Stripped To The Bone

In 2012, Liz Cunningham witnessed a dramatic coral bleaching event in the Turks and Caicos Islands in less than a period of a week. That month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documented record-breaking temperature highs for the North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea. This excerpt from Cunningham’s award-winning book, Ocean Country, describes what she saw.

- Liz Cunningham

THE BOAT CHUGGED out into the sleek waters of Grace Bay to a site called Boneyard. Oh, I loved that place! I sat on the upper deck of the boat and remembered the last time we were there, just the week before. It was a series of deep sand channels, densely populated with finger and staghorn coral. The finger coral was shaped like protruding stubby thumbs and the staghorn coral, like the large antlers of a deer – hence its name, Boneyard.

Boneyard teemed with life. Each cluster of coral colonies ranged from 20 to 100 “thumbs” and “staghorns”, densely packed together. It was hard sometimes to even see the coral mounds, because the schools of hundreds of yellow grunts were so thick, they only parted as you came very close to them. And those schools were punctuated by hundreds of parrotfish and damselfish and hamlets and grouper and trumpetfish. Not to mention a turtle or a herd of spotted rays or a shark swimming through.

As we motored out, I remember thinking that these waters were the most deeply alive place I had ever experienced.

The boat slowed. One of the dive masters used a long pole to moor on to the buoy. We geared up.

“OK kiddo, get in the water,” the divemaster said, as he checked my gear. I put the heel of my hand to my mask to keep it in place, looked at the horizon and took one long step off the edge of the back of the boat, and into that world I so deeply cherished.

I exhaled and sank softly into the water. I closed my eyes for a second or two, just to feel the water river along my body.