Caribbean Adventures: One more week

The little rock on horizon was our destination

Sunday afternoon, I hiked to the far end of East Bay, with a few friends. We used the beach there as a jumping off point to swim out to a little island, a chunk of limestone with a small beach and grassy area. It was a good twenty minute swim against the current, over seagrass beds. It is really cool to be able to pull yourself up onto an island, and be the only person there, to have it be for that moment, yours. I totally see what drove all the great explorers of the past to navigate and map and discover new places. The water around the island was really shallow, there was a reef that a lot of waves were breaking on. I swam out over it by myself and it was a little intense, it was only maybe two feet deep at places and the rocks were covered in fire coral and some of the biggest sea urchins I have ever seen, with waves breaking over me the whole time. So that was slightly stressful. It was totally worth it when I made it over safely and the bottom dropped out. Instantly everything became more peaceful and I started noticing that there were all sorts of rare reef fish hiding in caves on the other side. I saw this one porcupinefish as big as a small dog, hiding under a little ledge. I was keeping my back to the ocean most of the time, since the reef was just a patch reef, and behind it was a sandy plain stretching out into the blue. A barracuda snuck up on me, I turned around to see it hovering behind me a couple feet away from my face. Not going to lie, it was startling, I decided to navigate the shallow reef and waves again and make my way back to everyone else.

I've been trying to get in as many adventures as possible in my last few days here, even though we are in the middle of our final project. This whole week we are working on analyzing all of the data we collected in the past two weeks, and writing a paper about it. I've tried to only really sit on my computer and work on it during the hours after the sun sets, but it has been hard, this project is a lot of work. It has been really interesting to see all of the results and correlations we are finding though. We are also going diving a lot this week. On monday, our dive group went to the Spanish Chain, and about twenty minutes into the dive we found a fish trap. Upon approaching it, we discovered that it held a panicked nurse shark. It was small, but I still found it hard to believe it had managed to get itself trapped in there. I swam down and was looking to find a way to free it, but it was 10 feet deeper than our allowed limit and we needed to head back if we were going to have enough air to reach the mooring line and get back to the boat safely. So I had to leave when our dive leader signaled me to get up, to keep moving. Oh and apparently tampering with fish traps is illegal. It was troubling though, to see the shark thrashing around inside the trap and knowing that I could have gotten it out if I just had a little more time. One of the interns returned to the dive site latter in the day to check it out, and brought back news that he had freed it, which was awesome.

My dive buddy Kat got a short video of me (yellow snorkel) with trap before I got pulled away.

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

We have been working hard on our final papers lately, (just finished mine an hour ago) but we've had time to go diving every day. Yesterday we went to The Plane, and saw a bottlenose dolphin on our dive! Today we dove The Fishbowl, a new dive site that I hadn't been to before. There is a huge clearing of sand ringed by a wall of corals about 4 feet high, when you sit inside it you feel like YOU are inside a fishbowl and all the fish around it are watching you. I'm just gonna throw up some diving pictures (taken by dive buddy Kat and intern Lizzie) from recent research and rec dives because after finishing my paper I'm tired of writing. One week left! Lots of adventures to have still...