It’s the last day of Reef Check today and Si is starting team teaching an Open Water Course so couldn’t come out on the boat.  He was pretty gutted, as it turned out to be ‘Speedy’, Crystal’s speedboat.
Apart from yesterday morning, we’d never been on it and now it’s two days on the trot for me.
I waved goodbye to Simon and we headed out to the ‘Lighthouse’ reef which is on the other side of the island.

Today the students are doing their final survey on a shallow (5m) transect 100 meter line where the findings will be logged onto a global database and I headed out with Katti (another Instructor) to survey the deep transect line (10m).  I took the Invertebrates survey as I find that a lot easier than identifying fish 😉

The visibility was pretty good, an array of coloured coral, abundance of fish.  I was amazed at the lack of sea urchins and sea cucumbers compared to Mae Haad reef.

After Katti and I  had finished the deep survey, we headed off for a fun dive as we still have lots of air left so we headed off trying to find some caves but unfortunately didnt find them and got attacked by a couple of large Trigger fish which was fun  ..NOT!

Back at Crystal we collected the data and transfered it onto forms which Nathan will later log for global use.

In the evening, I caught up with a few people in the bar whilst waiting for Simon to finish his academics with his student before heading home.

Jen

Early start this morning, and we squeezed on to the speedboat with some Divemaster trainees.

We were out purely for a fun dive and our mission today was to find a fish we had never seen, The Pink Tailed Triggerfish. We had some information about where 1 or 2 were living on a particular dive site called “Red Rock”.

So we began our dive, and went North from Red Rock for about 40 mins and were just about to turn around when we saw them… Awesome fish, very timid (unlike there big cousins!).

Mission completed, we headed back to the boat and ran in to 3 Titan Triggerfish (the big cousins)…   One of them was massive (comparable to a pickup truck engine!) and was very aggressive.. After swimming out of his area, he swam around a rock and hid hoping we would come past… so he could attack again! Cheeky damm fish!

In the afternoon,  we were out on the longboat this afternoon helping with reef check.  It’s easy diving just pointing out Substrates, Invertebrates, Fish and any other oddities to the students

Back on land we gathered to discuss their findings and Nathan went through some of his books pointing out numerous corals and discussing what students noticed with regards to coral bleaching, disease & various causes   ..doing the Reef Check course really does make you look at the dive sites in a different light.

Both pretty tired and sweaty we headed home.  Popping into ‘Kanya’ our favourite Thai restaurant on the island so far to get a take away.

Today we’re helping Nathan out with Reef Check as a few of the Instructors are taking the course.

This morning they’re in the classroom doing academics so we went to Deep Down Productions so that Si could print out some of the outlines for the Documentary Course that he’s building whilst I began to read a book that one of the guys gave me.

After reading a couple chapters and Simon’s printing complete, we went to Crystal and waited for Nathan and the Reef Check students to finish their classroom work before heading out on the longtail.  Nathan gave a briefing, for today, the students just had to identify substrates, invertebrates and fish (certain types) just to get them into the swing of things along the transect line (100mtr line)  We’ve helped out numerous times with the course and we’re still continually learning with each dive that we do.

After an hour or so, we surfaced after the students had a go at trying to identify each category and then headed back to the beach where we discussed the days findings.

That evening for dinner, we headed to ‘Safety Stop’ for a Sunday roast and a game of Settlers of Catan.