Today, Alexa and I woke up at 5am to watch the sunrise and go for our first morning snorkel. We chose the harbour as our destination, and man was it ever spectacular! The undisturbed dawn waters had huge sea turtles, multiple rays and our first encounter with the reef sharks. We saw 3 black tips - 8 foot beasts that swim up close to you to test if you are edible, but once they detect the size of you (about 7ft with our fins on) they turn away. Freaky at first, but eventually it is a really cool experience! We snorkeled for a good hour, before heading into the showers to clean up for breakfast at 7am.
After breakfast, we spent the entire day in and out of the water, snorkeling to collect data for our group project. You couldn't really call it work even - we had more fun with the snorkeling between our collection sites, and even when we were "on duty" observing, watching the fish come and go from the coral was entertainment enough. In all, we had to collect data 4 times throughout the day, so in between snorkel visits, we lounged on the beach, ate some food and did a couple bits of data analysis to make our final project layout a bit less work later on. It was this day, in combination with day 4, that I burnt my back really badly from being in and out of the water. I'll wait until the next entry to upload that beautiful picture....a week later and I'm still peeling/itching!
After dinner, our next organized activity was the night snorkel. We gathered at the harbour around 7pm, donned glowsticks on our snorkels, and wrist torches, then entered the pitch-black waters. It was seriously scary. The high intensity snorkel lasted only 30 minutes, but you couldn't see more than 5 feet in front of you at any point, making the trip seem much, much longer. Luckily, nothing super scary popped out of the shadows like sharks, but we did see some octopus, multiple sea turtles and one ground shark - the wobbygong shark. It basically rests along the sea floor, camouflaged with the environment. It was sleeping, so that made it a little less scary for us all....
We headed to bed shortly after this, since Alexa, Andrea and I all decided we wanted to get up early again to try and attempt a snorkel around shark alley. We all had caught shark fever, and desperately wanted to see them in their feeding zone. Our tutor told us dawn was the peak feeding time, so we should expect to see more than 3....possibly up to 10!! Needless to say, we were quite excited about the prospect of the next morning's adventures!
The photos I've attached to this post are a couple of us collecting data, the sites and buoys we used as well as a couple of those sea turtles....my underwater camera was an epic fail - I picked up the film today and out of 27 photos, only 10 were exposed enough to see. Damn. At least I can get a couple photos offline from others who posted theirs!!
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