I've done it. It's been decided. My spirit animal of the water is the spotted eagle ray. It's taken me the whole tripe, but I've come to this conclusion after a period of great reflection and pondering. That period of reflection being slight sleep depravation and the prospect of cold water enveloping me.
To explain, I woke up this morning to the sound of rain, which was incredibly relaxing, and helped me to have the best sleep I've probably had the best sleep I've had all trip, but also induced an immediate sense of dread as soon as I remembered my towel sitting out on the banister, no doubt getting delightfully soggy. However, I had committed to going on this morning snorkel, so I shuffled out the door with Sean, Russ, and Zach, and we got ready to face the morning waters. Hailey, Nora, and Katie also were in the bathrooms, getting ready with a certain sense of distaste for the oncoming weather. However, a cup of tea usually seems to help, and soon we were off with Edd to go investigate the harbor. We went out on the dock to get into the water, and as soon as we reached the bottom of the jetty, Edd proudly pronounced that he would be taking the penguins way out, and jumped straight up and down into the water with a strangled squawk. Russ went right after as a Spanish mackerel and seemed to freeze in midair before full on slamming into the waves. With all my gear on, I went to the jump off point, and made a snap choice: I would be, embody, personify, the grace and majesty of an eagle ray we had seen flapping his wings with all his might to fly out of the ocean. I lept off the dock, my elbows at my stomach, flapping my hands as fast as I could , and face-first into the water. That hurt a little more than my pride. But it was all worth it. I had become the eagle ray, and earned a solid ten out of ten from the peanut gallery. After that, our dive was fairly uneventful, seeing a couple peeved looking grouper, the same hawksbill Edd almost sat on from the day before, and a cowtail ray the size of a oriental throw rug. We came back to the harbor with almost no incident, (Nora managed to slip down the stairs but gracefully cushioned the landing with her butt, mostly unharmed.) and the rest of the day was to be dedicated to the presentations of our final projects. We had mostly finished all of the presentation the day before, and Kenen's data was impressive enough that I was going to need a textbook to fully understand it, so I figured we were doing all right. We rehearsed a couple times, and then sat around waiting for our last group snorkel of the trip. We went out to North Beach, where we hadn't ever snorkeled before, and quickly pairing up, slipped into the water. I was with Zach, and we quickly realized that there was two groups that had developed in very different spots in the lagoon, and we were stuck smack dab in the middle, fighting a current to get to either one. With the rain and the storm we didn't see much, a couple anemone fish, and apparently an octopus spotted by Kenen. While swimming to catch up to one of the groups, I looked over to the left, and saw a huge green sea turtle pushing off into the distance. I followed it, not totally sure I was seeing correctly. From the size, I would have said it was a leatherback, but when it lifted its face out of the water, it was most definitely a green. It took off before I even thought, and nobody else near me had seen it! Eventually I met up with the other group that we had been trying to catch up with, and they confirmed that they had seen the huge green gliding above the reef, and I wasn't in fact crazy. We had a good time swimming in the rain, finding little gaps in the reef to stand up and mess around, and then swam back for lunch. Even without any huge sightings, I had a really good time, listening to Zach laugh and talk with everybody, pulling on Brynn's fins to try to get a rise out of her. It was just a nice indication of how far we've come as a group that we didn't even really have to see anything to have a good time. After lunch, Hailey taught me and Katie how to play Hearts, we got our absolute asses handed to us, and then we got ready for our presentations. I'm pleased to say that ours went off with out a hitch. Its funny, I feel like working with Kenen and Jeni has taught me what an A effort feels like for any assignment, which honestly is a skill I've been looking for for quite some time. I'm grateful that they let me into the group, and even more so that they gave me time to try to understand and assimilate to their work style. Kenen and Jeni are willing to work as hard as they have to for a professional level submission for their assignments, and I hope I don't forget that. After our presentations, we went out and watched the "sunset", which was actually just the clouds moving across the ocean, but the storm was amazing. The rain hung in the air off the horizon, and closer to us, the giant fluffy grey clouds pushed forward with surprising speed. We talked about the same stuff as always, what we had seen that day, books we had read while growing up, spotting the big blacktip that has passed by the last couple of days. After the last of the pink had disappeared from the grey on the sides of the sky, we came back to Pats kitchen where he had prepared the most wonderful steak and potatoes I've tasted in quite some time. I do love that man. Tonight is our last night on the island, but there will be more about that tomorrow.
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Those old Cuke boys are at it again. Our three days of working on final projects has officially begun. Kennan, Jeni, and I have begun our work on Sea Cucumbers, attempting to understand what drives these multicolored mush balls to appear everywhere, and yet apparently do nothing at all. But that's getting ahead of the program.
To start, everybody in the class seemed to be relishing the fact that we were done with formal lectures, labs, and dive times, and almost everyone took an extra hour to sleep in. It also helped that there was no early morning dive, as most people were going on scuba dives later in the day. I woke up, feeling well rested for the first time in a while, and laid in bed for a while, waiting for the last second before I had to get up for breakfast. Finally, I rolled myself out, and headed over to the kitchen. There seemed to be a pretty relaxed air as everyone was either excited about their deeper dives, or was still reveling in the close encounter of the shark kind from yesterday. I was mostly focused on the book that I had been reading "In a Sunburned Country", a travel journal of Bill Bryson as he traversed through the entire Australian landscape. I liked reading about all of the deadly things that could happen in the country, and the human cultural side as well. I made the decision that if at all possible, mainland Australia would have to be a return trip, because one taste of the far off continent was just not enough. After breakfast, us Cuke boys gathered up to set the parameters for our experiment. We were looking at 4 different kinds of sea cucumbers, professionally named: Black, Spiky, Poppy, and Burnt Sausage. They don't have common names that we can find in the book, and I empathized much more with Charles Darwin naming all his variations of finch after bequeathing titles to just 4 of our cucumber friends. Trying to determine what habitat preference these sea cucumbers might have, we decided to go out, counting as many as we could of each kind, and noting what kind of substance their mouth was on, and what the general makeup of the land around them seemed to be. Sea Cucumbers are supposedly detritivores, but a lot of the literature on them seemed to be fairly contradictory, so we decided to go out for ourselves and see what we could see. We split up our slates into the necessary categories to house all our data, and then broke off to wait until high tide. Right after breakfast, Nora and I walked around the shoreline, just looking at the edge of the beach to see what had happened over the last night. Nora has a gift for spotting jellyfish, and she pointed out several to me that had washed ashore. Most of them were harmless, but she warily called out one tiny Man of War jelly that was still in the process of drying, it's blue tentacles wilting around the bottom. As we wound around the island and back towards the dock, we saw the first scuba group heading out, and right below them on the dock, the shadow of a spotted eagle ray. It seemed to have been blown in close to shore, and was struggling against the formidable current to get back out into deeper waters. Nora and I followed it on the beach, back over our footsteps as it flapped its wings, trying to get enough power to push forward. As we sat there, a whole group of roseate terns that have just barely showed up on the island pulled up landed one by one next to us, watching the spectacle of the ray as well. They appeared to be waiting to see if the ray would get tired and be beached, one of the terns flying over the ray every once in a while, then returning disappointedly to the group, as if to say "No no, the food'll be another 5 minutes". They were going to be waiting longer than that, though, as the eagle ray pushed over the row of rocks just off shore, and then caught a current bringing him into water just deep enough that he could get full range of motion. The tips of his wings kept rising out of the water, and he curled them back every once in a while, slightly decreasing the pull of the current on him while taking a break. Slowly but surely, he made his way out into deeper water, and I was ready to go back in, satisfied with my happy ending. Nora was determined to stick around, though, as she had never seen a ray jump out of the water and was positive that this ray would set the record straight. We waited, and I shifted my feet to keep warm. There was a decent wind blowing, and I was ready to get back to the gustless treeline. After a few minutes, though, the ray disappeared, and then threw itself up in the air with a sort of tired gusto, like runners holding up their hands after a marathon directly before vomiting off to the side. It flopped back into the water and then swam off, tips moving away, and then disappearing into the deep. We headed back to camp, content with the now complete saga of the eagle ray that almost wasn't. I read for a little while, sitting and watching the rails (tiny birds, not poles of metal) peck around in the street. Eventually though, I got bored, and went and asked Nora, Jenna, and Katie if they'd like to play cards. Hailey and Sean joined in just in time to see me get thoroughly trounced at scum by Katie and Nora. Katie has a strategic side that emerges when we play cards that always seems to be three moves ahead. I think my fire from the hip style of playing might be a little exasperating to her, but then again, what she seems to sigh almost as a reflex when I do things, so that might just be par for the course. We played for a little while, then after lunch, we all split to either go on the second scuba dive, or continue the long wait for low tide. I decided to split off for Shark Bay and read my book for a while, and Hailey came along with me. Walking over to the beach, we noticed that they had swept the path, making it much easier, and less pungent, and soon we were emerging out onto the beautiful sunny North Beach. We were getting to low tide, the wind had dropped, and it was a beautiful day. Hailey and I both plopped down our towels and read, stopping intermittently to laugh at the seagulls bizarre, neck-bending squawking, or bicker about when the seasons officially change. (Equinoxes be damned, I'm still sure summer starts in May.) Eventually, I gathered up my stuff and crossed back over to camp to begin the great cucumber count. Kennan was still on his scuba dive, so Jeni and I gathered up our transect line, slates, and quadrats, and headed out to research beach to get started. We set the line, and slowly started to count cucumbers. It quickly became evident that the overwhelming majority of them were the black cucumbers, which seemed to accumulate sand except for in distinct little circles on their back, and had no reaction at all when you picked them up. The only way to tell what they were eating was to look for the puckered hole on the bottom that serves the purpose of a mouth. Anuses and mouths are about the only distinguishing factors that sea cucumbers have, and even that can get kind of switched around, but we did our best. I also noticed, as we worked our way down the beach, that the spiky's seemed to always have their rear end parked within the base of overhanging rocks and coral, and contracted their whole bodies whenever I tried to expect for a mouth. Turns out, I stopped having to look for a mouth at all, because I realized that their mouths had little branches coming off the side, giving a passable impression for a face. Fine by me. The less cukes I bother the better. They may be mostly brainless and poop our their face sometimes, but everybody deserves a little space. Jenni and I moved further down the beach, and eventually Kennan showed up. We kept counting, with the ratios mostly unchanging. Countless blacks, with the occasional "Look! A sausage!" or "Theres a poppy, under the coral!". What really perplexed us was that the spiky's looked almost nothing like the ones in the books, and they didn't behave like the regular black ones either. One fairly noticeable way to determine this was when Kennan picked the spiky ones up, after they had determined to contract down to their smallest size, they promptly spit their intestines all over him. If that isn't a clear indication of how they felt about the whole interaction, I don't know what is. Their intestines are white and tubular, and according to Kennan, very sticky. Its actually a fairly common response in most sea cucumbers, but none of the other ones in the lagoon seemed to do it except for the spiky ones, which lead Kennan to dub the them the stringy cucumbers. This was further confirmed by the fact that we found a more spiking cucumber that looked like the one we originally found in the book, and realized that they were, in fact, two distinct species. Right around the second expulsion of intestines, though, I looked over at the sun and realized we were getting pretty close to dark. We gathered up our gear, and quickly made it back to the library, rinsed off our gear, and Jeni and Kennan graciously let me split off for my recurring appointment with the sunset. It was spectacular. Low tide has been shifting later and later, and so as I sat on the dock, looking out across the lagoon, there were great clear stretches of water where the waves were completely stopped by the coral. The colors changed every five minutes, with great stretches of gold, purple, pink and orange shifting backwards across the sky and over the clouds. The larger blacktip that has made an appearance over the last couple days swam under the dock, and most of the class slowly trickled in. There was discussion in the background of the scuba dives of the day, apparently they saw a Manta and some lobsters the size of my arm, and varied exclamations of appreciation for just how beautiful this island was. Off to the side, blue footed boobies to their place on top of the ship wreck, and baby black tips swam by, tips poking out the water. The sunset continued for the better part of an hour, people leaving little by little, until it was just deep, crimson reds poking tendrils right over the horizon, but giving a glow all across the sides of where the sun set. A few of us walked back and forth across the dock, laughing and taking pictures of each other, just appreciating how the views around us could continually get better and better, even after the sun was gone, and the colors behind it raced to catch up. Today, for the first day since our the morning after we got here, I got up to go on the early morning scuba. I woke up several times during the night, but still felt relatively well rested when I woke up, still no alarm or sign of stirring from any of my roommates. I got out of bed, considered getting ready, and then Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" started blaring behind me at full volume. Now, I'm not totally sure, but I think it might be a law world wide that you have to stop what you're doing and bust a move whenever that song comes on, and so, there beside me bunk, in t shirt and underwear, I did my best to honor shakira by butt wagging to my best ability. After that, I felt as though I had earned a rest, and went back to
... Okay, listen, I had this whole thing about taking the test today, and how I saw a hawksbill, loggerhead, and green sea turtle today, but I'll just say that I lived today to what I think was the fullest, and so I am way too tired to write it all out tonight. Sorry, my adoring fans, and future me. I hope you still remember today. It was a good one, the animals were beautiful, the stars shone bright in the milky way, and that's what matters. No early morning swim this morning, it was time to count some fish. I woke up to Russ's alarm, The Final Countdown, feeling a surge of energy that only the one hit wonder Europe can bestow. We hit breakfast quick, and then suited up and headed off to Attenborough point, right next to Shark Bay. Todays experiment was the Fish Lab, and once again, it sounded deceptively easy. All we had to do was get out into the patch reefs, measure a thirty meter transect line (just perpendicular to the beach) and swim slowly along, filming the fish in front of us with the Go Pro. Jenna and I were paired together for the fish lab, and luckily for us, she had some experience with the camera, because I was more than lacking in experience with fish cinematography.
For the first time in our experiments, we were trying to gather data at high tide, which proved tricky from the start. Jenna and I placed our bucket o'stuff on the beach near a clear spot, and then had to climb over the rock outcropping upon Mr. Attenborough pontificates the destiny of the coral reefs. Right now, the only thing I was pontificating was what it would feel like if I at crap before even getting in the water. A couple wobbly steps later, we were sitting on the edge of the rocks, being hit every couple of seconds with a light wave coming over the top. We put on our flippers, masks, and Trisha came over to make sure we knew what we were doing. Right before she got to us, I was unwinding the measuring line, and the end snapped right off. I looked up and smiled at Jenna. "I broke it." Jenna looked at me with a surprising modicum of patience, although to be fair, she was probably still thinking about just not falling off the rocks, and didn't really have too much time to be disappointed in my lack of deftness with measuring tape. "We'll just have to tie it" she said, "Just make sure to tie it tight, it'll last for now". We turned back to Trisha, and she told us that some guitar sharks had been spotted right up the shore, but they probably would be a problem. Guitar sharks or guitar fish, are neither rays, nor fish, nor can you strum them to impress college girls at a party with your rendition of "Hallelujah", but are in fact in the family of rays, and kind of look like you replaced the front half of a shark with a ray. In any case, Jenna clearly did not like the sound of that, as she looked up at Trisha and asked her just how many of theses sharks were in the water. Right at that point, I jumped in and saw a 4 foot guitar shark 10 feet in front us, moving to the right. I turned back to Jenna. "All clear!" I lied, "The must have left off!" I knew that the shark was taking off, and it probably wouldn't help anyone to know that they had recently touched the sand in front of us. We took off swimming, found our spot along the patch reef, and Trisha explained really clearly how we would need to swim out, and to make sure not to lay our line over too many of the coral, to avoid as much damage as possible. I swam our line out and came back, because Janna was going to be the first one to film, to give me a chance to observe and hopefully learn something. She swam out and finished, then started winding up the line. As she was about halfway back, Trisha swam by, and called us both. I thought she was pointing to the transect line, so I started to bring it over, but then realized that she must have spotted something in the reef. Janna swam over and looked excited (I mean, its kind of hard to tell from the backside of someones head, back and butt) and then returned to winding up the transect line. I swam past Trisha, and then did a kind of about face so I could see the coral she was talking about. I looked where her finger was pointing, and saw a black and white striped eel, tucked into the base of the coral. Trisha told me where to look for its head, and sure enough, when I dove a little closer, there it poked out, clearly confused what it had to done to receive so much unwanted attention. The moray eels are definitively the oceans butter faces, with beautiful patterns on their body, and the face of a fairy tale crone that decided heroin would be a welcome addition to trapping fair maidens in the forest. But still, watching them swim is a work of art. The tide pushed us away from the outcropping with the eel, and I figured I should probably catch up to Jenna. I got her just as she finished reeling up, and we collected the measuring tape from the bottom, and weights in hand, swam to the next spot for our transect line. I was having a lot more difficulty swimming than normal, and then I realized that it was probably because I had two 5 pound weights hugged to my chest. We kept swimming, my legs starting to get tired for the first time, and then came to a reasonable sized patch reef where we layed our second transect. My turn to film. I swam out, placed the end of the line, and then came back. Janna showed me how to operate the camera, and how to hold it to try and keep the footage as stable as possible, and I was off. Trish said we should try to swim to the beat of "Another One Bites the Dust" and I started humming it in my head. I swam out, almost diagonally, but the current pushed back into a straight line, reached the end of the transect line, and prayed I had gotten usable footage. Janna and I swam back to shore, and came onto the rocks right next to Hailey and Katie. I looked up and noticed the Sea Eagle that had followed us out to shore on the way to start the experiment. Its under feathers were a stark white, with two big black blotches near the back of its wings. It was so far above on the currents of air, that it barely flapped its wings. "You're doing great, sweetie!" called our Hailey to the eagle, "Very majestic!" I laughed, wondering what the eagle was focused on at that moment, but picturing him dressed in a tiny soccer jersey with a supportive mom (Hailey) in the background. We grabbed our gear and walked back to the lab, where we dropped off our equipment with a freshwater rinse, and then did the same to our selves at the outdoor showers. There was still sand on my feet though, and I as I walked into the patio where we hang our wetsuits, the research station worker that cleans the area gave me one glance, and then turned her hose to spray my entire bottom half, without a word. Surprised, I stopped moving, and made eye contact. I saw that this was clearly not her first rodeo, as she gave me a small curtesy smile, and then back down to chase the sand falling off me out the entryway behind me. I get the feeling she fights a Sisyphean battle to keep that place clean. After we dried off, we were back in the lab and analyzing the footage we got and counting fish. I was surprised with how many fish there actually were, hiding in the crevices of the rocks, only appearing for a split second as I looked frame by frame at the video. I'm proud to say that my video skills were passing, although I probably shouldn't expect a call from National Geographic anytime soon. There were mostly damselfish, a lot of sand perch, and aimless little puffer fish right at the beginning. As soon as we were finished counting, I started working on the introduction to the paper, the first time that I had actually worked on one of the writing sections of the paper outside of a little analysis of results to interpret the graph. I was a little rusty, but looked at the papers from the previous labs and tried to model it after Brynn and Katies. After an a couple hours, the tide dropped and we headed out to the same beach. Again, I was struck by how big of a difference low and high tide make, as the rocks that had waves crashing over them just hours before were now only dripping, the water down to knee level almost everywhere in the lagoon. Janna and I walked off to roughly where we had taken our video before, set our transect, and then Jenna took the first video. As she did, I wandered off to the side, and tried to step lightly, looking for anything fun. All of the sudden, there was a quick flick of tail, and an epaulette sat right in front of me, straight as an arrow, and I noticed how well its camouflage really was. From a distance, it looks exactly like the strings of algae that hang off the rocks and corals edge. I called Janna over, but with another flick of its tail, it was gone. As we walked over to place our second transect though, another one appeared right in front of us. How could we not be getting any of this on camera! It swam languidly, knowing we were coming, and moved up current and out of reach. The epaulettes are quickly becoming my favorite shark. Their coloration is beautiful, they have proto-limbs, and something about the way they swim just makes me want to watch them for hours. We took the second video (me filming, and decidedly more bumpy than the first), and then headed back to analyze more video. I liked writing the introduction, but was also glad when I suck over and got to watch Jenna graph all of the fish seen per second as an average across the class. Excel has gotten ahold of me, and there's just something about watching those numbers do what they should that makes me very happy. That might be the most lasting effect of Dr. Taylors engineering processes course my freshman year, along with a slight PTSD every time I hear the world enthalpy. After we finished up our lab, I headed out to watch the sunset as is the daily ritual. I was excited as I walked over, because the sky was clear for the first time in three days, and I could already see some of the pinks and oranges that promised something beautiful. As soon as I rounded the corner to the jetty though, I could see something big, red, and really noisy. No, not the Kool-Aid man. The Scuber boat. Uber has recently come up with a ride share adventure where for the low price of three grand, you can ride in a submarine around the great barrier reef. While great as an idea, the boat they use to house the submarine is big, obnoxious, and scares all the fish, so I don't know what exactly they plan on seeing in their submarine besides a bunch of coral and sand. Usually the boat is forced to park out on the outer reef, but for some reason today they were able to come park at the jetty and scared away almost all of the usual evening crowd. No eagle rays, one lonely turtle, and when the blacktip swam by, I was afraid he was going to get pulled into the workings of the boat. With the boat parked right on the dock, about half the vista was blocked out, and the hum of the engine was a constant in the background, but most of us still hung out and waited for the sun to set. They were parked there even after dark, lighting up the whole bay with giant white lights that are supposed to be a big no-go on the island since it can mess with the turtles and the shearwaters learning to fly. I'm grateful for this island because its teaching me the value of natural rhythm. And so it's jarring to see it disrupted. I hope the boat is gone tomorrow. I slept, mercifully, for eight hours last night. Thats a pretty large accomplishment for me as is, being a procrastinator extraordinare, along with a college student, but the jet lag from losing a whole day when I crossed over has taken me almost a week to get over. The timing of that was slightly unfortunate, as when I woke up and looked over at my phone, I realized that all of the guys in my room were still there, and that we had missed the morning dive. Even still, I had to get up to work on my work for my other classes, so I gathered my backpack and shuffled off to the teaching lab, land of free and reliable WiFi. I ran into Edd on my way over, and realized that apparently the sleeping in had stretched further than just our room. No one had gotten up for the morning snorkel, and without a buddy, Edd had just canceled the morning dive. I felt bad, especially since I had missed the morning before. I'll try to make more of them from here on out. We got talking about jellyfish, and how ocean acidification has allowed them to more readily penetrate the shells of crustaceans, allowing them to have a wider and wider spread over the ocean. In Sydney already the box jellyfish pose a serious threat to anybody spread out at the golden beaches. One thing that I have learned about climate change is that it doesn't kill every species, like some people suppose. But it does weaken SOME species, and the ones that remain unaffected or benefit, quickly start to overrun whatever ecosystem the inhabit. Life in general has a way of acting against its best interests when it fails to show foresight.
I made my way over to the teaching lab, and after some quick work and then breakfast, we all convened for our lecture of the day. Trisha taught, covering the wide range of "Reef Fishes". One of the first things that we learned is that reef fish are essentially a misnomer. Fish and coral have cohabited for roughly 400 million years, but they still maintain the ability to exist independently. They just make each others lives a lot easier. All life came from the ocean, so it makes a lot of sense that fish species have been developing for quite some time. Some of the oldest, the coelacanth and its relatives, are mostly gone now, leaving behind much more diverse descendants that have partitioned practically every nice available in the vast blue ocean. One of the more interesting families that has come about are the Wrasses, which can range in size from the cleaner wrasse, at the length of your pinky, to the giant 300 pound hump headed wrasse. The tiny cleaning wrasse are prevalent in the Great Barrier Reef, and will actually set up cleaning stations around the reef, like little roadside attractions, and all of the animals nearby will stop and come to get cleaned. This ranges from fish to moray eels, turtles, and even sharks. Predator and prey alike have an understanding that the cleaning station is a peaceful zone. The cleaning wrasse will even climb inside the mouth of the predators give a good dental checkup, and the predators will simply sit there, patiently waiting reminding themselves that fish are friends, not food. However, not every participant in the cleaning station will play by the rules. Some of the predators with chomp down on the occasional cleaners. Anybody who is caught eating the wrasse is remembered by the other fish though, and will be shunned from the other cleaning stations, because nobody likes to be eaten by there customers, and even on the reef, there are rules to the streets. The rules go both ways though, as occasionally the wrasse will sometimes bite a little more off than just the algae, they'll take some skin with them, and fish remember those cleaning stations and will stop going to them. And trust me, once your reputation gets out as a biter, it's time to close up shop and mosey on over to the next reef, because your business is downhill from there. After our lesson on fish diversity in the reef, we had a quick lunch, and then we were off for our first official back reef dive. We had waited until low tide so that it would be easier to get out to the boat, an rubber dinghy just big enough for the 15 of us. The weather had been decent, but there was still a decent wind, and grey clouds hung over the sky, just to remind us that they could choose to end our trip any time if they really wanted. Waves chuffed the boat up and down and the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack started playing in the back of my head, as we passed the boat wreck at the jetty , came around the entrance to island, and doubled back, northward, to help to someplace called the Blue pools. We were officially out of the lagoon. We arrived at blue pools, and with all the grace and elegance of an crosseyed rock tipped over backwards into the water. I took one look down though, and everything else faded into the background. Literally at first, because when I had fallen backwards off the boat, I had forgotten to press down on my goggles, and they came right off my face, but as soon as I took care of that, the more metaphorical side could begin. Giant coral vistas faded into the background to the right, and to the left, you could see the gradual slope of the reef coming up to lagoon level. We were to float along the edge of the reef until we met up where the boat moored at a jetty a couple hundred meters away, trying as best we could to stay in a cohesive group, but also not kick each other in the head. I would estimate about a 50% success rate on both of those things. The current was strong, pulling us towards our destination, but my partner Sam and I swam back and forth across the edge of the reef, looking at the different corals and fish making up the immense landscape underneath us. A couple minutes in, I spotted some of the fluorescent coral that I am working on back at USU, outlining the corals in ghostly greens and blues. A soft rain began to fall, and as I dove down into the water, I looked up and was taken aback by the strangeness of seeing the tiny pinpricks fall on the clear surface of the water, light streaming through above me. Then I realized that I hadn't breathed any air in around 30 seconds and if I kept waxing poetic I was probably going to die. I headed for the surface. We swam past our original meet up point, the current pushing us quickly downstream of where the boat was moored, and we decided to meet at a further anchor just down the way. We swam down, got on board, and were off to our next destination. The waves were picking up by just a bit as we drove back to the front of the island, as we didn't have the land to break any of the motion, and we bounced right by the red and white tugboat that was housing our resident corporate interest, a ride share submarine called a Scuber, that was forced to dock off shore because it was scaring all the fish in the lagoon. We got a good distance from them, and then were dropped off right near Heron Bommie, just to the south of the lagoon. Sam decided he'd had about enough, so I paired up with Katie and Nora for this dive. Remembering my last attempt at exiting the boat, I covered my goggles with both my hands, triumphantly thinking, "Haha, you silly waves, I've bested you with my superior inte-"THUNK. I came back up directly into the side of the boat, sputtering and pushing myself away with some kernel of respect I thought I had lost already but found just for this moment. I waited for Katie and Nora, and then dove down to the level of the coral a couple times, spooking some trumpeter fish, but being totally ignored by the giant schools of tiny fish that were hanging around by the surface. As I came back up, I swam with the surface level fish for a while, and noticed several jellyfish that were floating peacefully a meter down, like they didn't know I was ready to pee myself if they got too close. Luckily, right at that moment, I poked my head up and heard peoples voices through their snorkel yelling "SHRRRRKK!!!! sHrK!!, AGGUNGOUGHTOSRSBSBSSSKKK", or something to that degree. A shark! And in the deep water, probably a big one! We should swim towards it, maybe it wants to be friends! We all hurried over, and sure enough, there it was, right near the bottom, a chunky blacktip, about a meter and a half long. It turned and curled off into the brine, right before Katie could get there to see it. We swam a little further, past the boat now, and Nora peeled off to get aboard with Jenna. Right as we split, Katie and I bumped into each other, and a unexpecting green seaturtle that was rising rapidly a foot underneath us! It was the closest I'd ever been, and I could see each individual plate, it's beaked mouth, and its total preparedness to smash into me if I didn't get out of the way. Fair enough. His ocean, his rules. Katie and I swam on, reaching the Bommie, and swimming all around it to see the forests of stag horn coral encroaching on all sides, until it reached the sudden drop off of ocean floor. We dove down as deep as we could a couple more times, and then it was time to get back aboard and head to shore. We were waterlogged, and jellyfish stung, but baptized into the the outer reef. |