- I've been
known to ask if I have snot in my eyebrows on more than one occasion
- I always
have a random patch of sun burnt skin somewhere
- I am one
with nature (this means everything I own has a bit of rat pee or gecko
poop on it)
Hurrah! I've logged over 100 dives now. It's with great satisfaction as I write down each dive in my log book and watch the digits go up and up.
Despite the pleasure of racking up the number of dives, most of my dives are survey dives. Survey diving isn't all fun and games. I spend most of my time underwater, floating upside down, precariously holding a rock that I hope isn't a stone fish, looking under a measuring tape and recording centimeter by centimeter what I see on my slate.
For the most part I'm doing a LIT Survey. After rolling out a taunt line of 10 meters I have 45 minutes to inch my way along taking notes of what's directly under the tape while my buddy scans a meter on either side of the tape looking for invertebrates. My slate usually looks like this "10-9.95 ACP-BR-SA -9.87 TA-SA -9.67 PRT-MV-SA" etc.... It's not that interesting. Fortunately I've become somewhat of an expert and can complete my survey within 25mins which gives me some time to swim around and look at the fish afterwards!
I'm also trained to do a BELT Survey and when my name is next to that on the schedule I always squeal with pleasure. It's a lot more enjoyable than a LIT. My buddy and I roll out 50 meters of tape and swim in a zigzag pattern towards and away from the tape along the length of it scanning 2.5 meters on either side for coral diversity. When we see a coral we record it and can disregard it if we see it again. It's basically a checklist of what's there. It's a huge difference from doing a LIT!
On Wednesday's we have our turtle dives, where we take a break from surveying the coral reef and look for turtles. In buddy pairs we are dropped off in specific places over the reef and swim in a U shaped pattern looking for turtles. When we see one we abandon the pattern and follow it while recording its activity. "30 seconds swam north, changed direction 10 seconds swam east. Dived past 16 meters, couldn't follow" type of thing. These are nice dives to swim over the reef and look around rather than concentrate directly on the substrate.
Occasionally we get fun dives where we don't have to record any data at all and can just swim around. Actually, someone (jokingly) asked for instructions on how to do a fun dive since we get to do them so rarely. On these dives, the boys in particular go crazy! One guy took an egg with him (how he managed to kit up and do a backwards roll off the boat without breaking it I don't know) and had threatened another guy he was going to break it on his head during the dive. We were separated from him during the dive but within the last five minutes the groups met up again – unbeknown to the victim. I was witness to it all and wish I'd had an underwater video of the scene. He swam up behind him, grabbed his tank between his knees so the victim was stuck and reached up and cracked the egg on his head! It was straight out of a movie it was so shockingly funny, it was all I could do to keep my regulator in my mouth as I laughed.
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