Here is Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Sorry, not many pics worth posting here, but I have hundreds!
This is up the beach a few miles from the resorts, on the atlantic side of the island. the reef was mainly a porites reef with large (36") brain corals, huge gorgonians and seafans and TONS of urchins and a fair amount of millepora "fire coral" . I was lucky enough to know what these were and stayed away.
The reef was 50 yards down the beach from my hotel room and in knee deep water out to about 25-30 feet deep where a mini wall was. At low tide, there was only about 121" of water above the porites...
as for polyps, not much.
I saw several large patches of polyps but they were the "mat" type, no stolon, and BIG open mouths! all were cream/yellow greenish. nothing HOT.
It was really cool to be able to see all of that.
here is me heading out to snorkel. You can see the darkness of the reef out in front.
Hurricane Dean (8/07) sideswiped the island on the day we were supposed to leave... we drank A LOT that day!
