July 20th Day 30

Today started off like the last few days have. The weather wasn't the greatest, but regardless there were cages to be made. Tom and I finished the cages in the morning and then processed the herbivory assay algae that was brought in from the field. When I was helping with this, Russ told me that I deserved to go out since I hadn't been on the water for three days. When he said this I figured he meant that we needed to go out diving again. But in actuality, since it was their daughter's last day in Moorea, they were going to go to the ray feeding sight. I was all for it so I got my stuff ready and we headed over. The weather was pretty bad looking on the way over with rain clouds everywhere. Once we got to the sight though it wasn't too bad. It was still cloudy which made picture taking less clear but the water was shallow enough to where that wasn't a problem. As we pulled up, all these people with seadoos had parked in a line at this spot so we knew we were in the right place. Right as we dropped anchor, the rays came to the boat and were looking for food. These 3 rays actually came up to the surface right against the boat expecting food. Russ pulled out some of the frozen squid he brought and fed them right then and there. When I hoped in, it was a little deeper than I expected. I could barely stand with my head over the water. But really that didn't matter. All the action was under the water and boy were there rays. They flocked toward us looking for squid to eat. The majority of the time I spent taking pictures and video of all the rays. At some points during the encounter there had to have been 30 rays swimming around us. They were not bashful at all and would just come up to you and flap onto your chest or head looking for food. I also managed to see a black tip reef shark off in the distance as well, but otherwise there were no sharks there like Russ said there might be. After about a half hour being in the water swimming around with the animals that killed Steve Irwin, we decided to leave to get back to the station before the weather blew in. I spent the rest of the day looking through video and photos of the rays. There were some really good ones and I ended up making one of them my screensaver. We had some home-made lemon chicken for dinner which was pretty good and then I came upstairs to talk to Erica. Now I feel pretty tired after a long hard day of feeding sting rays so I'm going to hit it. Until later.