Garden Eels and Pufferfish.

Today we did two dives. The first was a deep dive (second time to 100 feet!) and the second was to a small wreck/a navigation dive. Amy's sisters started their Advanced Open Water Scuba course today, so they had to do some compass work on the second dive for that. The rest of us got to play around underwater while we waited. I got to practice my bubble rings, which are getting better every dive!

Sarah and Emily practicing navigation.

Emily doing a "James Bond Roll" into the water.

Aaaaand she's upside down...

Look at my awesome bubble ring!!

We saw a ton of fish today on our dives, but three of animals we saw really caught my eye.

1. A baby trunkfish! These two pictures are of an adult trunkfish:

See the funky shape? In a Fish ID book, you'd find him under "Odd-Shaped Fishes." They are nearly triangular shaped and just make you want to laugh as they whiz by. However cool the adults may be, the babies are cooler. We didn't get a picture of the one we saw today (he went and hid), but I found this picture online so you can get an idea of just how awesome these little fish are:

http://livingoncaicos.blogspot.com/2009/08/juvenile-smooth-trunkfish.html 

Isn't just the cutest thing you've ever seen? At this stage, they are roughly the size of a marble and tend to bounce around, rather than swim. You can barely see their little fins!

2. The other day when I Skyped home, my brother asked me if there were any Garden Eels around Utila. I told him I hadn't seen any, so I wasn't sure. I can now answer that question. Yes, yes we do. On today's dive we came across several groups of Brown Garden Eels (perhaps 250 eels total?).Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of my own again because Amy's camera won't take pictures below about 40ft.

3. As we were working our way up on the second dive, Amy suddenly starts pointing underneath a coral ledge. Just hanging out there was the biggest pufferfish I had ever seen! It was easily a foot long. (the picture I managed to take of this beauty does not do its size justice!)

Awesome, giant pufferfish

Black Coral Wall

This last weekend, I went on my longest dive so far (1:25) and Amy’s sisters arrived to visit. Our house is a little more crowded than it used to be!

I'm driving the ATV and Amy is taking pictures from her seat on the
front grill. Sarah and Emily are hanging onto the back.

The dive was at Black Coral Wall, one of my favorite dive site around Utila. For her Dive Master certification, Amy had to map a dive site. To do this, you swim in a u-shaped pattern using the number of fin kicks to measure distance. When the bottom substrate changes (say sand to coral) or when the depth changes, you mark this down on a slate. When you get back on land, you can then use this information to estimate distances and draw a map of the site area.

While she was doing this, I got to do pretty much what I wanted while following her around the reef. Since I had the camera, I spent my time stalking flounders, hanging upside down trying to creep up behind an angelfish, and trying to blow bubble rings. (I’m getting much better, but Amy is the master of bubble rings.)

This is a Flamingo's Tongue, a fairly common and beautiful snail. 

A mixed school of Surgeonfish terrifying all the Damselfish on the reef.

Look! A bubble ring!

The two amazingly beautiful Grey Angelfish that came and hung out with us. (See my fin the lower right corner?!?!)

Scuba Week!

Last week, Amy and I got a bit of a vacation. Our grad student abandoned us to go home and see her husband for a couple of weeks. Since she was off having fun, Amy and I decided that it was time for our vacation too—especially since the Utila Dive Festival was happening!

We had a ton of fun going to different events and specialty dives. My favorite part of the week was getting to go on several dives to the north side of the island. Actually, my favorite part of the week was getting to snorkel with DOLPHINS!

That was pretty much the most exciting day I’ve had here. On our way to do our first dive for the week, we ran across a small pod of Spinner Dolphins. UDC’s policy is that you can snorkel with the dolphins, as long as you tip the boat captain. Amy and I decided that it was definitely worth the cost.

Despite there being quite a few of us in the water, we got some good looks at the dolphins. The best view I had was when one swam directly under me about ten feet down.

Baleadas make the best breakfast foods!

After the dolphin excitement, we got to our dive site. Blackish Point is a unique dive site here on Utila because it is the only spot on Utila where Midnight Parrotfish can be found regularly.

Unfortunately, we were diving too deep for Amy’s camera to work so I don’t have any pictures of the fish we were seeing. The highlights of the dive were two Midnight Parrotfish and eight brittle stars.

Amy working on her Coral Watch project to help determine
how much coral bleaching is occurring around  Utila.

The rest of the week was a lot of fun—we did a pollution clean-up dive, watched a boat parade, and Amy even won a ScubaPro hat! 

One of the boats in the Parade of Lights.

Ninja Turtle Returns

Last night, Amy and I spent the night on the beach with Gene.

Overall the night wasn't too bad. There was no wind--so more bugs than normal, but not nearly has bad as they have been in the past.

Ninja Turtle returning to the ocean.

The exciting news is that Ninja Turtle/Speedy has returned and she actually laid a nest this time!

Amy came back from the midnight beach patrol and told me that we had a turtle. When we got there, it was easy to tell that the turtle was our old friend Speedy. She has a much smoother shell and almost no notch in the back of the shell. Her tracks led straight up from the ocean and she had dug one nest and laid eggs straight away.

This is why they are called Hawksbill Turtles. I've been told they can
give a pretty nasty bite--I'm not planning on testing that out.

She's almost done laying!

She left an egg unburied, so I rescued it and buried it for her.

It was so relaxing--we didn't have to worry about placing data loggers or a sat tag. When the turtle was there we only had to take her measurements, get a rough count of the eggs as she laid them, and make sure we had her pictures for the data base. No sweat for experienced turtle researchers like us!

"We don't have protocol for this."

The last week or so has been quite depressing.

1. The ATV broke down at the beach. We couldn't even fix it with the machete and we didn't have a second vehicle with us to pull it out. So we walked back to town. Did I mention that we did the three mile walk back   along a road that was more lake than road in the pouring rain because a hurricane had just past by? (The phrase of the day was, "It wasn't raining when we left!" and it got more pitiful the longer we were out.)

2. The ATV broke down at the beach (again). We had just gotten it back from getting "fixed." The other vehicle with us was Gene's scooter. We did push the ATV to a better spot to leave it with the scooter, but we still had to walk out. This was the day after the previous walk, so the road was a mud pit.

3. Amy got sick.

4. The night Amy got sick, Lindsey and I still had to go to the beach. It was the hottest night I have spent on the beach so far and there was no wind, so there were quite a few bugs. However, on the drive back into town we had the worst experience of the week....

5. We were attacked by a swarm of bees. Really. It was quite traumatizing. We were now driving a four-wheel drive golf cart (which is probably why we hadn't broken down again) and I was standing on the back, holding on with one hand while wildly swatting bees with the other. Lindsey was driving at full speed down the road while swatting bees. We both got stung a couple of times (I had to pull two stingers out of Lindsey's head before the night was over). In all, not an experience I want to go through again. Luckily, neither of us is badly allergic to bees and the swarm doesn't seem to have stuck around. We think that one of the trees that fell over must have disturbed the nest and we disturbed it further by driving through it.

So, in all, by Sunday morning we were all in pretty bad spirits and none of us were in the mood to spend Sunday night on the beach. However, Sunday night our stretch of bad luck broke and our spirits were completely turned around in a matter of minutes.

At 9:10, Lindsey comes back to the tarp and tells us that she and Chel found a turtle that was almost done digging her nest. We all packed things up and head down the beach all of twenty yards. This was exciting--we might actually be done early and get to go home to sleep! Also, we were hoping to deploy the satellite tag, which meant we had to start the process as soon as the turtle entered her nesting trance.

On closer inspection we discovered two things about this turtle. First, she was a new turtle--only the fourth confirmed female on this beach! Second, we could not sat tag her because there was a barnacle in the way. However, as long as she laid a nest, we decided that we would be happy.

After a couple of minutes, I headed back to our camp to pick up a couple of things we had left behind. As I walked along the bottom of the brush that lines most of the beach, I heard some rustling. My first thought was that it was either a really big crab or... another turtle. Thinking that there was no way that we could have two turtles at one time, I turned on my light. There was a turtle sitting in the bushes, less than a meter from where I was standing. To say I was surprised is putting it mildly--I nearly fell over! Turning around, I went back to where Amy and Lindsey were sitting.

"There's another turtle over there." I stumbled over the words.

They both looked at me in shock. We had had two turtles, within 10 meters of each other in 10 minutes!

Lindsey's first words? "We don't have protocol for this!"

The next four hours were busy ones. Both turtles ended up laying nests that we had to dig up and catalog, we deployed the last set of data loggers in one, and the second turtle (named "Surprise" for obvious reasons) was perfect to deploy the sat tag on.

The end result is that we are done with the beach nights needed for Lindsey's research and we were much, much happier researchers! Now, we just need to finish the beach profiling and the pollution study before the nests start hatching and we have several hundred hatchlings to process.

We Have the Weirdest Turtles

Last night's turtle (Speedy/formerly known as Ninja Turtle) returned tonight! 

Let me recap last night: The fastest turtle in the world crawled up, dug five nests, got flipper tags, and the sprinted back to the ocean.

At 9:15 pm tonight, this same turtle back climbed up the beach right by our tarp. As in, we could have touched her from where we were lying. She then crawled right into the middle of the camp and started to dig the her first nest of the night. It would not be the last by a long shot. 

She moved to a new place and started digging again. This new spot was directly in front of the hammock where Gene, the ProTECTOR employee was sleeping. As we got near 10 pm, he got out of his hammock and started to the beach--totally unaware that there was a turtle nesting not ten feet from him. Luckily, Lindsey was able to stop him before he turned on his light or stepped on the turtle!

After this the turtle proceeded to wander around camp, randomly digging nests. At one point, she circled back over to where are tarp was sitting and even ran smack into the big duffle bag! Behind this bag, Scott (a BICA volunteer), Amy, and I were all hunched down on the ground, biting our lips to keep from laughing. After this, things got less interesting for a while, so Amy and I slept for about the next two hours. We were only awakened because the turtle was headed back to the beach, and she was considering crossing our tarp. Luckily, she ended up going around us and entered the water again at 12:15 am, a full three hours after coming out of the water! During that time she dug ten different body pits, with nine completed nest chambers. (The body pit is the initial, rather wild digging and then the nest chamber is a much narrower, more carefully done hole that the eggs will be laid in.) Ten nests is just one short of the recorded high for Hawksbill Sea Turtles, which is eleven nests in one crawl.

We all settled down for the rest of the night on the beach, not expecting anything else to happen. We were wrong.

At 2:45 am, we were awakened by Scott who told us that they thought "that crazy turtle was back." Speedy was indeed back, having climbed up the beach about 25 meters from our camp. She was rustling around in the bushes for quite awhile and we thought that she was finally going to lay eggs. No, we weren't that lucky. She dug four more nests before wandering right up to where we were standing (for those of you counting at home, this brings the count up to 13 nests in one night for this turtle and, as far as we can tell, a new record). Not only did this turtle false crawl twice in one night (very unusual) and dig more nests than have been recorded before for this species, but at one point she crawled up and sat on my foot. This was one confused turtle.

Finally, Lindsey decided that we might as well take the pictures we needed of the turtle's carapace and head scales (these are used as part of a turtle database for identifying individual turtles). After this, the turtle finally realized that there were humans standing around her and started for the water at top speed. However, about half way between her and the ocean was Scott. As soon as he saw the 100+ lbs turtle coming at him, he turned and ran, barely getting out of the way before she barreled through and into the ocean!

Lindsey pointed out that no one will believe us when we tell the story of exactly how fast this turtle was and maybe she's right. However, there are now a group of researchers that will swear up and down that there is one Honduran turtle that could definitely beat any rabbit in a race.

Rescue Diving and a Very Fast Turtle

 The last few days have been very busy. On the beach all night, diving for most of the day. As of today, I am officially a PADI Rescue Diver.

 The course started off with a short introduction. (Really, not much more than "Welcome to the Rescue Course.") Then all four of the Dive Masters in Training (DMT) who were helping with the course fell into the water and began "drowning." Maya, the instructor for the course, stood there grinning as the three of us who were taking the course gaped at her. We all soon learned that this was core to her teaching strategy. By the end of the course we were all good at two things: 1) rescuing an unconscious diver at the surface (something we did over and over and over again) and 2) thinking on our feet. Maya kept us on our toes and she also kept the DMTs in the water (usually panicking, but sometimes unconscious). By the end of a day of diving, we would have yanked people out of the water in between 15-20 times. During one debriefing, one of my classmates started to wander off. When Maya asked him where he was going, he gestured vaguely over his shoulder he calmly told her that "Nikki is drowning." Sure enough, yet again a DMT was in the water. By the end we were all a little blase about pulling the DMTs out of the water, but that is part of the point--we no longer have to think about each step, which means we are much faster at getting a victim to safety.

This course is easily the most fun and interesting of the dive courses I have taken so far. There is some physical challenge in dealing with a panicked diver or swimming with an unconscious diver to shore, but it is also mentally challenging. Every time you get into a rescue situation, the circumstances will be different and you have to adapt what you know to the changing conditions. If you are considering taking any diving continuing education courses, I would highly recommend working up through the Rescue certification. 

Caribbean Reef Squid (part of a school of 18).

 We have now had turtles on three of the last four nights. Two false crawls and one nesting turtle. The false crawls were quite similar, both turtles spent almost two hours on the beach digging test nests--between five and six apiece. Each time, they found that something about these spots that did not satisfy them. However, the first turtle came back the next night (at 3 am of course, when else would you want to lay eggs?) and laid her nest in the first hole she dug. Hopefully, the turtle who false crawled tonight will follow her example

Bringing an unresponsive diver to the surface.

Fun diving! (I'm in the white fins.) 

Trunk fish. They're triangular shape and super cute!

Tonight's turtle was nicknamed "Speedy." We had to flipper tag her even though she hadn't nested, which always provides a bit of a challenge. However, the moment we touched Speedy the first time, she started trying to bolt for the ocean. This lead to a bit of turtle rodeo, with at least two of us holding her down at all times. We finally got both flipper tags in and decided to let her go without trying to do anything further (she will be back in the next few days to lay eggs) and Speedy was true to her name. I have not seen any of our previous turtles move that fast. It seemed as if she had her whole body in the air at times. Within seconds, she was down the hill and into the water, leaving a trail of gaping researchers behind her.