5 - Plankton Party !

October 7, 2011

First of all, I just wanted you to know that I posted two other blog entries below that I wrote during the week. Don’t forget to read them to keep up with my adventures! It will be like that from now on, I will post multiple entries at the same time.

Yesterday the sun finally came out!!!!! WEEHEE! Well it’ raining again today, but since we hadn’t seen it since we arrived, it felt really good and the mood was completely different. People were hanging in the hammocks, playing games outside or just having a beer on the beach. But like I said, the monsoon is not gone yet and we probably have a couple more days to go with it.

But anyways, here a couple photos of our nice bay with the sun out (photos taken after a dive, which explains the drops)

I was also selected with Ross, Sara and India to do the first plankton pull and turtle nesting expedition! I was scared of getting seasick since we would have had to be on a boat for a long time, and my time in South Africa didn’t go too well with that… But it went really well and we were really lucky and got to be in the sun all morning. First, the boat dropped us to desert beaches and we had to go look for turtle trails. Unfortunately we didn’t see anything… 

Then we went a little off the coast into the Conception Channel, which is a big hot spot for whale sharks, and took 5 plankton samples. It’s basically a net attached to a 50m rope with weights at the end, that you drag over a transect. And of course, GVI has a record board for the fastest puller. It is also very important to get the sample back up quickly since you don’t want the animals from the 50m mark to be mixed up with the animals from the 10m mark.

 I am currently sitting in first place with a time of 1minute and 25 seconds. It was really hard… Picture yourself pulling a 50m rope with 8kgs weight on the end, dragging water on a moving ocean. Yeah. Anyways, I’m proud of myself and hopefully no one will beat me! It’s really rough physically and I legit thought I was going to pass out or throw up because the effort is really sudden and intense.

After such a long morning of labor, we got to jump off the boat right in the channel and it was so much fun. We all did cannonballs and other crazy jumps, because we were so happy to finally be in the sun and in a different diving spot. It was a really fun morning!

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any whale sharks L With the monsoon staying much longer than usual, all the currents are different and the plankton hasn’t been as important as usual. Thus the whale sharks are not there either… Here is a photo of Sara during her plankton pull - i have a video of me during mine but it's too big to upload here.

Other than that, tonight is our first party and we have the weekend off. Most of us are going into Victoria to get the Internet, roupies, party and just get off the base for a bit. Hopefully the monsoon will calm down.

Xxxx

C.