On Still Being Here Despite the Recent Lack of Posts

Yeah... sorry about that. Summer camp is taking up a lot of time, along with any other work I get stuck with. It's still a lot of fun, of course, but sometimes it's almost too much fun.

So what have I been up to? Well since the last post we've had 4th of July - all I can say is the Canadians put on a good party with a BBQ, fireworks, and an awesome house right on the ocean. Camp has also started, where we have a group of kids that come every day for five days to learn about stuff. Each week has its own theme that all the activities are supposed to focus on, such as mangroves or Arrecife connection or sea turtles or coral reefs. Yesterday marked the end of week 3, meaning we have 6 more to go. Most of the kids have been great, but we've had a few very frustrating kids as well. The good news is we only have to make it through five days without taking some sort of violent action against them. Very doable.

Also, Harry Potter came out on Saturday. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, with all of the busyness going on around here, I haven't had a chance to go diving or snorkeling to take new pictures. As a result, here are photos from way back when Mark visited. Soon after he arrived on-island we went for a warm-up dive at good ol' Eden Rock (since I know that site the best I figured it would be a good place for a refresher, plus he wanted to see the fabled tunnels).





Just after our initial descent, I spotted this filefish skulking about. As soon as he noticed Mark and me, though, he went into defensive mode, going all disco-crazy in the process.



Note the raised dorsal spine, the bared little teeth (hard to see in this picture), and the disco spots on its back. I took the first picture after it had already started reacting so the difference isn't as pronounced as it could be, but whatever. The point is that they're fun to hassle. Not that I condone such actions, of course.



This is a pair of French Angelfish cruising the reef. They're pretty popular with the kids, particularly on the underwater photography and videography programs, mostly because they're big enough to be seen from the surface by those who can barely snorkel, let alone snorkel and take pictures at the same time. (Ever seen an 8-year-old try to multitask? HILARIOUS.) So while they're all splashing around chasing the larger fishes, I'm usually off to the side checking out the little two-inch blennies and gobies hiding in the sand and among the coral.



When we first got in, it was to partly cloudy skies, and clear blue water. About 20 minutes into our dive, though, I heard this really weird noise. At first it sounded like the soft hum of a distant boat engine, but it just kept getting louder and louder without changing the pitch of the noise, as a motor normally would. We were at about 35 feet at the time over a huge patch of sand. I looked up through the blue water and saw the sea churning with the pouring rain. It rained like this for about 15 minutes, then disappeared just as quickly. By the time we returned to the surface about a half hour later, the sky had already returned to sunny skies with the occasional benign-looking cloud or two. Such is weather in the Caribbean.

On Visitation Rights and Bottomless Pits

Well, we have had our first official visitor here in Arrecife. Mark, one of my friends, roommates, and fellow Moorea trippers from UCLA came to visit over the weekend. I took a couple of days off from work and we took a grand tour of the island, both above and below the water, having ourselves a pretty good time - I don't always get to play tourist with a fully clean conscience around here, so it was a nice change.

One of the highlights was definitely our dive at Babylon, a site at the northeastern end of the island. Our original plan was to do a night dive offshore from a friend's house near where I live, but when we couldn't find a second dive light for Mark that plan got shelved. Instead we kept the tanks we had rented and decided to explore a new site. My roommate Julia had recommended Babylon a while back, and I had always wanted to dive in East End anyway, so the plan was set. After a bit of research to find the put-in location and the proper buoy (every dive site on this island is marked by a white ball buoy... which means there are hundreds, if not thousands, of buoys surrounding our shores), we drove across the country in about 45 minutes.


The website we found said the launch site was just west of the roadside monument to the Queen on Her Majesty's Highway (a somewhat run down two-lane road). We pulled off in a break in the trees and sure enough, there was a white buoy right offshore... and another... and another. We decided to split the difference and go for the center buoy (the fact that it was closest to shore had nothing to do with it, I swear). After a surface swim of about 30-45 minutes into a slight wind and swell, we finally made it to the buoy and started our descent.


At 40 feet we reached the top of the main reef and started our exploration. There was a bit of a dropoff nearby, so we started in that direction.


That "bit of a dropoff" turned out to not have a visible bottom. We went as far as 104 feet (108 feet for Mark, as he is so quick to point out), and still no end in sight. Remember that our island is more of an underwater mountain with sheer cliffs on all sides. Something tells me we found one of those cliffs. Anyway, these are some crazy green sponges I saw along the wall. The odd green and black patterning is not actually an artifact of the camera or any photo processing. The sponge really did have a weird dark shading all its own.


Coral. Obviously. Again.


After hitting our new personal depth records we headed back to slightly shallower waters to make the most of our remaining air (you use more air at greater depths, so we didn't stay down all that long). Soon after coming up, we saw a sea turtle cruising through the reef. This one was a big shrimpy as far as sea turtles go - obviously a young one - but it was still pretty cool.


A pair of groupers hiding under an outcropping of coral.


A closeup of gorgonian polyps, which would sway in the water like flowing hair. Very pretty.


My ever-mature dive buddy, who decided a diseased and half-eaten sea fan would make a great foreground.




Having said that, I have to admit that Mark certainly was good at finding filefish. While many varieties can reach lengths of over a foot, these guys were barely an inch and a half. The first one was living around a length of purple rope sponge. It matched the sponge in color and texture, and swam to the opposite side of the sponge as soon as it sensed danger. Of the three pictures I took of this guy, this was the one that showed the most of his body. Similarly, the second picture shows another well-camouflaged filefish hiding in a gorgonian. Again, it matched its home's color and texture, and again it was a pain in the butt to get a picture, so again this is the best I have.


Excurrent siphons of a sponge. Sponges filter feed by sucking water in through the pores on their sides (incurrent siphons), and out through the larger holes on top. To help the kids relate, we've started referring to them as the "Brita filters of the sea" - something with which our Winchester-Swann clientele is very familiar.


How many animals can you see in this picture? If you said three, you're right. In all honesty, I didn't even notice the tiny fish until I looked at the photo on my computer back home. An inch-long black fish on a black sponge at 40' doesn't exactly stand out in a crowd.

The next few posts will most likely be using pictures from this and other dives Mark and I did, as I will be busy with teaching CAOS summer camp for the remainder of the week and possibly more in the future, meaning 60+ hour workweeks and little time to goof off like this. Oh well. It was definitely fun while it lasted.