Face down . . .
in less than two feet of water. Not the way your average 70 somethings spend their days, but that is how we spent most of this week (including our 26th anniversary) while exploring stops along the Blue Ridge Snorkel Trail. From our perch (a story for another day) at Mama Gertie’s Hideaway Campground, we had access to several great locations. While the visibility was not our usual tropical clear, it was good enough to allow us to find lots of new to us fish. The photo below is Mills River in North Carolina, but all of the spots we snorkeled looked pretty much like this. The folks in the NANFA Facebook group were especially helpful with providing info on locations and fish identification. It has been a great week.
River access point at Mills River Park, Mills River NC
Photographing these fish was especially challenging due to the shallow depths, fast current and the speed with which most of the little buggers move. As you can see from the photo above, the water was brownish yellow, so getting good color balance in the photos below was just about impossible. Still, it was amazing to find so many species in such a small space, and those were the ones we were able to photograph. Several went undocumented and, therefore, unidentified. Here are a few of my favorite finds (the Redline Darter was my absolute fav!):
For those who are interested the two locations represented above are: Mills River Park, Mills River, NC and Pigeon River, Canton Recreation Park, Canton NC. We checked out several other locations, but the water was too murky to be interesting.
