We like diving in our mar...

Dearest Schmeet, so sorry for 'going dark' as Peter says, we have been busy with the fishes in Honduras - no, looking at them not eating them you naughty cat!

I would like to do a little visualization with you, imagine, if you will, a fully grown Evans male. He walks along level ground unencumbered. He will manage to perform this exercise well enough but may look a little ungainly, if not clumsy. Now dress this Evans in scuba gear - fins, 14lbs on a weight belt, huge walloping tank on the back and drop him in the water to a depth where he should be able to control his position in the water using only the volume of air in his lungs, where he should not be flapping his arms around and should in fact glide or hang motionless in the water. I'll leave it to you to picture the passage of this Evans through the water. Once you've done that, turn out the lights and imagine him diving at night..! Strewth, now imagine the poor person who has to be this Evans' 'buddy'. Who as it happens, looks a little like a seal herself, a seal on dry land that is...

No really, we were actually rather good in the water, and only destroyed a few pieces of irreplacable coral reef whilst clattering round under the waves. We can't have been too bad anyway, because, dear schmeeta, believe it or not (probably not, seeing as at times over the last year, you yourself have made me feel guilty with your levels of 'activity' compared to my sloth), but we are now Advanced at a sport. Well, maybe not a competitive sport but a physical activity anyway.

We have been in the beautiful Bay Islands, off the Caribbean coast of Honduras and have been diving our wetsuits off. We went there to do our Open Water course - 4 dives and a bit of an exam about buoyancy, decompression sickness and neoprene - and came away, 14 dives later, with our Advanced Open Water qualification, and an addiction that might not be so easy to sate back in the UK. Every dive was splendid but the highlights include diving at night, diving deep (90ft), diving a wreck, seeing a shark, southern stingrays and eagle rays, and finally, diving all on our own with no divemaster, no boat, no problem! The coral reefs around the Bay Islands are a magical place full of life and many many busy fishes. The fish we have seen can be grouped into several broad categories:

Fish named after other animals, i.e. cowfish (triangle shaped with horns), squirrelfish (big eyes, bushy tail), toadfish (they croak), parrotfish (scoff the coral like nobody's business with their great big beaks), hogfish, frogfish (look like a Simpsons frog), goatfish (they have a beard!) and porcupinefish (pretty eyes and yes, lots of spines).

Fish named after stationery, bits of other animals and random objects i.e filefish (an 'odd shaped swimmer'), needlefish, trunkfish (has no discernible trunk and doesn't look remotely like a trunk), triggerfish, trumpetfish.

Fish named after occupations i.e. nurse shark, sergeant major, surgeonfish, doctorfish,

Fish named after people i.e. bar jack

As you can see, many fish derive their names from other animals. What I want to know is why are there so few other animals named after fish? Por ejemplo, you can have a cat fish but not a fish cat, goatfishes but not fishgoats, you get the idea. There is however a fisheagle, but no eagle-fish, GO FIGURE!!!!!!!!