Brian knows a sucker when he sees one.
After a week aboard the M/V Solomon Sea in the Russell and Florida
Islands watching me do 5-7 dives per day, usually two more than the rest
of the group, Brian pretty well knew that I would dive anywhere
to photograph a special critter or fish.
Brian Bailey was our diving guide on the liveaboard trip. After
working in the Solomons for 30 years doing salvage and wreck diving,
he is the local expert on the wrecks and also has had plenty of
opportunities to spot fish in deep or less than beautiful reef conditions.
In this case, the site was in Honiara Harbor. Less than beautiful?
You bet. Our objective was to find and photograph a goby Brian
found while working on the Shell Oil pipeline. Before we jumped
into the water, Brian said to follow the chain on a buoy above the
pipeline down to the bottom. Good idea because otherwise it would
have been hard to distinguish up from down.
The bottom was covered with a fine brown silt. Almost no other
features disturbed the landscape. The bottom merged with the
water about 10 feet from my mask, making all a consistent, lovely
brown color. I had to stay close to Brian in order not to lose
him.
After a few minutes, he stopped dead still. Holding out his hand
with fingers outstretched he motioned for me to stop. He had
spotted a goby!
I started toward him, but within seconds a cloud of silt enveloped
us and we could see nothing. I could see nothing, but I could hear
a stream of terrible words mumbled intensely through Brian's
regulator. You see, Brian swims in the muck with his fins dragging.
Onward! We continued into the muck, zigzagging around the area
at the 60' level. The gobies were there. Beautiful, but extremely
shy ribbon gobies 8-10 inches long. Silvery bodies with pointed
tails and brilliant blue markings on their heads disappeared
instantaneously into a hole each time I began to get close enough
for a photo. Sometimes one, sometimes a pair of the gobies taunted
me.
I would look for the gobies and then discover that I could no
longer find Brian. After swimming around in circles looking for
him I noticed a track on the bottom. Oh Good! I thought. There
must be some auger shells here making these tracks. Then I noticed
there were two tracks almost perfectly parallel to each other.
Brian's tracks!
Following the parallel tracks I came to a cloud of silt and swam
into the midst of it. Just on the other side of the cloud I
saw a silver tank. Brian! I no longer worried about losing him.
We continued the dive with Brian spotting and pointing out a
fish, me inching toward it and it diving into a hole just before
I pulled the shutter release trigger. Finally, Brian found a
cooperative goby (fortunately upcurrent from us!) that allowed me
to get several shots of it as I moved closer and closer with
each shot until it filled the frame.
June 16, 1997:
I changed the end of this story. As I only had one roll of film
shot on the goby I waited until returning to the USA to have
the film developed at a lab I trusted. Unfortunately for us both,
Brian's fish (a baileyii he hoped) is described in my copy of
Rudy Kuiter's "Tropical Reef-Fishes of the Western Pacific, Indonesia
and Adjacent Waters" as a blue-barred ribbon goby (Oxymetopon
cyanoctenosum).
Sorry Brian. There is, however, one bad photo on the roll of a
similar goby that is not in the book. Maybe next time.
Report by Deb Fugitt
Sea Gifts