Started the day with a quick Gump dive with Stephanie. It was pretty normal except that there are a ton more fish on each anemone now since a large settlement wave came through so I decided for the sake of time to let Steph do all the counting while I swam around and took pictures. We were in a bit of a hurry to get done so that we could go ASAP to the west side with Keith to do fish transect maintenance. We got off Gump and put our stuff onto the boat with new tanks and took off. We ended up coming right back because the SAFE boat couldn't get up above 3000 rpm so we went straight back to the dock at Gump to get the 609 to take to LTER 6. There was a large swell once we turned the corner which wasn't fun in the smaller 609 but we made it to the site. We did our maintenance and then hopped back in the boat to go back to Gump. Surprisingly Keith pulled into the pass that is right by the ray feeding site which caught us all off guard. He took Steph and I to the feeding site which was cool. Jumped in the water and it was completely different than the last time I came. This time there were tons of black tip reef sharks swimming around which was totally new for me. The sharks were swarming around a tourist boat that was dropping fish into the water to feed the rays and sharks. We came over to watch and was it a site. The rays were on the bottom in a scrum trying to get to the food that fell through the sharks that were swimming right above all the rays. It was really cool to see and got a ton of video and photos of all the sharks. Once we got our fill, we got back on the boat and headed home. When we got back, we had lunch and started to do clean-up and maintenance. The last part of the day we worked on the boat trailers sanding off rust and then we called it a day. When we got off for work, we made some breaded chicken and veggies for dinner. After we finished, I went up to my room to do work and then got into bed. I'm super tired. Until later.
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