Learning about corals and killing a dive computer

Day 3 08 Oct 2010

The porch cleaning really turned out to be the easiest task in the task list. Nice. My cleaning buddy (our science officer Petchy) swept the porch after breakfast and I mopped it. Took me perhaps 5 minutes. Max.

We started the morning with a lecture on corals - mainly with the Acropora family. We got a list of species in the family and a picture of each during the lecture. Then we wrote the names down on our dive slates and went for a “pointy” dive and tried to find the species that we had just seen in the lecture slides. 

In the classroom

 The first dive was not too difficult as twe did not even do species, just coral growth forms. Otherwise the diving went rather well although our WelshmanGareth had a little stumble. His dive buddy Jesse was pointing out for him a scorpionfish and as it was really well camouflaged Gareth did not spot it and thought he was asking him to identify another coral form by its general form and shape. So Gareth took out his slate and pointed out to his dive buddy that the scorpionfish is a “sub-massive” form of coral. Well, you could call a scorpionfish submassive – but calling it a coral is rather pushing it. :)

Some of the target species: Tubastrea micranthas - handily surrounded by anthias as its name indicates

A "submassive" scorpionfish

After lunch we had another lecture on corals and went into more detail on hard coral types and had another pointy dive. I was rather struggling with the latin names and trying to differentiate the corals from each other.  We only need to learn about 250 species in total and this includes fish – but finding the specific 250 that we are looking for and being able to distinguish them from all the other life forms in the sea (for example, there are over 500 species of fish in this area…) at this stage feels very challenging. I‘ll probably laugh at my difficulty in finding them in the first few days by the time I get to end of my 10 weeks and become a coral guru (I hope at least! Haha. )

I even had my first workout today after the second dive. We are not allowed further from the camp on weekdays and Saturdays than the small shop in the village. This shop is about 300 meters from the camp. Not that far – but it happens to be on top of a steep hill. I managed to run 5 times up and down the hill and around the base building but then I had to give up although it was only 35 minutes of running. I did some situps, weights and stretching after that to get into a good one-hour workout. That made me feel very good about myself. Now, I just have to keep up with doing these workouts.

After dinner we had yet another lecture but this time on educational programmes that Coral cay runs to create awareness of environmental protection in the local communities, in particularly among the school-aged children. It was really interesting to hear from Lea and I’m looking forward to playing a role in our “Fred the Fish” play or going to the schools to do some fun activities with the children – or even having them visiting our base.

The highlight of my day was however that Joe saved my dive computer. I ran out of battery after the first dive on the first day. I really had not checked my battery levels – so stupid of me going for an expedition for 10 weeks!  Luckily our project scientist Joe’s spare battery for his Oceanic  fit my Suunto Vytec and Joe even helped me change it. I was so grateful – and so happy! My computer is back, hooray!  I take back what I said about hating Joe for seeing the whaleshark. Actually I love him, haha.

My Suunto Vytec