July 8th Day 18

The weather this morning was certainly much better than it has been the past few days. It was good enough that we were able to go to our other site around LTER 1 where we do not have a mooring. The rapid sites, which are just off Cook's Bay, all have moorings but this site that we went to today currently does not have a mooring which means we have to anchor. This of course to the people like Russ and Sally who work here is kind of a nuisance but it is something that I am completely used to. In Santa Barbara we always anchor so to me it's nothing out of the ordinary. When we went down on our first dive we managed to finish two of our four invertebrate plots that we had to survey at this site. On our second dive on our last plot we saw a ton of fish, like we had the entire day, and also a couple of friendly moray eels. One was pointed out to us by Sally because she and Russ were working on the plot before Tom and I. However she only saw the smaller of the two that were actually there. The one she saw was spotted with white spots while the other green moray laid hidden under the rocks nearby. It wasn't until I was almost done with the plot that I realized the bigger eel was even there. Too bad I didn't have my camera because that was an underwater Kodak moment. When we came up from our second dive the conditions had gotten a bit rough as a wind had picked up out of the northeast and the swell as a consequence was noticeably bigger. Despite that I have been in bigger swell while I have been here, I nearly got flung off the bow of the boat because Russ was going a little fast over the waves which of course fling the 609's bow way up into the air. I felt like we were going off ramps with the boat a few times on the way back in. After we got back we broke for lunch and after we just finished up making the small cages for the algal recruitment and sedimentation time series that we want to start tomorrow. After that was done I did some more work on uploading this blog in its entirety (although I'm not quite halfway done) and then had some dinner. Tonight we had veggie egg rolls made from scratch with some chicken which was pretty good. I then got a chance to do some more trip planning with Erica before she was too exhausted to function and now I actually think I am going to call it a night because I'm starting to feel it too. Until later.