Librarian on Palmyra Atoll: Five dive day

Monday, August 5, 2013

Five dive day

Today Doug and I did 5 dives. Francesco has an ear infection, so he was not able to dive with us. Our first dive was suppose to finish off the tile installation, but we ran into problems. Some of the holes Doug drilled were too close together for the paired plates to fit. I also ended up with one extra tile. Either I missed one of the prepared locations, or we only drilled 9 instead of 10 pairs of holes. We are going to have to go back and do some more drilling, but we may wait until after Francesco's ear is healed since the work goes better with 3 divers instead of 2.

Since we didn't expect to have to drill again, we didn't bring the drill with us. After the first dive Doug did fish counts at sites where he and his fiance, Hillary, did fish surveys about seven years ago. People have observed that it seems less "sharky" than in the past. By repeating the surveys, we may be able verify this observation. For these dives we go down and lay out a 10 meter line. This is the radius of a circle in which Doug records fish for 5 minutes. I just hang out quietly, so I can do some photography as long as I don't use a flash. After that 5 minute count, I roll out a 50 meter line along a depth contour while Doug follows above me counting fish. This is a very slow swim and is suppose to take me 5 minutes to lay it out and another 5 minutes to reel it back in while Doug counts. These are short dives, about a half hour long, so we were able to do 4 of them.

I had a green sea turtle come up to me during one of our safety stop. He was probably less than 2 feet from me before he turned and headed out to sea. I also saw a spotted eagle ray, a tagged gray reef shark, and a couple blacktip reef sharks.

As promised, here are some photos I took yesterday on my shallow 15 foot dive at Penguin Spit.