Today is Monday, June 22, 2009 ... Carolyn and I have been in Cozumel for 6 days and will return home Friday June, 26.

To date we have done 10 dives with a total of just over 10 hours underwater.  All of the diving has been very relaxed and typical "Cozumel
Clear" but today we saw something worth mention.

Today we saw a "Lion Fish" on one of the reefs at about 35 feet depth.  This is significant for a couple of reasons .... first and foremost, Lion Fish are NOT native to the Caribbean sea, they are in fact typically found all the way over in places like Fiji and such.  Apparently, in the last couple of years there have been sightings of Lion Fish off the coast of Florida and even some "mention" of sightings around Cozumel in the last several months ... BUT ... per a recent diver magazine  article indicated there had been no "documented" sightings of Lion Fish around Cozumel.  We had asked a couple of local dive masters about them and they had all claimed to have seen a couple here and there and even knew of one having been captured ... you see ... the deal is ... Lion Fish are not only highly poisonous to humans, they are also voracious eaters of other fish and are actually a very bad thing to have showing up on the reefs where they are not native.  They are indeed beautiful ... but unwanted in this area.  Regardless, one of our dive group today is a very fine underwater photographer and he took several pictures of this critter .  I will share a picture once I get it from the photographer ... we believe this one to be a juvenile fish since it wasn't very big and not as darkly colored as the pictures we have seen ...

So ... we can log another creature as "sighted" in our personal logs ... we have also seen several sharks, barracuda, a splendid toad fish, seahorses, lobsters, crabs, an eagle ray, several eels, crabs and many other less exotics during this trip ... but the rare (so far) Lion Fish is the big deal ...