general area, but was keeping his distance, so I kept on going.
After a few minutes, I realized I’d lost sight of him and I thought he was gone. That would have been nice, but no, he was now on the other side of me. About 20 feet away this time and he was definitely eyeing me up. At this point I waved to the other guys to go in. I saw him do his little twitch again as he was looking at me, but I started to think he was looking at something on or near me. I began to realize that his focus was on my wrist. More specifically, I realized his focus was on my shiny, waterproof, metal wristwatch. I lifted it out of the water, took it off and put it in a pocket and then got back to shore quickly.
As we got out, we realized that about a tenth of a mile down the road on the bridge south of us, there were fisherman who were dumping bloody bait in the water. This is known as chumming. It gets certain predator fish all stirred up and ready to bite on anything that looks like prey. It’s pretty effective and you really don’t want to be in the water near it. “Great” I thought, “no wonder there were so many barracuda and they were so stirred up.” We tried to pick our spots more carefully from that point. So, no fresh water alligator pools, no wristwatches or any shiny metal objects with or on us, and no fisherman chumming the water with bloody bait in the nearby vicinity. That seemed to work out ok. No one lost any body parts or any blood on the rest of the excursion. We had a great time and we learned… how to watch for barracuda.
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