For our last day we spent a lot of it in the water. In the morning we went out to a neighboring reef called Wistari. I’ll put a picture of the map for reference. We started at Wistari 2 and drifted until Three Rocks. Lots of cool fish in this one. When we first jumped out of the boat we couldn’t see the bottom so it was a blue jump in. We got back into the boat and on the way back to heron, we stopped at Heron Bommie. This was a massive coral that was a cleaning station for a lot of big things. We saw many turtles and a shark. So far we have swam North Bommie to Gorgonia Hole, Heron Bommie, and Wistari 2 to Three Rocks.
We got back to the island and did our research presentations. There was a lot of good projects and overall I am very proud of our whole group. We had an award ceremony and I got the Bartholomew Quint Salty Seadog award. We went out for a snorkel on the north beach just before low tide, which at the beginning was pretty cool. We saw a lot of cute little fish and an eel. Towards the end however, it was getting really shallow and we still need to get back to shore, but there was a minefield of cone shells between us and the safety of the land. I was inches above them and I really thought that that would be my end if I made one wrong move. I got to do one last evening float at sunset. It was the most beautiful sunset of the trip, the perfect last day gift. I sprint swam to the wreck and back and then I just floated till the sun was all the way down. I am filled with gratitude for this place and for our earth.
0 Comments
As I was floating in the ocean by myself waiting for the rest of the group to catch up to me because I sprit swam back to the dock, I was thinking how lucky I was to have an opportunity like this one. There is not very many people that get to go live on a tiny reef island in the Great Barrier Reef doing marine biology research. I get to swim with turtles, rays, sharks and a whole lot of fish everyday. I have found a new passion and something new to thank God for everyday. I knew when I first heard about this trip in class months ago that this would be a life changing opportunity and I was right, but in many more ways then I could ever imagine. I have done some amazing things in my life, and I have been to really cool places, but this place and this opportunity is high on my list of life changing events. I have only 2 more days here and I hope to make the best of them.
We went to the outer reef again today in the morning. I have gotten a lot more people on the no wetsuit trend. I think they saw how much more fun it is when you can swim and move freely. Braden saw a manta ray so go over to his blog to hear about that, he might also post the video there too. I have a dream to swim with manta rays and whale sharks and I will someday but today was not that day. I still have a lot of life to live so I am not worried about it. All of the high schoolers left today, so you can guess how excited we all were for that. Plus it wasn’t just us that we’re excited, the staff also was stoked. Maggie in the kitchen made us steak for dinner. She really does love us. I spent some time sitting on the beach thinking about how blessed I am. God really did create an amazing earth, with amazing creatures to walk it (and swim it). How blessed we are to be stewards of this earth, and what a responsibility it is. Another great day on the water. Update on our final project, me and Andrew decided on cleaner wrasses and their preferred coral to set up their cleaning stations. We went out this morning after breakfast to look for the cleaning stations. We found 6 stations and 10 moon wrasses. There is not too much of a diversity of coral right off of our research beach, so all the stations were on branching coral, mostly staghorn. We saw some other cool fish too, and even a sea slug with cool colors.
We went out to the outer reef again. I didn’t wear a wetsuit because I don’t need it. This way I was able to free dive a lot easier and go a lot deeper. Last time we went out to the outer reef Andrew got really sick, but this time, with sea sick meds and a lesson on how to pop his ears, I had a buddy that could keep up with my diving. We found lots of blue streak cleaning wrasse. I also found a few clownfish families in their anemones. Also lots of sharks, a lobster, and an eagle ray. A very fun day of swimming and I know I’ve said this before, but it was very soul fulfilling. I loved every bit of it, even when something was happing with my mask and it left filling with water. The second video is of a wrasse cleaning station I did not get up early for the morning swim today because I had to be on the docks ready to go for my first ever scuba dive in the great barrier reef today. I treated myself to an expensive experience, but I would not take it back for anything. It may have had bad visibility, and I didn't get to see a manta ray, but I was still amazing to see the reef like that. The place we dived at was called North Bommie. The diversity in the coral and the amount of fish is what is impressive to me. I have dived a lot in Cozumel, Mexico, but there is such a difference in the ecosystems. I learned the other day that the reason Cozumel doesn't have the fish population it should is because they have an excess amount of Lion fish, which have over hunted the herbivore fish there. This is also the reason why there is a lot of algae growth there as well. Here on the great barrier reef, there are a lot of herbivores to eat the algae so there is more a coral presence. I got to see a family of clown fish in their anemone and I just loved that. There were a lot of sharks as well. Something else cool is the school of unicorn fish that I got a video of. Overall an amazing dive even though it wasn't perfect I would definitely go again in a heartbeat.
I spent a lot of time on the beach as I always do, and I made a little artwork with the rocks, coral, and shells on the beach. Our evening swim was very rewarding, not because we saw a bunch of cool things, but because I didn't wear a wetsuit and I felt like I was free and could swim and free dive all I wanted. The sunset was beautiful so I put my fins and mask on the dock and swam out and floated on my back until it was time for dinner. Very good and soul fulfilling day. on the morning swim, we went out a little early. While we always go out before sunrise this morning I noticed a little bit more how beautiful the sky was. I unfortunately was in the water without a camera, so this is a great example of a moment that was created just for me to enjoy without the distraction of a camera. I have to admit that the sunrises here have been a lot better than the sunsets, and that makes me sad as I always enjoy the sunset. The morning gave us beautiful skies, and a lot of small beautiful fish.
We started on our research projects and me and Andrew decided on the topic of cleaner wrasse and their cleaning station locations and whether or not they have preferred coral to set up shop in or not. I did a little background research first on the wrasses, and tomorrow we will go out looking for the different cleaning stations. If you don't know, the blue streak cleaner wrasses is a small fish that will eat the parasites and algae off of bigger fish. This is a symbiotic relationship of trust, so larger predatory fish will not eat the wrasses and the wrasses won't take chunks of flesh from the fishes bodies. I spent a lot of time today wandering the in island paths and the beaches. I went out at high tide and low tide, and I really like seeing the differences between the the two. This island has an abundance of life and even from the shore I can see a difference in the populations of cone shells, chitons, and other invertebrates during the different levels of the tide. This morning we went out on the north beach, and using the coral watch grading sheets we looked at the health of the reefs. Coral watch has a website where you can input the data you found while out on the reef, it is one of the largest citizen science projects out there.
We had a lecture on the fish on the reefs, and for the feast of the day after lunch we had open. Me and Andrew walked around the island for hours taking pictures and videos and looking for cone shells. He has a Polaroid camera and has been making a album for Australia. The island is beautiful and there is no shortage of beautiful things to photograph. We waited on the dock for sunset with the rest of our group, and Andrew got a great Polaroid of it. We also saw sharks and ray swimming around the jetty. Today we started to think about our personal projects, and I am going to team up with Andrew to do a project on cone shells. I wanted to a project on reef predators, but I did it think it would be about highly venomous shell organisms. This mornings dive was one of the best morning dives we have had. We went out a little earlier than normal, so we could beat the younglings. It was a little cloudy so the sky was lit up by the sunrise so beautiful, lots of cotton candy pink, purple, and blue. Because of the clouds, the comb jellies had not figured out that the sun was rising so they were everywhere. They are harmless so we could hold them. They move in such cool way and some have colourful insides that we can see through their clear bodies. We saw many turtles and rays and also a lot of small schools of very pretty bait fish because of the high tide.
We got to go out to the outer reef. I am not going to lie the boat ride out there was almost as fun as the snorkelling. The coral in the outer reef is way more diverse than what we have been seeing closer to the island. There is lots of plate coral and it is so colourful, but not in the way Cozumel is colourful, its more pastel and softer, and it creates a beautiful ocean palate. We saw lots of pretty fish and even some trumpet fish we hadn't seen yet here. Also my buddy got sick so he had to go back into the boat so I go to just be floating by myself till he threw up over the side of the boat and attracted all the fish, which then attracted the sharks. I guess I lucked out by having a sick diving buddy. On our way back we were having a great time on the boat, I was on the lookout for manta rays like I always am, and right as we are going over a large swell I saw the classic white and black shaped sea creature I had been waiting to see. Unfortunately we were moving pretty fast and I didn't bail out of the boat immediately when I saw it. I have a new found resolve to swim with these animals now. I took around the whole of the island today. It didn't take that long because it is less than a mile long. It is a beautiful island and the plants are stunning. We took our fish and other species test and I did much better than I thought. The scientific names were hard to remember, and the pictures were a little hard to distinguish sometimes, but I passed so all is well. As the title suggests we went out on the reef today during low tide and gathered data for our fish abundance lab. We concluded that more fish hang around at high tide than at low tide because predators are hunting more during low tide because there’s less water to chase their prey around in. I got a good panorama of the whole island ⬇️and yes it really is that small. We spent a lot of time counting fish and fish types in the go pro videos we took. I finally got to wash my hair because I went at a low traffic time. There is only three showers for about 30 girls so I just am getting used to sleeping with saltwater in my hair. Not to worry though, my professor hasn’t washed his hair yet this trip and his hair hasn’t fallen out. After dinner my new friend Andrew and I watched people play video games on YouTube, my brothers would be proud. We then went to look at the stars like we do every night
Ok first things, everyone who knows me knows that I don’t like being cold and I don’t like waking up early. Today I did both of those things because we went on a morning snorkel before the sun had even fully come up yet. I thought I was going to be cold then but that’s not when I was the coldest. I was the coldest after we had gotten out and the sun hadn’t warmed the earth yet so it was just cold wind on my soaked back because my hair will never dry here. I did quite enjoy the morning snorkel because of the abundance of rays, fish, and even a few sharks. We swam out and around the wreck and woke up many fish and rays that were lucky enough to still be asleep at the wee hour of 6:30. We had our first lab today where we collected raw data about the amounts of different things starting from the beach then 25 meters out into the reef. The hypothesis was that the further from shore you go the more diverse the coral and other stationary things would be (coral, algae, sand, rocks, dead coral). This didn’t seem like a difficult lab to preform but as the tide was rising and with it the current, trying to make a transit measuring line straight was near impossible. Not to mention the two times we snapped it off the anchoring weight. There may have been several problems happening, but we got our data non the less. It was a beautiful day, God is good.
|