Fishies of the Yaeyamas

The snorkeling in Okinawa is amazing, as I have mentioned before. Above you see a snapshot of snorkeling in Kabira Bay, Ishigaki. This area is around a famous site called Juka Bijin. Juka Bijin is actually a painting theme of a beautiful woman under a tree found throughout Asia. In the case of Ishigaki, it is a particular underwater coral formation that looks like a tree. It has small, red, fruit-like clumps grow on it. The legend, according to my snorkeling guide, says that beautiful Ishigakan women swim out to the tree and pick the red fruit, because it looks like a heart. This guarantees them love.

See the Nemo hiding in the coral in the first photo below? The second photo is Staghorn coral, I believe.

These next 2 pictures are from Jeff's dive with manta rays. We went out on a boat to a place called Manta Point. For a few months every year, manta rays congregate at this place in order to get cleaned by little critters that live in the water there. I guess they nibble the bad bacteria off the mantas or something. They saw half a dozen mantas, check out the first picture to get an idea. I just snorkeled around up top cuz I can't dive, so I didn't see any mantas. But I saw some fishies!

Nemo, Nemo, everywhere. Isn't it funny how Hollywood helps intercultural communication? Nemo is a wonderful example. Since the film "Finding Nemo" came out, everyone in the entire world refers to Clown Fish as "Nemo". We went out at Shiraho to see the famous blue coral on this fisherman's boat. He took us to 3 different snorkeling spots. Before we got in the water at one of them he told us, "there are lots of Nemos over there, look for them!" Now, if he had said the name of the fish in Japanese we never would have known what he was talking about and probably would have smiled politely and ignored him. But instead we put hand gestures and "Nemo" together and went to find the little buggers.

The waters of the Yaeyamas are filled with this tiny bright blue fish. They are everywhere, and so pretty. We saw clouds of the blue babies with a mom or dad guarding them. If you held your hands out like in the photo below, they would come swim around them and occasionally come in for a nibble, hoping that you were food.