July 10th Day 20

I woke up this morning a little tired from the late night last night. I rushed to make myself a sandwich for lunch and rushed out to the dock to get my gear ready for our trip to LTER 5. We took the station boat which is about a 30 foot twin engine boat meant for longer trips around the island. LTER 5 is on the west side of the island so we had a good 40 minutes by boat to travel to get there. The view along the way was nothing short of spectacular. I was taking pictures of the island and the breaks on the coral just about the entire trip there. Once we got there we spent a half hour looking for the mooring for the boat and once we found it, we got our gear on quick and jumped in. Today I dove with Russ to help him do rigidity measurements in the plots there at the site. The water was spectacularly clear and actually might have topped yesterday for the clearest water that I have ever seen. There was also just so much more live coral there also. You could tell that the hurricane that hit a few years ago happened, but the reef itself seemed to be in a further stage of recovery than anywhere I had seen so far. The swell was rather big on the west side and we could certainly feel it underwater. There was a ton of surge at the bottom which was throwing me all around as I was trying to hold down three pieces of connected pvc for Russ to measure his rugosity chain with. Thank goodness I am always a bit overweighted when I dive. We did two dives at LTER 5 and then headed back to Gump. The ride back was a little dicey once we turned the corner onto the north shore. I took a video of the land going by while the boat was going over all the waves. When we got back, I went to put gas in the boat with Andy at the Mobil station dock and saw a family of Tahitians on their boat cutting up this huge fish. While Andy was filling up the boat I kept looking over at them in wonder of what the hell they had. So much of the meat was already cut from the fish that I couldn't tell looking at it what it was. But when I walked up the dock to go get the gas receipt, I saw the tail of the fish they were cutting up and it was huge. The profile on this tail fin had to have been at least 3 feet. When I walked back down the dock to the boat I saw Andy talking to them. He was asking about what it was and how they caught it. Turns out it was a big marlin that this guy hauled in on this little 15 foot boat with a line and reel. Before I hoped on the boat, Andy pointed out the head that was in their boat and man was it impressive. I wish I had pulled out my camera but we were in a bit of a rush to get back to the station so we could go back out before the day was over. We got some new tanks and headed out to the rapids site that is right off Cook's Bay on the fore reef and deployed some tiles for a sedimentation experiment. We came right back in when we were done and as we pulled through the Cook's Bay pass, we saw a big rainbow that appeared to be coming out of the water in the bay. I took a bunch of pictures to be sure I got a good one. When we got back it was a little past 5 so we called it a day. After doing some more planning for the Tuamotu trip, I went downstairs to have some eggplant parmesan for dinner which was incredible. After dinner I came back upstairs to work on the blog and watch the new episode of True Blood. Now I am starting to feel the effect of not having gotten a good 7 hours of sleep last night so I think I am going to hit the sack. Until later.