Day 82

We've all been super busy the past week working on our scientific papers!  Everyone has had a research project for the past six weeks, and now we have to get down to business and do the write-ups.  The papers are getting 'published' in the research station's in-house journal Physis.  It's not peer-reviewed work so it isn't true science, and it's likely that no one will ever read any of our papers, but it's still something.

But enough about work!  We rented a car for the weekend and went diving all over the island!  On Friday we hit Red Slave and the Salt Pier on the south side of the island.  Red Slave was amazing--I saw my very first sea turtle!  We've been here for two and a half months and I was the only person who hadn't seen one.  And it wasn't just any sea turtle, it was a loggerhead!  He was only about 4 feet away from us, and he swam up a little bit to check us out... before I scared him by chasing him.  Oops.  Despite totally freaking out I actually managed to get a picture!

My very first sea turtle!!!  He was so close!

Foureye butterflyfish!  You always see two together,
because mates stick together.

A coney in sponges.

Salt Pier was another really cool site.  You're technically not allowed to dive there without a guide, but we just hopped in the water one site over (Salt City) and did a suuuuuper long surface swim.  Salt Pier is where ships come to load up salt from the salt ponds, and the pier supports are the dive site.  There were tons of sponges and corals growing on the pier supports, and there were fish everywhere!  I also saw another turtle at the end of that dive, although it was a little sea turtle.  He was cute though.

These are the pier supports.

A sergeant major next to sponges and cup corals.

Looking up from the bottom.

A yellowtail snapper with a school of smallmouth grunts.

Schoolmaster snappers!

French angelfish!

This is a female queen parrotfish getting cleaned at a
cleaning station, where little fish eat the dead skin
and parasites off the bigger fish.  Yummy!

Smallmouth grunts.

Sponges grow like CRAZY on the pier supports.

An itty-bitty harlequin bass.

A spotted eel!

Eagle ray!  These guys are big and beautiful!

On Saturday we started with a drift dive from La Dania's Leap to Karpata, on the northeast side of the island.  La Dania's Leap is unmarked so it was a little hard to find, and it's a one-way site; you have to jump off a little rock ledge (about 2 feet high) to get in, and there's no way out.  Karpata was one of my favorite sites yet.  The topography of the reef was like nothing I'd ever seen; the reef was shaped like mountains, sloping sharply upwards.  There was also a very cool wall, which is basically a flat vertical edge, that was at about 120 feet.  I think I got a little narc'ed down there!  (That's short for nitrogen narcosis, which you get when you go deep.  It's not bad, you just feel a little silly, like you're on laughing gas.)

After Karpata we came home for lunch, and in the afternoon we headed down south for a double dive at The Lake and Margate Bay.  I took a ton of pictures, but my camera has a wet lens that I forgot to get wet!  That's why there's lines in some of the pictures.  Oops!

Lionfish!

That yellow thing is called a Basket Star.  It's all wrapped
up around the gorgonian (the purple thing, it's a type
of coral.)  I poked him but he wouldn't unroll.

Foureye butterflyfish.

The view was pretty great!

A grasyby sitting on a vase sponge!

I'm pretty sure this is a coral with its tentacles out.  Fuzzy!

A yellowtail snapper sitting in gorgonians, and one of my
fellow divers (not sure who) in the background.

I never get sick of this.

Look how much stuff is growing here!

A pair of banded butterflyfish.

Schoolmaster snapper!

A tiny little sharpnose puffer!

Another view.  :)

I got food poisoning on Saturday night after eating Subway, so I was up all night sick.  I tried to dive on Sunday afternoon, but my sinuses weren't happy and (according to my dive computer) I got down to all of 4ft before my face felt like it was exploding.  I spent the hour walking along the beach and got attacked by an eel trapped in a tidepool!  (Don't worry, he didn't actually get me.)  But I had a great two days of diving, so no complaints!

One last picture: a land crab!  I didn't even know they existed until I found one outside the lab last night!

Isn't he cute?