Vampire batfish…

As you know his nibs bought his dive kit a while back and after ill fitting wet suits and BCDs I decided to get mine. So after searching the net and trying on a few BCDs here I found my perfect kit. The boxes arrived and much fun was had (by his nibs) opening and fixing etc. The sensible thing to do would be to go diving locally to make sure everything worked so we booked a couple of dives with one of the local dive centres. The first dive was not much fun, buoyancy problems and a strong current meant I had to work hard and in my 5 mil wetsuit I got very hot and my mask steamed up. The second dive was much better, we dived a sunken cement barge just off Jumeirah beach. It sunk in a storm as the captain had greedily overloaded it. It was obvious that many divers had been here and fed the fish over the years as they were very very tame. It used to be the norm for divers to feed bananas to fish, under the water they disintegrate and fish love em. I had an escort all around the barge as my hair resembled the bananas so the fish were nose to nose with me most of the time, nipping at my hair. This is quite unnerving especially as some of the fish were not small, turning to look at something and coming eye to eye with a batfish is a bit too close for comfort. One batfish actually bit my finger, I’ve never known that to happen, unless you provoke them, this one just swam from beneath me and thought ah ha, hand means food so I’ll have a bit of that! It didn’t hurt but it did give me a shock. Feeding fish is NOT good for them and thankfully most places won’t allow it these days. The dive served its purpose, my kit worked and we looked forward to our next real dive; we’d booked a week in the Maldives on a liveaboard…..

The critter that bit me...