July 16th Day 26

I was woken up this morning by the howling winds and torrential rain outside which was certainly a first for me here. I know it has rained in the past at night but this was pretty intense. It was also at around 6:30 in the morning which really is only about an hour before I get up every morning. It during the majority of the day not including the late afternoon, the weather was marginal to bad for diving. Despite this, we went out to the fore reef for a quick dive to deploy another herbivory assay and collect some more algal succession tiles outside Cook's. On the surface it was windy and there was a lot of wind swell that was sizable enough to smack up against the side of our boat we took out. But despite this, we needed to get our work done so we dove in, did a quick and thorough job, and got out. Getting onto the boat was certainly interesting because you had to time your 4 foot climb up the swim ladder between the waves so that you didn't get flung back off the boat. Once we got on we booked it out of the weather and back to the station. From there on out I made some cages for the rest of the day. By the late afternoon the clouds had parted and it made for a nice end to the workday. After doing some work on my trip out to the Tuamotus, I had some delicious homemade poisson cru from the day old tuna we had bought from the Tahitian boat maintenance guy here at the station. Jack is a very good fisherman and he catches tuna pretty regularly which is great for us because we get the freshest fish possible for a cheaper price than what you get at the market. After dinner we had our first dive master course to finish up some material we needed to cover to finish off the master diver test. Unfortunately that ran a bit long and the guys who went to Mathieu's party down past the Hilton had already left so I'm stranded here writing this blog. I guess it's ok though because I am super tired from getting an hour less of sleep today so I think I'm going to check out for the night. Until later.