The Lake is a popular shore diving site just past the southern villas. It gets its name from the flat sandy area that around 70 - 80 feet deep nestled between the inner and outer reef. Both reefs are great to explore.

In addition to the usual marine life (parrotfish, trunkfish, damselfish, chromis, goatfish, etc.), we saw five first time captures here including a polka dotted hermit crab, porcelain redback crab, doubtful lizardfish and a sea pansy. We didn’t even have to get in the water for the fifth! We saw an Atlantic Tripton’s Trumpet in the tidal pools…which are also fun to explore.

Additionally, there were several octopus, a few different kinds of lobsters and crabs, eels and shrimp. Although we always recommend coming here to see it for yourself, if you can’t do that just yet, check out the video.

We want to encourage more shore diving, so this video provides some guidance where the site is, how to dive it and what you may see there. If you want to skip to or review specific topics, the chapter timings are below.

0:00 Intro
0:33 Site Background/Description
4:01 Site Logistics
6:27 Dive Profile
10:42 Sea Life
14:16 Night Diving

UNCOMMON SEA LIFE AND FIRST TIME CAPTURE IDENTIFICATION

We primarily use two sources to validate sea life we don’t recognize. The first is Florent's Guide To TheTropical Reefs which can be found at [ Ссылка ]. Its free and has lots of pictures, but is not comprehensive. The second is “The Reef Set: Reef Fish, Reef Creature and Reef Coral (3 Volumes)”. The box set can be found on Amazon; however with all our travels, we also purchased the eBooks ([ Ссылка ]) so we don’t have to carry an extra five pounds of paper in our luggage. :-) We also reference other sources from time to time as well.

Here are some links to more information/images about animals from this video.

Atlantic Triton’s Trumpet - [ Ссылка ]
Golden Coral Shrimp - [ Ссылка ]
Red Snapping Shrimp - [ Ссылка ]
Polkadotted Hermit Crab- [ Ссылка ]
Porcelain Redback Crab - [ Ссылка ]
Doubtful Lizardfish - [ Ссылка ]
Sea Pansy - [ Ссылка ]

Article “Association of butterflyfishes and stony coral tissue loss disease in the Florida Keys
” - [ Ссылка ]

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