Island trip...and more!

Before tony arrived we had been busily installing the helical anchors, moorings and collectors. We usually make the collectors here in the yard and Glenn tries to help.


Here’s a picture of Gordon taking a picture of glenn "helping".

When Tony got here we took him out to set up collectors on the south of Carmen. Here’s Tony spinning an anchor into the ground using rebar with all the collectors attached to him. So now I have 5 sites each with 3 moorings and collectors.
as you can see, the viz isn´t that great.
Here’s a freshly installed collector at about 15 feet below the surface.

Eventually (hopefully), the little baby groupers will find their way into them and I can capture them. So far nothing has arrived but that’s actually a good thing.

While getting ready for the island tony and adam insisted that I shave my head. So they held me down and did it.

Ok so it didn’t really happen that way. Tony shaves his head with clippers and I was commenting on how I wanted to shave my head before I came down here and Sandy said no way. And I said you’re not the boss of me! And then I did not shave my head. But after weeks of diving and losing my hairties and my hair flying in my face or being ripped out by the zipper and Velcro on my wetsuit I kept mentioning wanting to cut my hair. So when I saw tony buzzing his hair before going to the island I mentioned it again and adam said DO IT! You talk about it everyday just do it. So I said OK! Lets DO IT! So they proceeded to cut my ponytail off and then taper the back up to the top. After he was done I honestly didn’t care what it looked like because IT FELT AWESOME! Although it did look kinda swell even though he didn’t have the tapering tool for the buzzers. so then when we came back i tried to shape it a little more and i ended up making a big gash in the back like a dork and so tony had to fix that so here´s my eraserhead


So we head out to the island and im running around and it’s hot and I forgot to put sunscreen on and for the first time since we’ve been here I’m wearing a tank top. Normally the panga we take has a large shade tarp but Rafa had to find someone else to take us since his new motor hasn’t been delivered yet so no shade tarp, no long hair on the back of my neck and no sleeves. Well I got burnt. Pretty bad. And I was miserable the next couple of nights when I’d go to sleep and roll over on my back. FIRE!

The plan for working on the island is that we would do some afternoon dives to document spawning and then morning dives to do fish counts and invertebrate surveys. We arrived on the island the 12th, set up camp and got ready to do an afternoon dive. I couldn’t believe how calm the water was. It’s normally never like this this time of year. The visibility was still bad and I wasn’t able to film much but the grouper were definitely tere in large numbers and large sizes again this year.
The next morning, the 13th (my BIRTHDAY for those of you who haven’t been paying attention….lol) Adam and I go out to do some morning dives and head over to the southside of the point to do surveys. But before we do surveys I tell him I want to head down the reef along the bottom to look for GARROPA, which is the gulf grouper, a very LARGE grouper. So the visibility clears up the deeper we go and we’re cruising along when a large dog snapper flies past us. Adam points with a look on his face like ‘was that it? And I say no and write DOG SNAPPER on the slate. We continue on down and then BLAM there they are, three large GARROPA. I turned around to see if adam had seen them and by the look on his face I could tell that he had. So I’m stoked the garropa are there and I’m trying to chill and let them come close so I can finally get my holy grail of fish photos, a clear shot of GARROPA. But I just can’t get the shot, they seem to know to stay just out of range when all of a sudden I see this HUGE jack swim past us and then another and another and I turn around to get adam’s attention and notice that they are all AROUND us just circling and circling and im just snapping away with my camera and they just stay for like 3 to 4 minutes and I notice that the GARROPA are approaching us and are hanging out JUST outside the circling fish.

i´ve selected the square with the garropa and brought out more detail so you could see they WERE there but you couldn´t see them that well in the photo.

You can see how close they are. Here’s the first shot at full wide angle


Still circling


and then they leave and we were looking at each other like ohmygosh did you SEE that?

It was amazing. So we’re swimming around some more and then they come back again and do the same thing again and it’s just crazy having these hundreds of HUGE fish circling you and I look up and they’re STILL COMING! You can see them coming down to us from the surface. so this pic is just looking straight up to the surface


Basicly we didn’t get any transects done on that dive and when we got back to the boat I was so happy and just said HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! And adam laughed and he said ok I was going to ask if that was totally amazing and then I was worried you would say oh that happens all the time so I’m happy to know that it doesn’t because that was awesome. When we got back to camp and told Tony, Tony said oh wow how cool! I want to see that!

Which would be possible since Tony was going to be doing the morning dives the next day. Sadly though, the next morning we went back to that same spot and the viz was puro guacamole all the way down to the bottom and we couldn’t see a thing. We did the transects and went and did two more dives and got work done but the viz was bad and we didn’t see anything exciting like the jacks again. It didn’t really surprise me but it was worth a try.

On the way back because it was so calm I decided to check out these caves
that I’ve seen but the water was always too rough to go into them. This is a nice picture of Tony in the cave

Looking out from the cave

I was surprised there wasn’t stuff in them like big rays or maybe even a nurse shark hanging around on the bottom. Of course, I’ve been diving here for 6 years and I’ve yet to see a live shark in the water, only in fishing pangas.

Speaking of fishing for shark, at the palapa a couple of weeks ago one of the sport fishermen caught a hammerhead. A BABY hammerhead, killed it and then when he got to shore he said he didn’t want it. I hate those people. But to emphasize how small this animal was I had adam pick it up and hold it for scale. And I’m taking the picture and I’m so angry this guy killed the shark but then didn’t want it. It’s bad enough that things are being overharvested but to overharvest and then WASTE IT! Ack makes my blood boil. So I didn’t even notice until I downloaded the pictures to the computer that adam is SMILING this huge ol’ cheezing smile and I yell at him! Adam, what the hell!! LOL! I’m trying to document bad fishing practices and you have this big ol’ smile on your face!!! And he says oh dude I’m really sorry. And he seemed really sorry and then he said but then you should know better than to hand a shark to a Chinese person! I picked it up and thought YUM!


Which is probably true. I’ve never seen a human being put away as much food as he does. Right here he´s eating that half pan of cold annie´s mac and cheese. And the ironic thing is, he’s LOSING WEIGHT!!! Yeah, it’s totally not fair.

Later that afternoon Adam and I go out for the afternoon dives and the first dive at the spawning site the viz is so bad that we could barely see in front of our faces. We were trying to find the mooring that Tony and I installed that morning and at one instant a huge grouper sideswiped adam and he was shocked, took a good look at it as it swam away and then he said I was gone. At the same time I found the mooring and look behind me and Adam is gone. In reality we were probably only about 10 feet from each other but it was just so green. So we did the standard look for a minute then surface and decided that diving again in this spot wouldn’t accomplish anything since we’re supposed to be observing the grouper and we couldn’t see. Just at that moment off the point we see HUNDREDS of dolphins leaping so high out of the water and I say well while I’m making my decision as to what to do next LET’S GO OVER THERE! So we headed in the direction of the dolphins and they just came right over to us and were riding off the bow of the boat and jumping and leaping and going crazy. I told adam that earlier on the dives with tony I could hear the dolphins squeeking and chirping so they’ve been around all day pretty much. We hung out with the dolphins for about 10 minutes then they started moving on so we headed back to the south side of the point to see if the viz was any better over there. It was slightly better so I said let’s just see if the grouper are active on this side as well. We descended and were cruising around and didn’t see as many grouper on this side as the other but there were lots of yellow snapper chasing each other around so I was thinking that this side the snapper spawn and the other side the grouper spawn. Just when we get to the exact spot we saw the GARROPA yesterday I see a single big jack glide past us and I turn around to see if adam saw it and as I’m turning I see hundreds behind adam and he’s grunting to get my attention. And once again the jacks just came streaming down to us and were just circling and circling. This time I had my video camera so I was able to get some on film and then like before they just headed back up to the surface. I couldn’t believe it and when we got back to the boat Adam said “man I just don’t have the heart to tell tony that it happened to us again!”

but of course we did tell him…