i'm beat (part 2)

so for those who have been asking here's a picture of me


hee. yeah i know i'm in trouble. double hee

so this isn't the best picture in the world but i think it's cool because there are two color morphs of grouper, the normal leopard pattern and the golden. noone really knows what's up with the golden. people used to say oh the goldens are always male or they are so rare or they are the "kings" of the group. none of that seems to be true. now when we're watching spawning what we seem to see as far as courtship behavior is that the males are all agitated and swimming rapidly and bumping into each other until they bump into a female and then they chase her. well, this gets the attention of the other males and they all try to chase her and be the one (ones) closest to her when she spews out her eggs. but the females are so fat and full of eggs they're sluggish and they hide from the males until of course they get found andthen the race is on. so here is a picture of a golden FEMALE fat with eggs starting to get chased by some males


so unfortunately our decision to go ahead and go to the island wasn't as successful as we had hoped. the visibility was still bad and everyday there were strong winds all day and all night from the south. it was hard to keep camp together, get work done and dive and sleep. we did our best but sometimes the current was so strong we could only manage one dive in the afternoon because it simply wasn't safe or productive to do another. we did have some good dives in the morning and saw some cool stuff when i did my fish counts.

this turtle swam right by me then went down under the rock and just started SCRATCHING himself. i think i heard him purr...

i love these fish. it's a spotted scorpionfish. he tries to trick things into thinking he's a rock.

this stingray was HUGE!!! i know there's no scale in the picture but just imagine that the head and the wing part was large enough to cover my entire body like a blanket. NOT KIDDING!

so we did the best we could and dove and worked 14 days straight and finally got all our crap off the island.

we headed back and CRASHED. then the next day was a day of rest (may 28) and then sunday i had to pick up new volunteers at the airport. and, it's been, um, interesting....