TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Has the snorkeling returned to normal

Have not seen recent comments about quality of snorkeling now -- places like diamond reef, Great Dog, the Indians etc -- any recent visitor updates?

I was there in January and the Indians were just as beautiful as ever!

Was there first week of November. IHMO snorkeling was better than usual. It's like the marine life had missed having visitors and they were lined up on parade.

Back from six weeks fixing CRC and one thing we did notice was the depletion of the bird population and the massive increase in butterflies!

I'm not sure what normal is, since I haven't snorkeled the BVI for at least 10 years, but last week I hit a few spots. Disclosure, I am a snorkel snob and I'm used to much healthier reef systems, fish counts and overall diversity, but still enjoyed what I saw.

Spring Bay - A few fish (a school of six Honeycomb Trunkfish, Southern Ray, Sergeant Majors, etc...) and some recovering corals
Leverick Bay (along the rocky shore) - Starfish, small and juvenile fish (Damsels, Wrasse, Butterflyfish, Barracuda), an Indigo Hamlet (don't usually sea around my Cayman snorkel sites), Trunkfish, Mahogany Snapper, Sea Cucumbers, a few Cushion Stars, nice anemones and my first Arrow Crab ever!
Marina Cay - A Spotted Eagle Ray and some purple Sea Nettle Jellyfish
Monkey Point - Laden with Comb and few Box jellyfish when I visited, but saw some nice fish cleaning stations in the early morning and lots of damaged coral.
The Caves - A few Parrotfish, Bar Jacks, Yellowtail Snapper a large school of Ballyhoo and an Octopus in the open in one of the caves
The Indians - Easily the best of the lot. Large school of what I'm guessing were juvenile Midnight Parrotfish, Blue Tang feeding on the Sargassum, a White Spotted Filefish and some nice, healthier coral.

Link to a few pictures:
[img]https://photos.google.com/album/AF1...ipMQ5IsCBmZz6sVh0nta4ONE06cZo-jBJnLz4ShI[/img]

Yea those hurricanes do a number on healthy reef systems.

Hi. Pictures are not showing up.

Sorry, just changed the sharing setting. The links should now take you to a small album with visible pictures (I hope...).

Did not snorkel last week in the BVI, but on St John the north shore beaches are still showing signs of the storm.
I think a lot of it has to do with the depth of the water you are snorkeling in (just a guess).
The places where you can walk off the beach and you are enjoying a reef are the ones that seemed to be the most damage.
Very few sea fans, and all the fish were there, but did not seem as plentiful.
It was almost like everything was sandblasted.

Beautiful photos, thanks for posting. it doesn't look like you're filtering (magenta) the closeup shots. Any secrets to the color balance?

The quality of the pictures is fantastic. What camera are you using?

The pictures are from my trusty old Olympus TG-1. Just using the camera's underwater setting and then optimizing with Picasa/Google Photos autofix where needed. You can really see its capabilities in some of the shots taken in better water conditions here: Cayman Barrier Reef pictures (Ignore the blocked Photobucket slots). Great camera, would highly recommend the newer TG models.

I have an Intova Sport HD, 1080p at 30fps or 8 mp. It also has an underwater setting, or I can place a magenta filter over the lens. Just wondering how other people do it.

Nope....it's going to be a long time, but still lots of fun

Thanks for sharing your photos. Things look a lot better than I expected. I hope my pictures turn out half as nice.

Great photos!!! Thx for sharing