Where did you get the "seals" bit? Or are you confusing this word with "prey"?

Adam

I did a google on barracuda attacks.  They are extremely rare and there is no mention
of any difference between divers and swimmers. In some cases the barracuda was acting
in self defense against a spear fisherman, in some it competes for a fish with the
human, and in others there is no known reason. A common theory is that shiny objects
are mistaken by the barracuda for silvery fish it preys on.

Adam

I've shot aggressive ones before (with a speargun)

Every once in a while I get one that's too aggressive for my taste.  It is
my policy to give such fish a headache.

--

Hmmm, I was going to suggest a spear gun . . . but guess not.  8^)

You might as well ignore them.  If they decide to strike, there isn't a
damned thing you can do about it, not to mention that for every one you see,
there's proabably a half dozen that you didn't see, that saw you.

Really, just ignore them.  They're not nearly as dangerous as the armed
criminals you're already ignoring.  In fact, even in Canada, the odds of
being the victim of a violent crime are many times the odds of being
attacked by a barracuda.

Lee

Saw it on night dives in Thailand.

It worked.

The barracuda would swim alongside us, remaining at the edge of the
lamps' beams until a fish was lit long enough.

Then snap! all you saw were some bits of fish and a barracuda tail.

With a nice crunching sound.

Cheers,

Froggy

Yep that was probably the one that attacked Paul.

I'd forgotten about that. The first time I went snorkelling in Cancun
(before I took up diving) I was cruising around a large coral head at
15' or so and came across a school of smallish but nasty looking fish.
I headed for the surface. Later I asked one of the fellers operating
the site (it was a commercial platform run by Aquaworld but long since
gone) if there were barracuda in these waters. He said definitely,
lots of them. I asked if they were dangerous. He said not at all,
unles one is wearing shiny jewellery and pointed to my neckchain and
silver pendant dangling at my throat.

I now religiously remove my rings and the chain before any dive.

JF

LOL.  I must have "missed" that part of the article.

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote a few years back that describes a
barracuda encounter (I tried to convert it to plain text; my apologies if it
didn't convert):

Scuba diving is next on the list, so daybreak finds me visiting a sunken
wreck about a mile offshore.    Royal, an airline pilot from South Carolina,
is my scuba partner for the day.  He's been diving Anguilla's many
shipwrecks for fifteen years and offers to be an informal guide.    Upon
submerging, we dive seventy feet straight down to the ruins    Royal reaches
a sunken freighter long before me, and it's just as well: from a porthole
amidships emerges a barracuda almost as big as me!     Statues fidget more
than Royal does as the barracuda slowly circles him, eyeballing him with a
half-bored, half-amused expression     I notice the dive master's eyes
laughing behind her mask; she and the quite tame barracuda are old friends.
After the barracuda re-enters the hulk, I tour the reef into a world out of
National Geographic.    Polka dotted rays, colorful tiny cleaner shrimp,
more tropical fish than Sea World, and they're all so big!    Here are
life-sized versions of animals I've studied in countless aquariums, except
this time we're the curiosities being observed.    All too soon, the dive is
finished and we're headed back to shore.    Royal wants to call home and see
if his insurance covers assault by barracuda.

And I didn't mean to be argumentative. In fact your reference to vomit and
the attraction to the fish reminded me of my early diving days when we would
dive West Palm, drink and drive our way down to the Keys that night, and
then take Crawford's boat out for a few dives in the morning. On a couple
occasions I threw up underwater and the resulting mad dash by the
Yellowtails to gobble it up would get me bit a time or two.

I don't discount this could have happened with the 'cuda, though I would
expect the bite to have been around the head rather than the foot were this
the case.