A long but productive day

The day started off with a beautiful double rainbow. The ship anchored in the lagoon arrived yesterday. The skipper, Dustin, sailed solo from Hawaii. There were originally four ships sailing to Palmyra to visit, and two turned back.

view from the Galley

After breakfast it was off to the FR7 shallow transect to return 20 tiles. It is work, work, work to get this accomplished in an hour underwater, but then we have to hang out for 5 minutes at about 15 feet for a safety stop. This gives us time to look around and enjoy the amazing marine life. Among other things, we saw a dolphin swim by during the safety stop on our first dive. Paul also brought the GoPro camera along for the first time and took this "selfie" picture of the three of us.

Me, Paul, & Sabina doing our safety stop

We then moved on to the FR9 shallow transect to retrieve another 20 tiles for processing. We had some cracked tiles, which is a bummer. Since Paul had the GoPro with him, I asked him to take the photo below of uncage tile #4 which had a large piece of something encrusted with coral resting on top of it.

uncaged tile with debris resting on it

FR9 was a neat area, but there is much more relief and not much of a slope, so it was harder to orient to determine which transect line is which. The first two tiles we collected turned out to be a pair from the middle transect instead of the shallow transect. Subsequently we found the shallow transect and collected 18 of the 20 tiles before running low on air. Overall I have been doing pretty well finding the correct tiles given I relied on Doug to do most of the underwater navigation last year.

On the boat ride back we enjoyed the ono fish sandwiches Sabina had packed for us after breakfast. Here are Paul and Sabina on the foredeck of the Zenobia hamming it up for the camera.

Paul & Sabina enjoying the good weather

On the way through the channel we spotted Barbara Block's team who are tagging mantas as the rays pass through the channel into and out of the lagoon. They do the tagging while snorkeling, not on SCUBA, since the bubbles from SCUBA can scare off the mantas. The channel is a great place to do tagging while snorkeling since it is not that wide and not that deep.

Robbie Schallert & Ana Guerra tagging mantas in the channel

After dinner on Thursday is "science night" where someone from the group gives a science talk. Tonight the Fish & Wildlife Officer, Lindsey Hayes, talked about his many years working on Johnston Atoll studying birds. We enjoyed the talk while sipping a little wine.

wine with Thursday night science talk