20 October 2019

End of another week.   It's been pretty good diving but the weather hasn't been the best.  Heavy storms over night and then drying up by late morning and then heavy rain in the afternoon.  Can't really complain as I've not got soaked on the way home yet :-D

I still have my Eco intern for another week.  He's a lovely chap from Hong Kong and is pretty funny.  Even though he only started diving in the last month, he's a pretty good diver.  Still needs learn about spacial awareness but he's good.

We've been out collecting coral eating 'Crown of Thorns' which has tested Darren.  Not only does he have to measure, note the depth and count how many arms these starfish have (research purposes) I pick them up with some large long tongs and then put them in a sack which he has to dive about with :-D  So all n all, he's been put through his paces LOL

The underside of a Crown of Thorns

Earlier on in the year, we had a couple of groups from India that made bottle nurseries, well we finally got around to putting them on the long tail and deploying them at Junkyard.  We've not put any corals in them yet, as we are still waiting on approval from the DMCR to do anything. 
Moving these small but very heavy cement nurseries was hard work but we've now made a path from Junkyard to the natural reef, so hopefully, people shouldn't get lost ;-D 

Bottle nursery that we will plant corals onto eventually

Darren struggling to move this one.  Only another 30mtrs LOL

New Giant Clam Cage 

We also deployed a new clam cage and moved some of our giant clams.  Our old cages were very tired and had lots of holes in them which Mr Trigger fish loved as he was able to get in and eat some of the clams.  Annoying when we've been been looking after the clams for over 18 months.