Home now and the end of my TCI adventure

I’ve been home now for a week, and still I’m feeling the shock of re-entry into civilization. The cars and crowds of people and buildings are confusing and shocking to me. Hot showers, clean beds, a full fridge and the smells of Christmas keep me from longing for my island home, but what I really miss are the people.

The goodbyes with my SFS friends were very hard and very tearful. Picture about 30 students standing in the middle of a full airport terminal sobbing into eachothers arms and making everyone else in the vicinity look around awkwardly. I didn’t care at all about crying in public. That moment was the culmination of several anxious weeks spent worrying about leaving my new close friends. I think that I’m still in denial about the idea that I may never see some of them again.

 I miss Adrienne’s laugh, Alex’s weird faces, both Jakes’ random hilarious comments, playing bannanagrams with Teressa, getting drunk with Sam, backrubs from Jewell and Connor, dancing with Sarah, Ashley’s encouraging squeezes, Amanda’s singing, Annie’s expression of shock, adventures with Jeff, and so so many more things that I can’t even list. I took a lesson and a memory from each of my 34 peers and feel so much richer for it. 

The more general list of things I miss about living on South Caicos:

• Never wearing shoes- professors and students alike went to class barefoot
• Hardly ever wearing clothes- eh, towels count as clothing right?
• The warmth- screw this winter cold
• The sun- screw these winter clouds
• The beautiful sunrises and sunsets every day, turning sea and sky into a painting
• Sky above me and horizon around me- always a feeling of openness
• Diving- the feeling of effortless flying, of exploring an alien world
• The beautiful wildlife, always new, exciting and graceful
• Feeling completely in the moment- only ever thinking about what new adventures the day will hold, etching every sight in my mind as though it was my last
• Being constantly around friends, always someone to talk to, be with
• The sound of waves to put us to bed, the sounds of roosters to wake us
• The simplicity of our schedule- we were told what we had to do when, so the only things on our minds were the tasks at hand, no weight of worrying, no fretting about scheduling, no back of the mind panic
• No contact with the outside world- the only things we carried were our water-bottles
• Seeing lighting over the ocean
• Counting shooting stars
• Watching orion’s belt climb the sky at night
• Cooking for 50 people together with friends
• The feeling of 82 degree water on my skin
• Signing to someone else under water and knowing exactly what they mean without any words
• Bagging a lionfish by myself- YES!
• Cutting a perfect lionfish fillet
• Finding a beautiful seashell to keep
• Working as a team and completing a project together efficiently and effectively
• Going to sleep exhausted from a day full of fun with friends in the water
• Waking up knowing that I get to do it again

I was incredibly lucky to participate in this program and I want to thank my parents for making that possible as well as the SFS TCI CMRS staff for creating the unique experience I had. I would absolutely recommend this program to any excited adventurer, and know that I will keep and treasure these memories for the rest of my life.

My last dive

Tense excitement as we geared up together this morning for the last time. We were all going to the grotto today, everyone wanted to end with an epic dive. Our dive master said, “Right on top of the eagle ray vortex. Lets dive.” And it was like sliding back into my element, everything was suddenly effortless. I went sans wetsuit today and was so glad I did, the water felt fantastic. Our dive master had been right, we descended right on top of a fleet of 25 or so eagle rays, swimming together in a tight formation. Eagle rays make everything else in the water look clumsy, I never get tired of watching them. The sharks came next, some really large reef sharks peeking in and out of the gloom in the distance and moving about their business below us. When we ran out of eagle rays and sharks and stingrays, we got silly, playing with each other’s bubbles, dancing underwater, clinging to peoples fins so they couldn’t swim, handstands, tank riding, whatever :P The eagle ray fleet came back to see us twice more during the dive, causing a sudden pause in our antics as we watched them pass by. I was holding on to every precious second underwater, and 35 minutes came much too fast. I can’t express how thankful I am that I’ve been able to experience diving the way I have here. Its an incredible and beautiful experience down there and I hope I am lucky enough to keep doing it.

Its very busy around the center right now, it’s a bittersweetness as we experience all of our lasts. Our last community engagement is today, so is our last Saturday night out. I’m sad even as I enjoy it. I’m proud of myself because I’ve gotten our class to paint a very large mural in the center of the commons area. It’s a painting of eagle rays just exactly the way I saw them today, swimming in a pack. There’s still so much to do here, and I don’t want to waste one more minute here on the computer, so I’m going to go get back in the water. 

One. Week. Left.

The ocean looks like a pool of glass today. Every day the ocean and the sky seem to compete with each other to look more colorful. Right now when I look out, I can’t see a horizon, the sky and the ocean are the same bright white. 

I’ve been sitting in this hard chair for 3 or 4 days pretty much straight writing my final paper. I’m still working on it, but currently the title is:Assessing the current status of the red lionfish (Pterois volitans) invasion across habitats in South Caicos, Turks and Caicos Islands. It basically says that the lionfish invasion in South Caicos appears to be worsening as lionfish are getting larger every season in both shallow and deep habitats. It has a couple other points in there, an ontogenetic shift, all condition factors of fish are above 1… I was basically just throwing in other points so that I didn’t have the exact same presentation as everyone else. 

I did go on a second night dive last night. It was a bit chilly even with my wet suit, but it felt so great to get back into the water. We didn’t see any large critters, but it was exciting as always to be diving, and I was fascinated by the coral polyps feeding, the strange tiny crustaceans and the eerie shadows on the ocean floor. The closer we get to December 8th, the more I try to cling to every moment here. Im trying to etch the sights, the smells, the sounds into my memory so that I never lose any of them. Things I still need to do: visit the haunted house on the hill, have a bonfire night with my friends, skate to the local dump, find some awesome conch shells to bring home, take some more pictures and spend as much time in the water, with these friends as I can. 

2 weeks to go and another day lionfish hunting

No way. Two weeks left? I cant believe this. 

So today, another day in the life of a lionfish hunter, caught 11 on the dive today and 16 snorkeling in the seagrass blowouts of longbeach. But I did have an interesting encounter today while we were snorkeling. I was on the edge of the line of people searching for lionfish, we were pretty spread out and lots of people were caught up duck diving for lionfish at the time so no one was in sight underwater. Out of the gloom to the left of me I saw a huge barracuda creeping up on me curiously, about 15 feet away. I turned towards it to get a better look at it and it swam straight for me.  I freaked out and started swimming backwards awkwardly and then jumped as something cruised into my peripheral vision just over my right shoulder. Only two feet from my face, a large eagle ray swam past me and straight at the incoming barraccuda. The barraccuda instantly changed its mind and turned aside, speeding off in a different direction. As i stared, the eagle ray turned and swam back towards me, swam around me in a friendly circle only a few feet from me, and then swam back the way it had come. Such a cool experience, I was awed. I have an eagle ray guardian angel! Maybe it was a patronus? It shocks me that we know so little about these animals too. 

Thanksgiving is tomorrow? My body definitely still thinks its summer time. What’s nuts is that christmas music is going to start popping up in two days… craziness. The food boat didn’t come today :(  so I dont know if we’re even going to have a thanksgiving-ish dinner, but hopefully we’ll find someway to fix it up South Caicos style. 

Search and Destroy Day 3

This morning at 8am, we suited up for our second lionfish hunt dive. The water is cold now in the mornings, so I struggled into my wetsuit before marching down to the dive shed. Its a routine that I’m getting more and more used to. I was a bit hurried descending because the waves were making me pretty seasick and I wanted to get down out of the waves as fast as possible. Almost as soon as we hit the reef, a large lionfish was there waiting to greet us. I dont know why, but my brain was moving… so… incredibly… slowly… forming… thoughts… was… so… hard…? I swam over to try to assist catching the lionfish but all i really did was get in the way. Suddenly, my brain snapped back into focus and I was really embarrassed about being so clumsy. I shook my head out of it and tried to focus on my air intake. I put one hand on my chest and looked at my dive computer, trying to make the air time remaining display as high as I could, slowing down my heart and breathing slowly and shallowly, sipping air. I searched around with my partner Evan, for a while with no luck. Then the whole group came upon a large table ledge, and another pair caught two more lionfish. I was behind them, trying to peer under the ledge to see if they had missed any, and when I turned my head to see the rest of the group (zero peripheral vision is so annoying) there was a lionfish streaking towards me and the shelter of the ledge. I tried to get my net out but all i ended up doing was whacking it as it went by. I swam under the ledge after it and tried to reach it with my net, but couldn’t quite. One of the interns brought a long pole and tried to poke it towards me. Another lionfish came out of nowhere and swam straight towards my face, and I batted it towards the intern with my net. He wasn’t ready for it and it dodged his net and swam under his stomach straight between his legs and out of sight. He squealed into his reg pretty loud when the lionfish’s spines came dangerously close to his groin lol. After a few more minutes of digging, we had to give up on those fish, and I was frustrated. But we kept swimming, it was still only 20 or so minutes into the dive. 

As we were searching, we swam up over a ridge and found a sort of valley, that turned out to be a highway for eagle rays. We saw 6 of them total, swimming in pairs along the valley. I had to tear myself away from staring at them to go back to my task of looking for lionfish. (did i mention that i love this program?) At around this point, Evan switched with one of the two boys who had been hanging back and conserving their air. Our new strategy is to keep two divers in reserve who can tag out the first two hunters who are low on air. Luckily, because I’m a girl, I use less air than the boys do and usually don’t have to worry about that as much. Even with the substituted hunters however, we had to ascend after 55 minutes because everyone was running low. I came up with 920psi, my lowest yet. 

Only an hour after our dive, we went on a snorkel hunt. We took two guest snorkelers with us because we try to rotate in a few people from the land Directed Research Projects so that they can get some time for water. It was a pretty deep site, about 4 or 5 meters, and the current was fairly strong. After about 15 minutes of scanning the bottom and peering into nooks and crannies in the rock, Jeff who was swimming closest to me grabbed my arm and pointed ahead of us. About 12 eagle rays were casually coasting past us in a pack, close enough for the girl at the end of our group to touch them! And off in the distance, four more were swimming in the opposite direction. A few minutes later, we stumbled across a small sleeping nurse shark sitting on the bottom. At last, we spotted a small lionfish hiding in a coral head. It took us 15 minutes of attempted teamwork, ducking down in pairs to finally capture it.

And of course, the most epic story last: I spotted our last lionfish for the day, and called the rest of the team over to help me catch it. After several tries, jabbing into the holes in the coral trying to scare it out, I looked down and recognized the patterning of a spotted moray eel inside of the hole. We continued to jam our nets under the coral, when after a particularly vicious poke by Jeff, we saw the eel thrash around inside of the coral alcove. Then after a pause, the eel poked its head cautiously out of the hole, and then swam the hell out of there. Alli said she could still see the lionfish down there so we duck dived down to try to catch it, but I couldn’t quite see it. The two boys in our group dove down together next to try and catch it and came up laughing. “Its dying!” “what??” “The eel must have taken a bite out of it!” But when Alli went down to investigate, she came up with just a lionfish head. Thats all that there was left! We had aggravated the eel so much that it just chomped the lionfish in half and peaced out. Nature teamwork at its best. 

We had a third snorkel hunt after lunch but it was a bit of a joke, so much hype for only 3 minutes in the water swimming over a tiny reef. 

We came back and dissected our finds afterwards. I’m getting pretty good at filleting :)

Cant wait for the same routine tomorrow, only this time I’m gonna catch one myself!

Best Dive Ever

This morning I was pretty grumpy. I got up a bit late, wasn’t really all together, and was extremely grouchy to discover that my dive was right after morning meeting and I was definitely going to be late. I rushed, jumping into the pool to cram my wetsuit on and got down to the dive shed last. As much as I’m late, I really hate it when I am >:( but then my dive master said, today we’re going to the groto. Suddenly my >:( went to <:D The groto is a special treat for divers because it has all of the coolest big animals. We don’t get to go there often because the site doesn’t have a mooring line so we have to roll off while the boat is still moving and then after the dive we get picked up in the middle of a boat channel. This was first time going. 

Despite the happy prospect of a potentially good dive, I was still grumpy all the way until we descended and I looked down and around me. Normally, on the other dive sites, the ocean floor comes up to greet us and we spend our time swimming through and around the colorful coral formations, up close and personal. The floor at the grotto is at 70ft and the slow sloping underwater hills and valleys instantly gave me the impression of flying over an alien landscape. We were coasting along for a few minutes when I saw two giant shapes appear out of the fog, they were eagle rays! I had never seen eagle rays diving before, and each one had a wingspan of maybe 5 or 6 feet. They crossed in front of each other, flapping gracefully. They look just like majestic birds underwater. Easily my favorite animal from now until forever. We watched them swim right by us in awe and then my dive master pointed again and there was a tiger shark behind us on the other side. For the rest of the dive, every 2 or three minutes a tiger shark or an eagle ray would pass us and I would momentarily forget to breathe. There was also a school of massive horse-eyed jacks  that swam in and around us, coming so close and swimming straight at us, only to turn casually at the last second. At one point I turned my head and saw not only a hawksbill turtle cruising downwards in front of us, but also a nurse shark pacing snakily underneath us. It felt honestly like a dream, as we drifted slowly along the wall with the current. 

Naturally, even though my dive was the best dive of my life, the next group just got back and is telling me they saw a vortex of 40 or so Eagle Rays swimming together on their dive. I guess there is always something cooler to see next time :) 

Happy 11/11/11!!

I’m covered in fish scales right now and my hands smell nasty, but I’m siked about my day so far. 

Yesterday I caught my first lionfish on a snorkel. We work in teams of five while snorkeling, duck diving down as a team to heard the lionfish into one of our nets. The first lionfish we found was under a rock at 3m depth or so in the middle of a seagrass bed and the current was NASTY. Every time I ducked down it took all my strength and air just to reach the rock, let alone try to catch it. We spent 10 minutes diving down over and over, in teams and individually, trying to hold enough air to poke the guy out from under the rock. Finally Jeff dove down and tried to nab it, scaring it away, and I dove down and caught it with my two nets. I was so excited!! 

After we got back with the 2 lionfish we caught total, we dissected them, opened up the stomach contents to be weighed and identified and then filleted them. Suprisingly, both lionfish had whole, identifiable gobies in their stomachs that we squeezed out. 

Today we repeated the procedure, but at a whole new level. We went diving to hunt for lionfish. It was me and all the boys so Evan, Jeff, Connor, Rob and Chris. It was so exciting being down there in teams peering under every ledge.  My dive buddy, Evan, and I saw one almost right away underneath a table ledge but when we reached under to nab it, it swam farther back into the ledge out of reach. Alli was diving with us and about halfway through the dive I saw her go down to look under a promising ledge. I saw her get her nets out and knew she had found one so I went around to the back of the rock to help. I could see the lionfish through a hole in the back and Alli’s nets were too short to reach it, so I poked my net through and together we scared it into a net. I used up my air so much faster than normal because we were swimming pretty hard. We’re actually allowed to stay down for an hour on Directed Research dives but none of it made it that far, I came up with 850psi after 42 minutes (compared to usually coming up with around 1400psi) and Jeff and Chris had to ascend early because Chris ran through almost all of his air. Our whole group caught 3 lionfish today, one was the biggest I had ever seen, 40.9 cm long! I got to dissect the one I helped catch, and it reminded me a lot of when I interned in  Woods hole and got to dissect the live fish to fix them from the inside. We killed them first by stabbing them in the brain with a knife and immediately all the fins stuck straight out and twitched for at least 10 minutes. Mine was a very ripe female full of eggs (yayyy! I’m saving the reef from sooo many lionfish!) and she had two gobies in her stomach. I did my best with the fillet, it wasn’t too bad but I left a bit of meat above the spine that I’ll have to work on getting next time. It was really tough because the knives are dull, but a good craftsman never blames his tools right?

We’re going out again in a few hours on a snorkel this time, I hope I catch another!!

I got in!!

So for the last week, we’ve all been really stressed here at the center because Directed Research Projects start on Thursday and only a certain number of people can do each project. They were picked based on merit I think. We had to write justifications for ones that we wanted to get into, and could write as many as we wanted. The projects offered are as follows:

Lionfish Hunting: This one is conducted by Allison Candelmo or Alli, our Marine Resource Management prof. Data is collected on lionfish caught either diving or snorkelling. 

Coral Monitoring: This one is conducted by Annemarie Kramer, our Marine Ecology Professor. Students do transects of corals and focus on coral diseases

Eagle Rays: Also conducted by Annemarie, students go out snorkeling to collect data on Eagle Rays, trying to find out what habitats they prefer and other behavior patterns.

Dock Landings: These students have to interact closely with locals and hang out at the docks while fishermen come home to collect data on stomach content and sizes of fish caught. This one is run by both Alli and James our Environmental Policy prof. 

Local Interviews about Environmental Policy: This is a freeform project where students interview locals about their views on the environment and on environmental policy. They can write about pretty much whatever they want and this project is run by James.

For my first 3 choices I picked 1)lionfish 2) coral 3) eagle rays. And I wrote justifications for all three of them for fear that I would end up in one of the two land based projects. A full third of us was going to have to stay on land though, and everyone in the center has been biting their nails for days. 

I came back from bathing on the dock and just found out…. I GOT MY FIRST CHOICE!!! 

I’m so so excited. Im going to go and celebrate now. Get ready for another month of awesome lionfish-hunting with my best friends :D

Sunday Adventuring and a Night Dive!

So today, the three musketeers (Jeff, Alex and I) went on a snorkeling adventure. The water was especially clear, and unusually cold. And by cold I really mean about 81 degrees. We stretched the rules a little bit and swam pretty far off of one of the nearby beaches into the boat channel and saw some amazing patch corals. There were some colonies of lobe coral taller than I was, and we saw some very intricate fire corals too. We saw some very large bar jacks, probably two feet long, as well as a big sting ray buried in the sand. We saw a few fish I’ve never seen before, like a sea chub and a spotted file fish and a cow fish with little blue horns. We also saw a tiny cute flounder buried in the sand only a few feet off the beach with tiny blue spots. 

I went on my first Night dive a few days ago too. We were so so pumped. In the pre-dive talk they reminded us that even though it might seem scary because its dark, stay calm and act just like you would on a day dive. By this point i was terrified, and very sure that i would swim into a 10ft shark or face first into a  giant fire sponge in the dark.

As we geared up, I triple checked all my stuff. My dive camera, for some unknown reason has at last decided to die, so i didnt bring it. It was really crappy anyways and every single dive as soon as I got down there it would decide to not work for some reason. This was my second time ever wearing my wet suit. I was very glad I had worn it when I got cold later in the dive even with my 3mm suit on. We changed up the dive groups so that there was a dive master for every 3 students instead of for every 6, and so my dive buddy was actually one of the interns this time.

It was pretty scary going down, free fall without any visibility is very confusing, and i descended a lot faster than I thought. On the other hand though, I realized that the visibility wasn’t much different than up on land at night. I could still make out the outlines of people around me even when i wasn’t shining my light on them. My group dove the arch, my favorite, and boy was it different at night. Everything everywhere was alive with crawling, squirming, twitching things. All the coral had their polyps out and waving, tiny hermit crabs and other crustaceans were having epic battles, meanwhile all the fish were dozing in crevices around the reef. I saw what looked like a giant daddy long legs but actually turned out to be a tiny  crab crawling around under the arch. While I was busy examining the little guy, Charlie, my dive buddy, tapped my shoulder and pointed above my head. I looked for what he was pointing at, coral, hmm coral, OMGAGIANTCRABRIGHTOVERMYHEAD. I almost swallowed my reg, there was a crab as big as my head on the ceiling of the arch 6 inches from my face. I heard Rob, one of the students in my dive group, let out a giant bubble as he laughed at my reaction. We also saw a very large lobster parading bravely across the sand as he never would have during the day. A large green sea turtle also swam up to us. I descended a little bit to greet him and get a better look and he swam right up to a foot away from me confidently and as he approached, just side-stepped me easily and went on his way.

It ended much too soon. We went up for the 3min safety stop and I started noticing that my ears were making rubber ducky noises and squeaking a bit. I motioned to charlie, (by the way that was definitely the hardest part, doing hand signals in the dark, you have to point your light at yourself, without blinding yourself, and using only one hand) that I was having issues equalizing and he came down to where I was. Normally, your ears equalize on their own on the way up, and when they don’t, its called a reverse squeeze. (in simple terms) I took it very slowly, pulling on my ears and turning my head, I had plenty of air so that wasn’t an issue, but I felt self-conscious about going so slowly. Charlie was really great, he had me hold on to the mooring line and as we walked up it hand-over-hand, he kept motioning to me to slow down, take my time. After about 6 or 7 minutes I finally made it up to the surface. My ears still hadn’t equalized, but they didn’t hurt either. It took maybe 5 or 6 hours for my ears to go back to normal. Charlie was saying that I probably got congested a bit while I was down there because it was cold, and thats why I had issues equalizing on the way up. 

Anyways, I should go, I have my first of three finals tomorrow and I don’t even know what its going to be on… time to go study! :)