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diving post!
Sep. 8th, 2007 06:06 pm*iz ded from tired*
I went on my first two scientific dives today (not counting the one during the class)! My buddy was a grad student who'd taken the class with me so that was cool. We went off a boat, which I haven't done much and it's SO much nicer than diving off the shore. There aren't hot soup and snacks waiting for you on the shore, for one thing. We did the first dive at south Monastery and the second at Stillwater Cove. I've never been to the latter before but I've heard it's very nice and it is.
I saw a ton of fish. I surveyed fish, invertebrates and algae/seaweed today. There weren't all that many inverts. Not the ones we count, anyway. There was a ton of articulate coral (can't find a picture - it's like pale purple twigs stuck to the rocks). I also saw lots of different rockfish. The first photo on that linked page is very much like what it looked like, minus the dramatic rays of sunshine that I don't think show up without fancy camera equipment. Also I didn't see any schools quite that big but there were a few schools of maybe 30-odd blue rockfish.
The coolest fish I saw were a lingcod, some male kelp greenlings and by far the biggest vermilion rockfish I've ever seen. It was almost 3 feet long! The ones I usually see are under 1 foot long. That was at a really cool part of the dive: we were setting out the line for the last transect at about 35 feet deep and we came to a ledge where the reef ended and it dropped to about 50-60 feet below. We didn't go down - the transect has to be roughly level - so we had to curve around a little and stay on the reef. I saw the big rockfish over the edge in the deeper part.
I went on my first two scientific dives today (not counting the one during the class)! My buddy was a grad student who'd taken the class with me so that was cool. We went off a boat, which I haven't done much and it's SO much nicer than diving off the shore. There aren't hot soup and snacks waiting for you on the shore, for one thing. We did the first dive at south Monastery and the second at Stillwater Cove. I've never been to the latter before but I've heard it's very nice and it is.
I saw a ton of fish. I surveyed fish, invertebrates and algae/seaweed today. There weren't all that many inverts. Not the ones we count, anyway. There was a ton of articulate coral (can't find a picture - it's like pale purple twigs stuck to the rocks). I also saw lots of different rockfish. The first photo on that linked page is very much like what it looked like, minus the dramatic rays of sunshine that I don't think show up without fancy camera equipment. Also I didn't see any schools quite that big but there were a few schools of maybe 30-odd blue rockfish.
The coolest fish I saw were a lingcod, some male kelp greenlings and by far the biggest vermilion rockfish I've ever seen. It was almost 3 feet long! The ones I usually see are under 1 foot long. That was at a really cool part of the dive: we were setting out the line for the last transect at about 35 feet deep and we came to a ledge where the reef ended and it dropped to about 50-60 feet below. We didn't go down - the transect has to be roughly level - so we had to curve around a little and stay on the reef. I saw the big rockfish over the edge in the deeper part.
