Hey y’all!

I have never woken up to a more beautiful view than this! It was a very windy night–it’s still windy–but the water looks like it’s filled with diamonds! We got to snorkel for the first time today, starting slow to make sure there weren’t any problems with our equipment. I’m carrying my phone in a sleeve, but I didn’t figure out until after the practice swim how to take pictures underwater, so I didn’t get any great coral pictures this morning.

We then swam out to the patch coral, clumps of coral the size of a van or a bit larger in the middle of seagrass beds. I saw a bunch of cool corals, a baby Barracuda closer to the dock, and a few juvenile Damselfishes that I think were either Longfin Damselfish or Cocoa Damselfish because they had yellow bodies with dashes of blue across the head and back. I gotta say, the currents were a lot stronger than I expected!

After lunch, we hopped on the boat and rode out about ten minutes to a couple of patch coral reefs and were tasked with taking as many pictures as possible of our animal groups. I had a hard time using my phone in the waterproof sleeve to get pictures of Damselfish, but I’m pretty sure I saw a few adult Dusky Damselfish protecting their reef patches and chasing off trespassing fish. The second site had so many Damselfish! I saw some young Threespot Damselfish, young Beaugregory Damselfish, a bunch of Sergeant Majors, and even an adult Yellowtail Damselfish! (My phone was almost dead at this point, but thankfully Emily helped me to video some of the Damselfish I saw!)

One last shoutout today to all the hermit crabs lining up for the nighttime beach party…all except the lone sand crab.