It didn't seem that dangerous at first.
I was married at that particular time. I was on my honeymoon in Grand Cayman. It was our last day of diving before we headed back to Texas the following day. I suggested to my new wife that we swim out into the ocean with our scuba gear to that white marker bobbing on the surface of the ocean. It didn't seem that far out in the ocean. She was agreeable and we were off on our adventure. To make matters more exciting, the bobbing marker was tied to a shipwreck about 40 feet underwater. I brought along some bait stuffed into our jackets to bring in a *few* fish. A horrible mistake.
Now, the water in Grand Cayman is clear. Very clear. That day you could see over a 100 feet in any direction. And there is no current on the west side of the island. Even though you're out in the ocean there is not any real current at all. So off we went. After an hour of swimming and making it to the buoy that marked where the wreck was, I noticed we were so far out in the ocean you really could not make out easily if people were on the beach or not. We were really out there in the ocean but it seemed as if were in a lake. The wreck was right below us so down we went.
Link to a pic of the wreck we were diving:
Then things went wild. On my previous dives I've never had a problem bringing along stuff to feed the fish. However, these fish were conditioned to being fed. There weren't a couple of hundred of fish. There were thousands. And they surrounded us and they were hungry. It was something straight out of one of those nature shows where you see something incredible. We were 40 feet under clear blue water but surrounded by a circling mass of fish each about the size of your hand. So far, it was intimidating but nothing dangerous.
Then the small fish parted and we got the hell scared out of us. A 300 pound grouper swam out of the wreck and wanted the bait. I've never seen a 300 pound fish face to face but this monster was not afraid of anything and bumped me in the chest. Then it approached my wife who promptly began screaming bloody murder into her regulator. According to a popular movie, in space, no one can hear you scream. However, underwater you can hear a scuba diver screaming quite easily. I tried punching the grouper in the eye to get it away from her but to no avail. It wasn't going to budge. It was bigger than me. I grabbed it and pushed it away but it was slick and moved past me and began bumping my wife to get at the bait I had put in her bc jacket. I managed to get all the bait out of the wife's jacket which was consumed by the grouper and other fish like pirrahna. I was still maintaining my cool. I'd never heard of anybody being hurt by a grouper but the agressiveness of the smaller fish was starting to scare me because they were nipping at my hands as I pulled the bait out of our jackets that I was trying to dump it as fast as possible. I pulled out the last piece of bait out my jacket. The grouper didn't hesitate and swallowed my hand and arm almost to the elbow. I was a bit freaked but pulled my arm out fast and the grouper didn't bite or draw blood. Now the adrenaline was flowing.
My grouper looked kinda like this
http://www.dembny.de/images/00000427.jpg
Then I saw something that took my breath away. A huge school of horse-eye jack fish. These fish were bigger, over a foot long and there were hundreds of them. We were now surrounded by two patroling circles of fish, the smaller fish and the bigger school of fish. It was amazing to watch and I'll never forget it.
Then things went bad. The outer ring of fish sudden did something weird. They formed into an upside down tornado shape. The upside down fish-tornado was almost 40 feet, from the sand to the surface, and it rotated. It was jaw dropping to see, but then I thought, oh, hell, they only do that when they're scared. What are they scared of?
I whirled around in every direction, side to side, behind me, up and around looking frantically for what was causing the fish to do that. Then I saw it. A six foot barricuda swimming above our heads drawn in by all the fish activity. Holy cow, I thought. I've never seen one that big before.
http://www.divepalancarcozumel.com/images/barracuda.jpg
As you can see from the pic, the barricuda can be intimidating. Within a split second all the fish that had mobbed us were gone. In another split second the barricuda came all the way down to the sand where we were standing and lazily began swimming to me. I was dumbfounded so I didn't move. The barricuda swam right up to within inches of my face mask and opened its mouth. You could all those sharp teeth just waiting for a nice juicy hunk of flesh to eat, or fingers to snack on.
I kept my hands tucked under my arms and began swimming backwards as fast as I could to get away from the barricuda. We got about 100 feet away from the wreck and the barricuda finally went away. Then we surfaced and made the hour-long swim back to the beach in silence. I knew I was in the doghouse.
Of course I got chewed out by the wife. But then as time went by, we talked about how exciting it was seeing all those fish and what a great adventure it was.
Anyway, when we went back to Grand Cayman two years later, we did it again. It was great fun. This time I didn't bring anything to feed the fish though. :)
