Today
I got up a bit early before breakfast to head over to the CEI offices so that I
could pay for Erica’s accommodations here at CEI. It wasn’t until I stepped in the door to the
office that I realized that no one was working today since it is Sunday. After realizing this, I headed off to
breakfast and eventually down to the boathouse to get our gear ready for
another day of fish surveys out at the patches.
We took our time at breakfast which turned out to be a good thing
because both of the boats our group was supposed to use today were being fueled
at the marina. It took a bit longer than
usual today for our boat drivers to fuel because they got stuck behind this huge
private yacht that took over a thousand gallons of fuel to fill its tank. My guess is that this yacht is not the most
fuel efficient boat in the world. We had
to wait a while but once the boats came back to CEI, Lillian and I loaded up
and headed out to the patches once again to do some more fish surveys. Once we got out to the patches, we had to
re-anchor four times at our first site which was pretty memorable. The current and wind were going in very
different directions very strongly today so it took a few tries to get the boat
to hang in the correct direction near our first reef. After that we plunged in and got started with
our survey on the first reef (myself pictured surveying the first reef of the
day).
We
had a variety of patches that we visited today that had varying densities of
fish. There were a couple of reefs that
were particularly memorable that we surveyed today. The first was this patch that was large and
covered with live coral (pictured here).
It was cool to see this much live coral out here and as a result, the
fish community was abundant and beautiful.
It was so abundant that we decided we would not count all the fish on
the reef but instead identify all the species present on the reef and measure
the fish that were representative for each species. After this reef we headed off to another reef
that was also large but looked much different in structure and species
composition.
This
reef seemed to be moving because there were so many fish on it. In particular, the reef was covered with
juvenile and adult grunts of a few different species (pictured here). It was impossible to count all the grunts
present on this reef so we just made some really rough estimates. We figured that combined the two species of
grunt that we saw totaled over a thousand fish alone on this reef. There of course were many more individuals of
different species on this reef which made this dive a bit longer than
average. I had a hard time with this
reef in part because of its size but mostly because of the number of
grunts. Their presence in such great
numbers here caused many of the reef associated fish to hide which made our job
of counting and sizing fish much more difficult. Afterward we did a few more quick reefs
before heading back into CEI. At the
second to last reef we surveyed, Lillian finished her surveys a bit before me
and took some photos of me at work counting and sizing fish (pictured here). Our evening was quite ordinary other than us
doing dish crew again so I am not going to comment too much more. I need to Skype Erica to finalize some
details about her trip before I go to bed so I must sign off. Until later. 
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