God's Been Good to Me

Out on the chum boat this morning, I came across a song I don't recall listening to before. It's a song by Keith Urban called "God's Been Good to Me." I know most the lyrics refer to Tennessee or country music but the chorus seems so appropriate for here and now. The chorus goes: 

He put me, smack dab in the middle of Paradise, 

In the heart of the city where my dreams would come alive. 

And everything I have, and everything I see, 

Is just another reminder, God's been good to me.

Now, I realize just about every single day how lucky I am to be here in South Africa doing what I'm doing, but the song still got stuck in my head and I couldn't help thinking of it over and over again all through our beautifully clear, sunny day, especially in terms of everything that's happened over the last couple years since I started university and have gotten to do so many things I never imagined. 

He put me, smack dab in the middle of Paradise,

Summer of 2010, research trip in the Philippines.

In the heart of the city where my dreams would come alive.

November 2010, presenting our Philippines sea cucumber
 research at the Murdock Undergraduate Science Conference.

And everything I have,

The sisters and I in Utila this summer.

And everything I see,

Cheetah walk at Tenikwa in October.

Is just another reminder,

Blue shark dive at Simon's Town.

God's been good to me.

Cage diving

Heading Home

Sunrise at the airport

My remaining time in Honduras is now being measured in hours. We've completed the first portion of our sojourn back to the states. Emily, Sarah, and I left Utila early this morning on an itsy-bitsy plane. I was placed in the copilot's seat and hoped that the pilot wouldn't have a heart attack or anything like that. We flew first to La Ceiba and then to Tegucigalpa. Due to reasons which remain a mystery, to fly out of Teguc at noon on one day requires a flight from Utila leaving the morning before. So we had landed and collected baggage in Teguc by 8:30 am and we don't fly the rest of the way home until noon tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of my family and friends again. 

Anyone else know how to fly this thing?

Is this standard navigational equipment for a small
plane? I'm more used to seeing this on a dashboard of
a car...

Oh yeah, and remember those hatchlings I sat on the beach waiting for all last week? Yeah... They hatched. According to the report I got from those still on Utila, they got a call right about the time we were landing in Teguc. It was Gene calling to tell them that our nest was hatching. Yes, at the last, I missed the turtles by two hours.

Scuba Tune-up

The girls went down to Utila Dive Center this afternoon and did a Scuba Tune-up. They reviewed all the skills they learned back in their Open Water courses in preparation for starting Advanced Open Water tomorrow. For the course, they have Maya as an instructor (the same instructor we worked with for Robyn's Rescue course) and she worked with them today for the tune-up. Robyn and I snorkeled around the dock and took photos from the surface while they worked. I'm signed up to be a DMT on their course and it will knock out one of the last things on my checklist for completing my own course. 

As for my own course, I'm almost done! I took and passed my second exam while the girls were doing their tune-up. I have to complete the map that I started a couple days ago and enter the Coral Watch data. That, paired with leading a dive during the Advanced course, will be all I need to be done!! 

Finding gear

Setting up gear under Maya's watchful eye

Practicing skills underwater

"Sisters, sisters..."

We have house guests again! This time, it's my two little sisters. Ok, fine, for the sake of exactitude and the aforementioned sisters who will argue with the term "little" (they're both as tall or taller than me), my younger sisters. Sarah and Emily flew in this afternoon and they'll be leaving at the same time I do. 

Yup, I'm getting down to nearly single digits of days left on Utila. Anyway, still have some diving left (I'm helping on the girls' Advanced Open Water course) and hopefully a nest of turtle hatchlings!! 

Our ATV can comfortably fit four with a little creative
seating arrangement. We look like natives now!

Emily joining us in our baleada dinner.

100 Dives and Counting

This afternoon, I logged dive number 100! I have now spent more than 3 days of my life underwater. It was beautiful weather for a dive and Black Coral Wall had awesome visibility. It's also one of my longest dives to date at an hour and 25 minutes long. I love tropical diving! I worked on a map of the dive site as part of my DMT requirements and then we just swam around till the class on our boat was ready to leave. 

Oh, and if anyone was wondering, I use an Olympus Stylus Tough for an underwater camera. It's rated to only 33 ft but that's deep enough to reach the top of the reef and it can take some nice shots. (The camera can survive a deeper dive but the buttons don't work due to the ambient pressure. I had it on a dive a few days ago where we ended up with a maximum depth of 65 feet. It wouldn't turn on at depth but it worked perfectly fine once we ascended.)

A juvenile parrotfish eating

A Flamingo Tongue on a piece of coral

Black Coral. What the site is named for and a very
valuable coral if you dare risk the fine if you're caught with it.

My dive buddy

Fire coral. Don't touch!

Four-eye Butterflyfish

Practicing blowing bubble rings. Absolutely a required
 dive skill in order to be awesome.

These Gray Angelfish showed up as we were blowing
our bubble rings. They were only about a foot and
a half away from us.

My beautiful bubble ring! I'm finally getting really good at them.

The Utila Diet

Do you need to lose weight? Do you want to lose weight on a tropical island? Well then, our diet plan is for you! Our specialists have created it to cater to your needs exactly. Just follow these easy steps for pain-free weight loss! First, find a tropical island and take a trip for a few weeks. Second, sit up on the beach all night waiting for turtles, snacks are optional and do make the time go faster. Even better, find a location waiting for sea turtles which requires walking up to 8 miles each night. Third, recoup from the night on the beach by sleeping during the day. Fourth, wake up with enough time to eat a meal and head right back to the beach. Finally, if you can contrive to contract a GI issue or two, this can speed up the process. If additional activity levels appeal, diving courses can provide exercise without increasing risk of heat stroke. Try our new, patented, proven weight loss method*. 

In other news, dive festival is in full swing. Yesterday's activities included a peak performance buoyancy workshop (we didn't attend since we both did these exercises as part of our diving courses) and a volleyball tournament (sounded too hot so didn't attend that either). I don't think Robyn and I will be vying for the "most active participant" award. Anyway, with the best intentions, we set an alarm last night and went to bed ready to be at UDC by 7am for a deep dive. At 7:40, Robyn jabbed me to say that it was 7:40, we had missed the boat, and I might as well go back to sleep. At noon, when we finally woke up the rest of the way, we were disappointed to see posts on Facebook excitedly recounting the dolphins the dive boat had seen on the deep dive that morning. Well, we'll set several more alarms tonight and hopefully be awake in time for tomorrow morning's dive. 

*Not all claims are accurate or backed by clinical studies. Also, apologies if you were hoping for an expose on the native diet of Hondurans on the Bay Island of Utila. 

Mystery Solved

If you recall, a couple weeks ago, we had a visit from Ninja Turtle. This resulted in The Mystery of the Disappearing Turtle. Well, Nancy Drews that we are, we've solved the case. Or maybe Lindsey can be Nancy and Robyn and I can be the Hardy Boys... but I digress. 


Tonight and last night we had the same turtle visit the beach. No, she has not yet laid eggs. She has, however, dug plenty of nests. Last night, she dug five body pits, three of which had nests as well. On her first crawl tonight, she dug ten body pits with nine having nests. When she showed up again around 2 am, she dug four more body pits with three nests. This turtle is insane. We watched her for no less than five hours, tonight alone. 


The manner in which she showed up tonight was also unusual. Around 9:30, Scott (a BICA volunteer), Robyn, Lindsey, and I were laying around talking on our tarp on the beach per normal. Scott abruptly sat up and stared toward the ocean, bewildered to see a stick heading towards him. It was then that he noticed a turtle was making its way up the beach and had the stick somehow wedged between her carapace and flipper (we still don't know how that occurred, the stick fell off shortly after). Not wanting to startle her, we simply hunkered down flat on the tarp as the turtle crawled by not three feet away. She then proceeded to crawl to a palm tree even closer to the tarp and begin digging. When she got tired of that hole, she moved further towards the woods and closer to the hammock where Gene (a BICA worker) was sleeping. This process continued for the next three hours. Robyn, Scott, and I got a spectacular view of the turtle when she crawled back towards the tarp, passing a foot from us and bumping into the duffle bag Scott was crouched behind. Of all the crazy turtles we have encountered on the beach, we feel this is the craziest. We also feel that we have substantial evidence against the local theory that a sea turtle, if it smells humans, will return spooked to the ocean. 


The solving of our mystery, though, comes with the witnessing of three exits from the beach. Namely, this is the fastest turtle we have ever seen. Last night, when Chel tried to touch her to put in a flipper tag, she bolted. I do mean bolted. It took a flying tackle from Lindsey and Robyn to lay hands on the turtle. When we finally let her go, she skittered down to the water faster than I would have thought possible. Same with the first exit tonight. The second exit was even more impressive since she charged down the beach, straight towards Scott, causing him to sprint (yes, I do mean sprint) out of her way. You're missing out if you've never seen a grown man run from a charging sea turtle. Scott maintains that she was also making some sort of hissing noise that he found more terrifying than her speed, which really doesn't help the amount of laughter we get from the situation. 


Back to our case. Normal sea turtle tracks show heavy drag marks in the middle from the carapace with very distinct marks from the front flippers on either side. When this turtle is moving so fast, however, hardly any carapace track can be seen and the flipper marks are widely spaced and indistinct. The flipper marks, in fact, look remarkably like the indentations made by our feet as we wander about the beach. Our theory is that our speedy turtle and ninja turtle are one and the same. If she bolted that first night, we could easily have heard just the briefest rustle as she moved out of the bushes and she would have been long gone in the ocean before we knew she had entirely left the beach. The other strange bit had been that we never found tracks of her leaving the beach. If she was moving fast, though, it seems plausible that we simply didn't know what to look for and obliterated the indistinct tracks the first time we walked through the area desperately trying to see where she'd gone. 


Case closed. 

Bugs!

If you know me very well, you probably know I'm normally not very bothered by bugs. For the purpose of this discussion, we won't be using the scientific definition of bug (ie, a special group of insects displaying certain qualities that make them "true bugs"). Instead, we'll be using Dr. Zoolittle's* definition which, if I remember the spiel correctly, is, "Anything that makes you go, *shudder with appropriate accompanying noise.* It could be your brother, your mother-in-law, your ex-boyfriend." So, not really bothered by bugs (or my brother, incidentally. You'll have to wait on my verdict about the other two as I currently have neither.) For example, I woke up last night on the beach to find a decently large spider sitting on the stump near my head. Not bothered by it. Instead, I wished I had a camera handy so I could take a picture of it. 


I do, however, take issue with biting bugs. I don't mind bugs like spiders which will bite if you threaten or provoke them. I mind the ones that bite for the purpose of sucking my blood. I especially mind if they hurt while biting and even worse are the ones that create an itchy welt. Overall, the Mosquito Bite Counter has gone down since getting back to Utila. I've had a few random bites, but nowhere near as many as that first week. On the beach, the worry is sand flies. Up till a couple nights ago, however, we had a steady breeze all night that kept bugs away. Not tonight, though. The wind cut out around 2 am and the sand flies promptly arrived and proceeded to feast upon Lindsey, Robyn, and I. With bug spray working depressingly poorly, we decided to leave the beach at 3 am. I've never seen us pack up so fast! 


*Dr. Zoolittle was a character who gave an animal show at the San Diego Zoo. I believe they still have the show, but, last time I saw it, they'd changed the actor and it just wasn't the same.

Picky Turtle's Return

On the 3 am walk, Chel and I found turtle tracks. We could tell, via the flipper tags, that she was the same turtle that false crawled (came onto the beach without nesting) last night. Tonight, or rather this morning, she actually nested. When we found her, she had already dug out the hole and laid most her eggs. Since she was already tagged and photographed last night, that cut down on our work and, thus, the total amount of time we spent dealing with her. She laid 133 eggs and we collected the rest of our data without incident. Well, mostly without incident. We had some trouble getting our field scale to cooperate. When it finally gave us a reading, we realized that, in pushing buttons randomly, trying to make it work properly (this is, of course, the highly scientific and approved method of dealing with faulty/annoying equipment when the usual recourse of smacking the stupid thing is ill advised), we had recalibrated the scale so that each egg was reading roughly 1/5 of its actual weight. 


The work tonight, though, raised some other questions that have come up each time we see and interact with a turtle. The Bay Islands Conservation Association (BICA) has the unenviable job of trying to enforce conservation practices in Honduras. Honduras has some laws in place to protect endangered species, such as sea turtles, but laws are only as good as the enforcement and there is nearly a complete lack of such follow through. That is why institutions like BICA are important. BICA has volunteers during the day and night during turtle nesting season. A volunteer, like Chel, may be on the beach six nights a week. They certainly earn my respect for doing this with no real return. The issue we have run into is when some of these volunteers make themselves self-proclaimed turtle experts. 


We've been working with two people, specifically, who have some erroneous ideas. There are also a few practices we've observed that indicate the data that BICA has reported may in incomplete/inaccurate. The first problem we ran into was that Chel had not been informed of what Lindsey would be doing with turtles. When they first encountered one together, Chel freaked out because Lindsey started moving to place a satellite tag on the turtle, dug up the nest to weigh and measure eggs, and was using white light. They also had a disagreement on when a turtle should be flipper tagged and, so, the turtle left the beach with a sat tag and no flipper ID tag. Turns out, BICA's policy is to only tag during the nesting trance (a state the female experiences during laying) while the most current scientific opinion is that that is the only time the turtle should not be tagged. White vs. red light is also slightly contested among the scientific community but the majority say that white doesn't bother the turtles too much as long as you wait until it has begun nesting so you don't startle it off the beach before then. Since then, the professor has informed BICA of our full data collection process but the information never got all the way down the chain of command to Chel. Another man who volunteers on the beach, has expressed concern about making sure we are far enough away and downwind of the turtle so that it doesn't smell us and get scared off. First, as a marine reptile, it's likely sea turtles don't have the best sense of smell. Second, if they can smell, it's likely a turtle wouldn't be too worried by the scent of a human. Anyway, it is an interesting situation and one that is not simplified by some language barriers. 


I have some pictures of both sea turtles and the Rescue Diver course but have not yet had time to edit and upload due to the crazy schedule we've had for the last few days. We've been going to the beach at night, of course, coming back and sleeping for a few hours, then getting up and promptly leaving for the dive center, getting back just in time to leave for the beach again. However, the course ends tomorrow so I promise pictures very, very soon!

Anti-Ninja Turtle

Ariana and I woke up the other morning to find this note from Robyn. I believe it is fairly self-explanitory. We finally had a non-ninja turtle! (Yes, that is what the disappearing turtle has been dubbed: The Ninja Turtle.) This was actually a female which laid just a few weeks ago on our beach. At that time, Lindsey was able to put a satellite tag on her but, due to a disagreement with BICA personnel over when to tag the turtle (during or following the nesting trance), the turtle had left without any identifying flipper tags. So Lindsey was also extremely happy to be able to finally have flipper tags on the turtle which had been wandering about with her high-tec satellite tag on its back. 

Robyn and I are embarking on a new adventure called the PADI Rescue Diver course. I, of course, have already taken the course but am helping on the course she's in as a DMT (divemaster in training). The fun part of Rescue Diver is all the scenarios which you do to learn how to deal with various diving emergencies. The fun part as a DMT is that we get to be the divers in trouble and make it as difficult as possible for the students to rescue us. Stay posted; I'm sure there will be some good stories and pictures.

And now, enjoy a couple more pictures from another beach outing Robyn, Ariana, and I took this afternoon. 

Yes, envy us. We're spending our summer on a tropical
island with 82 degree water.

I promise, we really are working hard!

Beach Day

I guess, technically, every day we work is a beach day but this particular day was special. Ariana has come over for a few days during a break from her work in Cuero so we get to show her around our little island.  

Miracle #1

My backpack has returned!!! On Friday, my backpack was stolen while we were profiling the beach. We were a bit puzzled by the occurrence since we were on a deserted road, had only heard one vehicle pass (it hadn't stopped), and were never more than 20 m from the spot where three different bags were sitting. Nevertheless, when we took a break after a couple hours, the backpack was unquestionably gone. Most disappointingly, Robyn and I both had our iPods in the pack, along with Robyn's camera. The rest was water bottles and an assortment of gear like sunscreen, some rain gear, and my knife. Today, however, my backpack was returned. Not sure where or how it was found, but one of the BICA workers had promised to make inquiries after it was taken and had located it. The bag was definitely sifted through and, although most the gear was returned, the electronics and knife are still missing. However, we're viewing just getting back as much as we did as a blessing. 

I have officially completed one more phase of my divemaster training. I have now assisted with an Open Water course. Three observations from this experience:
-First, the new divers will improve by leaps and bounds. I'm talking drastic improvements in skill and confidence in the space of a half hour surface interval between their first and second open water dives. 
-Second, they will have any and every problem you have ever and never considered or even dreamt of. Things that never worried you for an instant will appear as a matter of life or death to them. 
-Third, when setting up kit/gear, expect to run with an answer like, "There were four weights on my belt yesterday," and translate from that and your own memory how many pounds each student in the class of eight needs. That, or they'll come to you holding a belt you know to have the right number of pounds and say, "I think I have too much weight, I only had three weights yesterday."

Heading to the third open water dive with a full boat of
new divers. 

The final festivities of Carnival on Utila.

Another observation, holding a parade on a road just
wide enough for two golf carts to pass, may not be the
best idea every.

This week was also Utila's carnival which wrapped up yesterday with a parade and, I believe, an island-wide drinking party. I made the mistake of trying to leave the dive center just as the parade was in full swing. Took me 15 minutes to make it from UDC to the first road where I could cut up (usually long enough to walk all the way home). Honestly, I'm not certain which direction the parade was actually moving since some trucks and floats were heading one way but horses and a drum corps were going the opposite...

Stand back, I'm gonna try science!

Kids, always remember that science requires dedication, precision, accuracy, and above all, tools tuned to a high degree of both accuracy and precision. 

Robyn cutting PVC pipe with a handsaw.

Or that is the ideal of how science is supposed to work in a lab. Or work in a first world, well-run lab. Not so much field work in a third world country with no lab to speak of for miles. In the field, in situations like ours, improvisation is the order of the day. Also, cutting PVC pipe with a handsaw will apparently bring the downstairs desk worker up at a run worrying that someone is destroying the building. 

Today we began beach profiling. After four hours of work, we had moved an astounding 75 meters from our starting point. However, that does amount to 13 individual transects of 20 meters long each and it was going much faster than profiling had at Cuero. Robyn and I are also going to be starting an examination of the pollution on the beach and hopefully will get a chance to study if and how the junk impedes the movements of hatchlings. 

In other news, I'm starting a new phase of my divemaster training by helping with an Open Water diving course. Tomorrow morning we get to take them out for their very first open water dives!

Robyn with some of the implements of
profiling.

Getting ready to set up a transect to
measure the slope of the beach.

A dedicated grad student follows the transect line
wherever it leads. (also entitled, Lindsey Enveloped
by Bushes)

Looking down the beach from our campsite.
The beach is actually quite pretty during daylight hours. 

Aren't my toenails pretty? And appropriate?

Disneyland Utila

What with the vanishing turtle last night, we hardly needed more excitement already but we got it. We had been on the beach for barely an hour last night when the clouds above us began lighting up and we heard thunder quite nearby. Electrical storms are the one reason we leave the beach so we quickly began packing up. Not ten minutes later, we were loaded onto the ATVs and ready to leave. As we began driving, the rain was already starting. In the dark, especially with the rain, the dirt road we use to get to the beach turned into our own version of the Indiana Jones ride (or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, but my roommate already claimed that as a post title). Maybe tonight we'll be back to a normal schedule of boring night patrols. 

Returning from the beach on a non-rainy day.

Our "campsite" on the beach.

A section of the beach we are patrolling.

Robyn and I on the beach last night,
before the rain hit.