Day 3 Snorkeling

Today started off terrible.  It started raining about 3 in the morning, which I did not hear because I was sleeping, and it continued until about 10.  We were supposed to leave out at 9 but with the lightning and thunder we were delayed an hour.  It was cloudy and cool all day, but we perservered.  We went to Mexico Rocks, Mexico Cave, and Playa Blanca.  Once again, the places are named because of what you see when you look at the shore.  We were on a different boat today called Goliath.  It is much bigger than the speed boat we were on yesterday.  Some middle school students from Pensylvania are staying here and they went with us today.  We were on the boat all day.  Ken was our guide and even though the water was rough, we made it through the day.  Every time we get in the water it is unbelieveable what we see, it never gets old.  Today we saw:

Mexico Rocks:

• spadefish
• Ryan saw a lionfish (not me)
• southern stingray
• queen angelfish
• french angelfish
• eel
• squid
• yellow goatfish
• spanish hogfish
• scrawled cowfish
• spotted trunkfish
• numerous parrotfish

Mexico Cave:

We just stopped at this location to practice our free diving skills.  (Of which I have NONE!) The cave was 12-22 feet down and we were to dive down and look into the cave.  One of the guys in our group dove down and saw a 10ft nurse shark! When the shark saw all the people, it came out of the cave and took off!  I did not see the shark, but my dive buddy Lynn saw it swim off.  She said it was huge!  The water was cooler here and I did not stay in very long because I could not dive down to the cave. 

Playa Blanca:

This spot was a buddy snorkel, so Lynn and I got to snorkel by ourselves.  We went at our own pace and could look at whatever we wanted too.  I really lliked this type of snorkel.  The bad part was that we were so close to the reef that the current was really strong.  It was very hard to snorkel and look at the fish while we were being tossed around by the waves. 

• Dr. McGinley pointed out a sleeping nurse shark
• french angelfish
• queen angelfish
• yellow tail damsel
• bicolor damsel
• spanish hogfish
• french grunt
• snappers
• blue tang
• saucer eye porgy
• porkfish

Once again, I know I am leaving out numerous fish, but it is really hard to remember everything that we see.  I am just trying to take in everything and enjoy this moment.  We are going to start our actual research soon.  Our professor wants us all to become comfortable in the water before we start the actual fish counting.  I will have more on our research as we begin to start it later this week.