last island trip evah

so sad

so this was the last island trip for my project and possibly the last island trip evah. next year at this time i will be **fingers crossed** almost finished with my thesis and preparing to graduate so i won´t be here in loreto.

*sniff*

so i´m very glad that this island trip went very very well. this time we had four people: Adam, Catherine (catarine to the neighbor kids) and Joe.

Now not many people know that Lance Armstrong uses the alias "Joe." and he often randomly volunteers to help out poor little grad students with their projects.


"Joe" arrived on the same flight that Adam was returning on from LA. Adam returned for a couple of days to take in a graduation and a wedding that included a madcap drive up and down the state of california. While he was gone, Catherine and I worked very hard.


i don´t have any pictures of the trip out to the island because i was shooting video but once we got there on thursday afternoon and unloaded the gear it was essential to take part in the luxuries this site offers


since adam was recovering from a bad cough joe and catherine dived with me at this site. in the mornings we did transects and in the afternoon we tried to document spawning. the first morning out catherine and i were a bit distressed when we went down to do transects and their was a giant gillnet stretched across the entire reef from 60 feet deep up to 45 feet deep.

whoever put out the nets must have just done so that morning because most of the fish were still alive.

i started to cut one out with my tiny dive knife when catherine shoved me out of the way and busted out her machete and started doing serious damage to the net. all told i think we released about 20 parrotfish and then we had to stop. it was maddening how many there were and we were running out of air. plus catherine was spending half her time cutting me out of the net. i had so much stuff attached to my BC - slate, transect tape, camera that any little thing that touched the net would get caught in it.

on our second dive we went to another part of the reef on the same side of the island to actually do transects and ran into ANOTHER net. we cut a few fish out of that one too. now normally i would not mess with a person´s ability to make a living but the nets were illegal. there were three net sets in a restricted area (near the grouper spawning site) so my only regret is that when we tried to tangle up the nets they wouldn´t tangle up so much and i kept getting caught in it in the process. yes, i know, i´m your hero.

when we dove in the afternoon, they were TOTALLY doing it

it´s very hard to take pictures and video of these guys. first the water is normally very murky and even though the viz this year was amazing you still have to deal with low-light conditions and long distances between you and your subject. another problem is that the action can start at about 40-60 feet and culminate at 20-30 feet or even sometimes break the surface and it´s too dangerous for a diver to follow them that quickly from depth to the surface. so i just do the best i can with what i got.

one afternoon when it was catherine´s turn to dive in the afternoon to see SPAWNING! (when i had mentioned the original dive plan with catherine diving in the morning to do transects and joe in the afternoon to be my buddy during spawning since he was new and i hadn´t trained him to do transects catherine busted out with "SPAWNING! I NEED TO SEE SPAWNING!" so i had to rearrange my entire sampling scheme and train joe just so CATHERINE could see SPAWNING!)

ahem

anyway, this giant school of tuna came up past us and just split in half to go around us and we were in this huge pocket between the two sides of them.



it was awesome.