Home
Posted on December 5th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
I’m back from Mexico, where I split my time between diving, eating, sleeping, and keeping abreast of the Facebook situation. (We won. Here’s the court ruling.) It was a fantastic vacationâwell, a long weekend, really, but still fantastic. Arrive Thursday, dive for three days, return Monday. The water was heaven, and the marine life incredible: a very rare blue parrotfish, almost extinct because restaurants serve it as grouper; moray eels, including one four or five feet long, swimming in the open water, which you don’t see often; huge barracuda; crabs as big as my outstretched arms. But often in diving it’s the little things that are most exciting to see: a fish cleaning-station, where certain species go to have their skin pecked clean of algae by other fish; or a fireworm, also known as a bristle worm, a long caterpillar-like worm covered with poisonous bristles. (Found one of those; never saw it before.) At one point, our dive master actually pulled out a magnifying glass to help my dive buddy and I see something….
Most exciting, though, was to see how the reefs of Cozumel are rebounding from the devastation inflicted upon them by Hurricane Wilma. I dove there just a few months after that hurricane, and it was like an oceanic ghost town; the reefs were awash with sand, and the coral looked gray and barren. Now the life is really starting to returnâthere are new sponges, new anemones, new growth all over. And the color is back: vivid reds, blues, purples, yellows, unlike anything one can see on land.
And then, on the return from the last dive on Sunday, our boat was suddenly surrounded by dolphins, an entire pod of them, swimming effortlessly inches under the bow as we chugged along, turning onto their sides to look up at us (or so it seemed, anyway), then turning and diving into deeper water. They gave us up eventually and we made our way back to the marina, but as we looked out toward the open ocean, the dolphins were still there, swimming and breaching, the lowering sun reflecting off their backs.
Heaven.
9 Responses
12/5/2024 11:52 am
“At one point, our dive master actually pulled out a magnifying glass to help my dive buddy and I see something….”
What was it?
12/5/2024 12:23 pm
Zeph Stewart has died.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=513503
He was a great man.
A phenomenally productive scholar, proactively curious, generous, and kind into his last years, and a gentleman to the core.
Just a moment here to mark the fading-out of a beautiful Harvard numen.
Standing Eagle
12/5/2024 5:37 pm
It was a “nudibranch”, otherwise known as a sea slug. Sounds unappetizing, but they’re very cute. See http://www.sergeyphoto.com/underwater/nudibranchs.html
- Dive Buddy
12/5/2024 6:11 pm
Actually, dive buddy, it wasn’tâit was those little eels that lived in the sponge, the tiny, tiny red ones. There was a name for them, I can’t remember what it was….
12/5/2024 6:48 pm
Shannon?
12/6/2024 1:07 am
Well said, SE. Zeph began chairing Classics in 1977, the year I arrived here and took up my first job as assistant prof., a stranger to Harvard and its odd ways. His wit, learning, sense of humor, utter lack of pretentiousness, genuine interest in EVERYONE with whom he had contact, these all made him the model of a good leader, and of a good mentor, years before the word was used. A wonderful man.
12/6/2024 2:02 am
If he was all that, what was he doing at Harvard?
12/7/2024 6:56 am
In the Caribbean, Parrotfish is served also under its nickname “Old WIfe”. It is a delicious reef fish but over harvested.
12/9/2024 4:53 pm
Sorry….Old Wife is the triggerfish, not parrotfish.