July 7 & 8, 2011

OK, so yesterday Jonathan gave me the grand tour of the Palace grounds and all of our animal/aquarium facilities. Our first stop was the "nursery" lagoon with some of the smaller sharks. The next lagoon had some slightly larger animals, including sharks, rays, groupers, Napolean wrasse and 4 hawksbill turtles. The final lagoon had the largest sharks and some small schools of trevally. There are nurse sharks, zebra sharks, blacktips, a grey reef shark, some lemon sharks, bowmouth guitar fish.

I asked Jonathan if, under any circumstances, there was cause to get into the lagoons to do work. He actually said that one of the things he's been wanting to do it get an accurate count of the blacktips and how many males vs. females there are. Many of the sharks in the lagoons were actually born here, which is pretty amazing. I want to just crawl in there with a mask and snorkel, wedge myself into the rocks and sit all day! The lagoons are amazing and I have decided that I want one.

There are other tanks, a mixture of freshwater and saltwater tanks. There are tanks filled with Piranhas from South America, cichlids from Africa and all manner of saltwater reef fish from the Red Sea. As a responsible aquarist, Jonathan tried to only stock tanks with local, native species since we run on an open system. Essentially, water is brought in from the ocean via these huge pipes that run about 30 meters underwater, lightly filtered, pumped into the tanks then cycled back out into the ocean. If a non-native species happened to lay eggs or breed and the larvae got through the filters and ended up in the ocean, it would be bad news!

Part of my responsibilities is to make the rounds to all of the tanks and check up on the health of the animals. There is a great crew of guys here that know all about the life support, cleaning and maintenance of the tanks, but aren't as savvy about the actual animals. Usually Jonathan does the rounds, but I'll be doing that so he can get caught up on the other projects he has going on.

After the tour, I went snorkeling around and just outside of the marina. It's pretty amazing that with the dredging, jetty building and general human disturbances that have happened here, there is so much reef growth right here INSIDE the marina. I saw so many different species of fish, it was incredible. There were rays, damsels, butterfly fish, wrasse, parrotfish, hawkfish, angels, goatfish, sweetlips, huge schools of chromis and lionfish (to name a few). There are randomly placed steps along the jettys to allow easy in and out access for divers and snorkelers. At the steps I was going to use to get out, I found a medium sized radiata lionfish and further down the wall, I found a pretty big one. I've also decided that I need a new lionfish in my tank at home.

Today Jonathan and I went for a dive. I was a bit concerned that I might have trouble clearing my ears and regulating my breathing since it has been 5 years since I last did an open water dive. I was fine! We went all the way to 63 feet and I didn't have any problems. We were in the water for 60 minutes. A few years back they sank one of the older dive boats to create an artificial reef so we went out to that. There were huge schools of small fish hanging out inside of the boat. Underneath the dive deck, near the propellers were about a dozen Volitans lionfish just hanging out. We also saw a Titan trigger which has a reputation as a badass if you get near it's eggs. There have been reports of one so ferociously attacking a diver that he lost the use of his arm! This one stayed a good distance away from us and I'm glad I know that they can be aggressive so I know to stay away from them! I'm way more afraid of that trigger than I am of a shark!

It was a great dive, I did pretty well on air usage, my ears cleared and I didn't even get a headache (which can be pretty typical for me). I can't wait to go again. Jonathan said he can talk to the guys at the dive shop that they do business with and see about getting me on their dive boat so I can see some other places and wrecks.

Some other observations:
There are cats EVERYWHERE here. They are scrawny and skinny and terrified of me, but I'm trying to get them to like me! The strange thing is that when you approach them in a car, instead of getting out of the way, they lay down. In the middle of the road. This makes me wonder how there are so many of them.

Saw some dolphins today right at the entrance to the marina, figured it must be a typical sight. Jonathan says that in all his time out here he has only seen dolphins 3 or 4 times and they are usually much further out.

Check Facebook for some new photos of the dive and around the Palace.