Black margate

The black margate belongs to the grunt family.  They can grow to 2 feet, but the fish featured here in the photos below were 1 to 1.5 feet long.  This season, we have generally only seen one or two on a dive, but today we located an aggregation of them, just drifting along, near the bottom in about 30 feet of water.  They are sort of shy, and tend to swim away when approached. It's always nice to see large numbers of sizable fish.