El Andalous - Fish

Arabian Picasso Fish

One of my main aims in coming over here was to swim every day and I’ve kept to it fairly religiously. I’ve had the occasional day “on” (the opposite to a day off) if there’s stuff that I’ve needed to get done (eg, Swiss admin or I want to speed up a bit on my writing projects), but otherwise I’m at the beach from around 2.30pm to 5.30pm. An hour of that is taken up with swimming. The rest of the time I read.

Ever since the water’s got warmer, I swim quite a lot with my head in the water gazing around for fish (I wear goggles, so I just hold my breath; not sure how good that is for my health!). I take my digital underwater camera with me each day to take photographs. It makes the swim more interesting, but I suspect in the winter I will just swim, and faster, to keep warm.

Taking my camera helps me to focus more on what I’m seeing. It gets quite easy to stick your head in the water and just think “oh yes, seen that fish before” and not look that carefully. I’ve invented the challenge for myself of taking the best picture possible of every fish that I see and to collect photos of as many different species as I can.

It’s great as I now look a lot more carefully as I go. There are so many tiny fish just hiding in among the coral. If I take photographs, I also get a better look at the fish, and at my leisure, afterwards (assuming the fish didn't swim away before I pressed the shutter).

And then there are fish that hide on the ground that I’m sure I must have missed before. For example, I saw a sea cucumber today. It just looked like a cucumber-shaped lump of rock covered with sand, but as I swam past I thought I could spot an eye peeking out at me. I swam round it for a while and then part of its body moved and I was suddenly sure it was a living thing.

The fish are amazing; many are beautiful, some are weird, others are just so well camouflaged that I find it hard to know whether I’m looking at a rock or a fish. I think I saw a bearded scorpionfish the other day. I would never have seen it had I not spotted it settling onto the coral. It immediately turned itself into the colour of the coral and even though I knew it was there, I couldn’t make it out at all. One of the fish kept on trying to feed off it and it suddenly changed its colour to match the dead grey coral beside it. Immediately, within a second, it had altered itself. I have a photograph, but it’s a bit pointless because it just looks like a random piece of coral, even when I zoom in.

I’m more aware now of what I have seen before and what’s new, so I get a sense of excitement each time I see something I hadn’t spotted before (and sometimes a sense of frustration if I can’t get a photo in time).

But, me being me, I can’t do this without some kind of end plan in mind. I’ve almost finished 25 New Year’s Resolutions – For Cats! (so look out for it on amazon in October!) and my next book in that series will be For Fish!  Apparently, collecting fish is the second-most popular hobby in the world. I found that quite astonishing. I guess stamp collecting is the number one? Anyway, by looking more carefully at the fish, I’m also getting more ideas for the book, so that’s further justification for my activities.

I’m additionally thinking that maybe I will write a snorkeling guide to Sahl Hasheesh showing all (well, many of) the fish that can definitely be seen if you go snorkeling within this small-defined area. I can expand it to Hurghada at a later date. I could then use my best photos as illustrations.

All in all, at the end of the day when I come off the beach, I always feel chilled and happy with life and that’s probably worth as much as anything!