Well I Never - A Most Pecular Dive Spot

We anchored in a shallow bay separated by a long black sand beach from a sporadic row of restaurants and hotels. I look down and see sun-dappled ripples of sand through the clear water and off our bow a dark oasis of turtle grass. I’m thinking this is a most peculiar spot for a dive site but the intriguing name has me interested and also wondering how it came to be called, Well I Never.


I am told that serendipity, with a little push from high oil prices, played a role in the discovery of this peculiar dive location. Kay Wilson, owner of Indigo Dive St. Vincent, was looking for a dive site closer to her shop and, as luck would have it, stumbled upon this gem.

Kay had a Dentist appointment this day so Andrew was our dive guide and I truly felt sorry for him. There are four divers, three of us photographers, so his dive plan was totally blown as soon as we back rolled into the water. We scattered like wild cats to the patch of turtle grass looking for hidden gems. Mary and I took off in one direction and Bob and his daughter in another. Andrew, resigned to defeat, set about finding goodies in the grass.

As we approach the turtle grass, we see it is populated with an abundance of white spiny balls called West India sea eggs. Covered in white spines over a black body they look lifeless but if you get real close you can see movement. Gently touch the spines and it will react and you cannot help but wonder how something so slow gets anywhere, but they do.

Razorfish hover over the grass, some are darting around and some half buried in the sand. I paused a few moments to observe them busily swimming about on some errand of nature that is a mystery to me.

Andrew spotted a shortfin pipefish swimming through the grass. With a body like a very small snake, they rarely grow larger than 6 inches; they are normally hard to spot but this one sticks out in the grass. Unafraid but wary, it reluctantly allows us to take its picture.

Fanning out across the grass we see groups of beautiful leech headshield slugs, their bodies painted in bright orange, blue, and black stripes. These cannibals are very small, generally between ½ to ¾ inch, and it took considerable effort to find one that was not buried in the grass.

Mary spotted a seahorse swimming across the sand. Did you know that a seahorse is really a pipefish? What gives it the appearance of a horse is that the head is at a right angle to its body while the shortfin pipefish head is flat with a long slender snout. The seahorse is a very poor swimmer and I wanted to get a video so you could see how they move about in the water, using a very small dorsal fin for locomotion, basically they go with the flow and latch on to whatever they can with their prehensile tail when they want to stop.

Eighty-seven minutes into the dive our stomachs were telling us it was time to eat so we reluctantly ended the dive. What made this most peculiar spot a memorable dive for us? I think it was a combination of the abundance of little critters, unhurried pace so we were able to spend considerable time just observing and most of all it was fun!