starts and stops

we arrived in loreto safely and found Ivette to give us the keys to the house and proceeded to try to start getting some work done. easier said than done.

the first day we launched the boat we drove down to Puerto Escondido, but that was only after I had cancelled the first day of diving because the weather report said wind gusts up to 25 kph. it was very calm that day. so the day we actually launched it wasn't super rough but it was a bit choppy and the visibility was puro guacamole. when we got to the launch ramp i used last year was closed off and we were directed to the other side of the port to use the new ramp with its NEW PRICE!! $286 PESOS!!! PER DAY!!! what the heck? that's $30 bucks a day to launch. my tinytinytiny boat. ack. so i decided until i could find the proper person to talk to about the price, we would launch from loreto (FREE) and work at Isla Coronados.


i like Coronados because the east side of the island is all rock formed from lava flow. it looks way cool


this is heading out of the muelle (harbor) early in the morning. before the sun went into the clouds it was a GIANT red disk on the horizon. so bummed i missed it.


pretty flowers. oh hey what a cool truck in the background!

so we were able to get some dives in and then DUHN DUHN DUHN i could dive because i had **coughfemalecough** issues. and then we were able to start up again and then sarah got an ear infection.

on the otolith front unfortunately


there's just a lot of standing around.


there's been an influx of squid and therefore dorado so now the fishermen are going after the dorado. but they're not catching so much becuase there is soooo much squid that they're not biting. one captain told me that they just throw bait at them and they're not interested. and then when he finally hooked one it threw up a stomach full of squid. the only people that are fishing for leopard grouper are the commercial guys. sarah found a guy with two huge buckets of grouper at the muelle and asked them if we could measure and take the otoliths and they were saying um no and then when i arrived they only let me measure two of them and absolutely positively had no interest in letting me cut the heads open because they sell them whole to the pescaderia per kilo. i tried to explain how i do it and what i take and NONONO. buh bye.

so then i grabbed one of my captain friends and asked him to go to the pescaderia to buy cabrilla. i bought the two biggest ones. this is the biggest one right before he filets it.


if you can guess how much two grouper that are 89 and 83 centimeters long (about 13 kilos/27 pounds weighed together) cost then you can probably guess why they're fishing the hell out of them.