Caribbean Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving started off with tropical sunshine, beautiful boat rides, swimming in coral reefs, field work, and that was all before 10 in the morning. It was a great day, I hung out with some fishermen at the docks, where me and some friends bought a 6 pound cleaned grouper from them for 18 bucks. After that was stashed in the kitchen, I enjoyed a sunset on the cliff at the edge of the center while I called my family. At dinnertime, all the students and staff gathered in our dining area and took part in a very delicious thanksgiving feast. The menu is the second picture on the right, and I ate large portions of everything on it. Really, I ate so much that it physically hurt to move, I ended up crashing with a bunch of people watching the blue planet. Thanksgiving is an interesting holiday, where we celebrate by eating not just for sustenance, but feasting in excess. Our feast here felt more meaningful than all my thanksgivings spent in America, since here, especially at times when food shipments have failed to come in, I have found myself eating simply and just for sustenance. Also, there are haitian households on this island that live like that all the time, that never have the means to eat in excess in a way that we take for granted in America. Puts things in perspective, makes me thankful for being privileged with the lifestyle that I enjoy.

Next day, pumpkin pie for breakfast and leftovers for lunch. Most of the center went to a beach cookout, and some stayed to camp, but me and some other guys stayed behind and grilled our grouper that we bought the other day, while we watched the sunset. It ended up being very delicious, one of the locals gave us some seasoning when we were out buying charcoal, which went very well with our citrus marinade that we made. We topped it all with some pico de gallo and ended up with a very peaceful and tasty fish dinner. I wish we had done that more, its a great feeling to prepare your meal completely and know where everything originates. There was still dessert left over from the day before, so we raided the fridge and polished it off.

I've also dove both yesterday and today. Yesterday was our last research dive, shallow water and strong currents. Its a great test of scuba skills, and the site was enjoyable, I had four squid sitting in a line watching me for half of my transect. Today we dove The Grotto, which is my absolute favorite dive site. The architecture of a huge cluster of coral heads next to the drop off creates a convoluted series of valleys and overhangs that house a wide variety of large fishes. I was swimming over them this morning when two huge reef sharks came out at seperate points and both started swimming towards our dive group in a pincer movement. The larger one looked like he was coming straight towards me, and being out in open water, all you can really do in that situation is hover and wait for the shark to turn away. He did, cruising out over the wall and out of sight. We saw the same sharks on the way back to the mooring line, as well as a sea turtle. There was a field of garden eels, poking their heads out of a sandy patch on the sea floor. Right above them was a small mating aggregation of yellowtail snappers. They rapidly shoot up to the surface in pairs to do this, and dash back down to a comfortable depth. Right by the mooring line, there was a fish trap, with a huge lobster head inside as bait. It had caught four large queen triggerfish, as well as an assortment of groupers and snappers. It was a good start to my saturday. Less than two weeks left on this island.

This ain't seaworld, it's as real as it gets!

This week has been very laid back. Every morning my research group has gone out and done field work, and we have usually been back by 10 AM. Then the rest of the day has been free to do whatever. I've done a lot of exploring, reading, and the only responsibility I've had is to write my research proposal, which was due last night. I'm really happy about how my proposal turned out. Our group of 12 is all using the same methods to collect all of our data, which we share, but we all individually use some of the data in our own projects. Personally, I am going to look at three benthic attributes at the sites we survey: rugosity (a measure of topographical complexity), vertical relief, and live coral cover. I want to see what correlations there are between these factors and the abundance of larger size classes of resident reef fish, as well as the overall estimated biomass of the area. Basically, I want to see what structural elements of the reef influence greater fish assemblages. This is important for management purposes, in doing reef recovery and similar things. So sorry if my writing is a bit dry, I just finished nine pages of scientific writing.

Our dive group, one of the interns took this picture.

Anyways, I just got out of the water from my first rec dive since last saturday. I've been diving throughout the week for research, but this is the first time we've all gone out on a "fun" dive. The surface conditions were really choppy, and we were in the small zodiac, so we just put our gear on in the water and descended as soon as we were ready. The noise and partial chaos of the waves vanished instantly as we went down into the silent, still  underwater world. We went to this site that I hadn't been to before, called The Warhead. It's the nose of the crashed drug plane, further down the wall. It is wedged in the rocks about 80-90 feet down, which is deeper than we can go, but we hovered out over the wall and looked down at it. The drop off really just takes my breath away every time I dive, especially when I hover out over the wall. Its a ridiculous sensation, to be floating there and looking out into an increasingly deep blue. Back over the shelf, I've really been enjoying looking at the corals and sponges at the depths we dive at. In a garden on land, flowers catch our attention because they add color and organized form to a confused green background. Underwater on a reef, the corals and sponges do the same, except the background is just the substrate, perhaps with some encrusting algae. The corals and sponges, instead of being organs of plants, are entire organisms, and colonies of organisms. Some colors are muted at 60 feet, but the deep greens and maroons of giant sponges are very impressive, and the rich purples of sea fans stand out well. These sessile animals have a ridiculous variety of forms as well, there are hard stony corals, fat cylindrical sponges, branching corals that look like antlers, sea rods that look like a soft cluster of tubes blowing with the current, and really deep on the wall I see crazy thin spiraling sponges. So cool. The setting of every dive I make here is this amazing garden, and that is just the backdrop for the fishes, sharks, sea turtles, and other cool things we encounter while diving. I hit my 10 hours of bottom time mark on the dive today.



Me, upper left. Sea turtle, lower right.


While I was eating after hopping off the boat, people brought in an injured flamingo to the center, hoping we would know what to do with it. I got to see it, it is in pretty bad condition, a small wound on its neck and a larger one on its chest. We think a dog attacked it, hopefully it wasn't a person that did it since that is a $50000 fine. Kind of like killing a bald eagle in America. Anyways, I'm going to go get lunch and then get back in the water to do more filming for our coral reef movie.

Just hanging.

Dolphins! And thats my hand on the left.

Shark Bay in the foreground, then East Bay, then Long Cay in the distance. View west from Pete's Point.

Research

Since directed research started, I have pretty much just been in the water as long as the sun is up. I've dove every day for the last four days, racked up three and half hours of bottom time, and spent the rest of the day snorkeling. I really just come back to the center for lunch and then its back out in the water again. Our directed research project has 12 students working on it, broken into three groups, 4 people per transect line, so we can do three at each site. I'll keep the description of what we are doing simple. We take the boats out to a site, and an intern (using scuba) begins to lay a 50 meter length of transect tape along the bottom. As the tape is being laid, two snorkelers follow the intern on the surface, and record what species of fish are within a 5 meter wide belt along the line, and their size classes. After that, two more students, scuba diving, record observations of various cover and topographical features, as well as measuring coral dimensions. This process takes around an hour, and we trade off between diving and snorkeling in our four person group. 

I love the research dives. They are awesome even though we are doing a lot of work, and it is hard to control your buoyancy at the ~25 foot depth that we work at, especially when you are using a slate to record data and a measuring tape. I like being able to see these shallow reef areas from a divers perspective. Normally I only get to see them close up when I am free diving during a snorkel trip, and I can only stay down there a short period of time, and the fish are startled and do not display normal behavior. It is really cool to watch them return to their normal business, and watch the cleaning stations, territorial fish, paired fish, feeding behavior, all sorts of cool things.

Yesterday we didn't do any research, but we had a fun dive at East Bay Spur, where we saw a couple sea turtles. Then more filming for our coral reef movie project in the afternoon, and then cleaning boats. As far as life outside of the water goes, it is also pretty awesome. An ice cream shop opened in town, and they have delicious homemade ice cream. The mosquitoes are getting a little better and the nights are getting cooler, I am actually using a sheet when I sleep now. An alum donated a foosball table to the center, so that is really cool, something new to do. If I get back early enough before dinner I can watch the lionfish group dissect their catch from the day. I haven't been fishing myself as much lately, but me and some friends were having good luck fishing off a jetty just west of the center, using conch scraps from the fishermen as bait. I actually caught two yellowtail snappers on the same line at one time before the hurricane. Here is a picture of me diving from about a week ago, checking out the remains of a crashed drug plane.

Dolphins

Done with finals. Directed research starts tomorrow, so I've been taking up time wandering the beaches, playing some whiffle ball, playing with Tomas (the cat thats been hanging out here), trying to build a raft, and lots of random fun things. Like scuba diving.

This morning bright and early I hopped on the bouncy rubber zodiac and headed off to dive the arch. Micah, the intern driving the boat was gunning the motor super fast and we actually got some clear feet of air off of some waves. It was a really fun ride. We were crusing next to the 23, a flat bottomed skiff, when all of a sudden there was a pod of dolphins swimming with us. Ricardo, our dive safety officer, was in our boat and told us to go faster, the dolphins wanted to play with us. They swam with of both of our boats, staying right in front of the bow. I was worried that we would run them over, but they could move so fast, every now and then, one would spiral away or dart ahead really quickly. They were jumping out of the water as well. I was lying leaning over the front of the boat, so I was literally inches away from them. Needless to say everyone was so excited. When we reached our dive sites and jumped in the water they lost interest, and we started our dives.

I don't have any pictures to post yet, but here is a video taken during the dolphin encounter. Sorry for all the loud screaming, but I mean, most of people here are girls so, you know how it goes. It was taken by someone on the other boat, but that means you get a discovery channel chase cam view of our boat. I am on the zodiac, the red boat, and I am lying on the front end, closest to the camera when you see the boat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxzi3w8nzFw


I dove at this site called The Arch, which is this huge arch about 50 feet down, that you can swim under. There were a few really big fish hanging out at the arch when we reached it, a nassau grouper, mutton snapper, and black jack to be exact. There were all sorts of crazy sponges and hydroids growing on the underside of the arch. The air bubbles I exhaled caught themselves in little pockets on the rock overhead, it looked like liquid mercury or something. Makes me want to try cave diving. I saw a lot of gramma loretos as well, they are a really cool fish that orient themselves based on the surface they are swimming next to, so when they are under an overhang they are swimming upside down. We had an excellent dive, the 40 minutes went by way too quickly, it seemed like our 3 minute safety stop came up way too quickly and then we were back on the boat again, heading back to the center.

On a sobering note, one of my roommates came up from a dive later in the day bleeding out of his ear, we aren't sure if he ruptured the ear drum or not, he went to the island clinic but they basically told him to come back tomorrow. He probably won't get to dive the rest of the trip though which is really unfortunate.

I'm about to go wander the town for the evening. Miss everyone back home, especially my awesome little siblings. Signing off.

Rock You Like a Hurricane!

It was a busy end to a busy week last week. Schedule went something like:

Wednesday: Diving
Thursday: Prepare for hurricane.
Friday: Two projects due. Hurricane.
Saturday: Clean up after the hurricane.
Sunday: Business as usual, study for finals.

So Tomas ended up deciding to take the most ideal path to hit us. It changed from its westernly path through the southern caribbean to head north. It built up strength down there, then the eye went through the straight in between cuba and hispaniola. From there it veered east again at the last minute, and the eye ended up passing right over our island. Haiti got hit, but the storm didn't really lose strength, it hit us at about its peak wind speeds. The day before we spent putting up metal plates on the windows, getting all our stuff off the floor, moving benches, tables, anything the wind could blow into things. We got our four boats out of the water as well. Everyone with boats too big to haul out anchored them in the straight between South Caicos and Long Cay, to serve as some protection from the wind and rain I guess. When we woke up on saturday we continued preparations and then after lunch made an orderly evacuation. We ended up taking shelter in this two story cylindrical buidling over at East Bay, an unfinished resort. As far as a dusty construction site went, it wasn't that bad. There were hurricane proof windows, which meant we got to see outside. We hung out outside most of the day as the winds picked up, and then at about 930 at night we sealed everything up. We watched movies on a projector and tried to sleep as the winds got louder and louder. The actual hurricane hit in the middle of the night. I woke up as the building shook and the winds howled for about an hour, then things calmed down as the eye went over us, only to return to furious weather after it passed. We couldn't see much, there was some lightning which confused me, I thought people were using flashlights inside (since we lost power), as I drifted in and out of sleep. The next day was clean up, which involved dealing with the flood inside our bedroom and picking up a lot of branches. The center didn't really sustain any significant damage, and everyone was alright.
That was the first hurricane I had been in, it was an experience for sure. The water is starting to clear up, I'm curious to see what the effects on the reefs were. I just took a final exam, and I have two more tomorrow, then classes are done, and I will literally just be in the water all day. The rest of the quarter will be directed research, and I got into my first choice project. It involves extra dives, which is awesome, I'll be diving and snorkeling and doing transects and quadrats measuring substrate topographical complexity and its correlation to fish populations. Data analysis will be interesting as well, there are some cool statistics to be done, and we'll cap it off with a legit 30 page scientific paper. I'm excited, this is what I've been looking forward to. I'll get to keep doing recreational dives too, so between that and research dives I'll be logging a lot in the near future.

Sharks, Hurricanes, and Other Normal Topics of Conversation Here

I haven't had time to write much lately. Probably the most notable thing that has happened was me being able to hang out with a reef shark for most of my last dive, to The Grotto, an awesome dive site. I got in the water and started to put my BC on, since we were in the Zodiac and there wasn't room to do it in the boat. I looked down and there it was, circling 50 feet down. We descended and it swam away. Then as we were making our way to the wall it came back, swam right by us and hung out with us for a while. We saw a couple reef sharks that dive, and a turtle, but that one decided to make several visits to us, it was the first thing I was when I got in the water and the last thing I saw before getting back on the boat. That was the closest I have been to one of those, closest I have been to any shark except for a nurse shark that I saw the very next day.

We had been doing filming for our coral reef movie project, and had been to a couple sites. There was a reef shark that we saw at Sharks Alley, and then at Admirals Aquarium I found a huge nurse shark hiding in what looked like a small opening in the rocks but what actually ended up opening into a sizable cave. At first I thought it was a ray in there covering the sand on the bottom, but it turned out to be just the caudal fin of the shark. There was some bladed fire coral around the entrance, but I could swim down and approach it from the right angle enough to grab some free rock and hold myself down enough to stick my head inside, and watch it sleeping.

Besides that I've been doing a lot of projects. There was a tourism assessment presentation and paper, a lobster management presentation, a marine ecology research proposal, all due in the time since I got back from break. I've still got a reef survey to complete, a cultural reflection to write, and a seagrass monitoring data analysis project to do before the week is over too. Then exams, then directed research starts. More on that later. I'm looking to either do research on the correlation between substrate topographical complexity and fish population size, or to do research on lionfish, catching them and recording locations and stomach contents.

Right now we are keeping an eye on Tomas, down in the southern caribbean. Its projected to hit haiti at a cat 2 force on friday, after that the current projected path is right over us. Haiti has had so much to deal with lately, there are still like a million people living in tents there, and they are in the middle of a cholera outbreak. Its a really bad situation, hopefully the hurricane gives them (and us) a miss.


Here are a couple pictures from my last dive.