End of Wk 3

It's been a great week - lots of turtle sightings (a 1.5m one was 3m away), spotted sting rays, Southern sting rays, huge black groupers and of course, the usual run of coral, though I did see a fairly rare Dendrogyra cylindrus with it's polyps out!! (keep your hair on, folks, I know it's exciting stuff...). Turtle egg-laying season starts around May 1st too, and hopefully we'll get involved in the turtle projects. I'm not too sure what we'll be doing, but essentially the eggs need protecting from humans, dogs and birds until they hatch. Because it's a developing area, people also need to be educated that bright lights confuse the turtles (who navigate by starlight), making them head back to sea instead of laying their eggs,

We're all getting the hang of monitoring now, which has taken quite a few dives. For coral people like me, it means laying out 30 meters of tape along a certain bearing, hanging upside down (head down, feet up) to read and every 25 cm marking down what lies underneath it. This is called a point intersect transect. It sounded easy enough when we were briefed on land, but believe me, the first time was much harder than expected! Anyway, after 3 practices, we're able to do 2 transects a dive now.

Tonight we've got a "G" party (i.e. dress up in something beginning with G). I'm not a big fan of fancy dress, but it wouldn't really be team spirit to NOT go... Anyway, the trouble is what to make the outfits out of. "Gonorrhea" would be mustard and honey mixed up and smeared all over, "Greek" would be the cop out bedsheet- I decided on "(Papua New) Guinian Gigolo" and I even made a palm frond skirt.

One of the other volunteers, George, just had his 19th birthday, and I was ecstatic to find out that if you have a birthday during a phase (i,e, the period you sign up for), you get sausages, eggs AND pancakes for breakfast!!! And even though the sausages were cryptically described as "bird" sausages, they were a great, meaty treat as opposed to the standard morning fare of porridge. Indeed (don't you get really bugged by sentences that begin that way? I do...) , all our meals are vegetarian except for the Saturday beach bbq and fend-for-yourself-Sundays.

We also started teaching English to some of the locals. I have a beginner group, all of them artisans. It's actually quite fun, although it's a bit taxing to prepare for 2 lessons per week in addition to all the other things that we're doing, We should be starting with the school kids next week I think, though the other adult students won't be coming to class as there are no cruise ships in town (basically, if there are no ships, the town is deserted, and it also means that there are no tourists riding around on ATV's, making a racket out front of our nice, sleepy little beach front base). 3 classes a week will be draining, but the upside is that while we're teaching, one of the staff, Tim, cooks up a veritable feast which is hoovered up in under 5 mins as soon as we get back to base.

It's Saturday afternoon, and I don't have to work for an entire day and a half. What's more, Jessica (my friend and ex-boss from from BJ) and her husband Willem (I think) are arriving today, so we'll be having a few beers I'm sure.

On that note, I'm going to sit in a deck chair in the water and finish my beer. I'm sure that'll be followed by another.

R&R in Playa

We're in Playa del Carmen this weekend for a little R&R. The other camps in the region should also be here, so it's going to be a pretty huge GVI party weekend by the sounds of it!

The last week was busy with lectures on Emergency First Response training, turtle identification, reef threats and we started learning how to actually do the monitoring. I started my course work for Rescue Diver, and have pretty much decided to do the Dive Master course. That course is going to be A LOT of work!! But it'll mean that I can work professionally in the diving world, so it should be worth it.

While in Playa, we've each got a list of supplies to bring back with us. On my list: Tabasco, Tabasco, Tabasco, dive watch. Yes, the dive watch that I've had for 20 years has finally succumbed to old age, although it was completely my fault. The doo-hicky, turny knob (which does actually have a correct name; something like capstan or turbonkinator...) wasn' screwed in tightly and so now I've got salty condensation inside. Amazingly, it's still going, 2 days on from the water intrusion, but I just know that it's going to give up the ghost any day now.

That's it for now, we've got a busy day ahead!

More sun and beach, anyone?

Well I'm glad to report that Rob wasn't suffering from decompression sickness, but he's going up to Playa del Carmen tonight for more tests. Unfortunately, he hasn't been able to do any fun stuff at all since the fit, but of course that's to be expected.

Meanwhile, I've completed the first of 2 coral tests - the next is underwater spot testing, which basically means that a member of staff takes me down, points to a coral, and I have to get it right... and I have to pass without error. And we've been given more coral to learn. And we're doing Emergency First Response training. And I'm thinking of starting my rescue/dive master training.

On today's dive, we saw a whale shark, albeit from the surface (we were in the boat heading to our dive site) but it was right on the surface! Amazing site. At the end of the dive, we saw a small green turtle - it was popping it's head up for air when it spotted us, and as soon as he did, dove back down with a big splash: really cute! The dive itself was pretty cool - I saw some intersting grow patterns of agaricia agaricites, a nice mycetophyllia lamarckiana... really big colpophyllia natans. Excellent. Yes, I'm a coral nerd. Hah - you should hear the fish geeks!

Daily life starts at 6.30am, and you're assigned to one of three camp duty job groups:
1) Ground (raking the sand to prevent sand fly larvae from hatching and to make the place look neat)
2) Boat (kitting and unkitting the boat; making sure that the rinse tanks are clean)
3) Kitchen (cooking breakfast lunch and dinner for 18 people)

It's not too bad, as there are 4 or 5 people in each of the 3 groups, which rotates duty daily. It's kinda fun, in a totally nerdy way. Oh, there's also compressor duty (filling up tanks) which is quite boring, but it's free time to read or study. And today is my lucky day: I'm on bathroom duty, so I've got to clean out the 2 bathrooms, top to bottom. Mmmmm.

You very quickly get used to the constant dampness - and 2 minutes after a shower (or more often a bucket shower) you're already dirty in some way. And the same clothes are worn day in, day out (I only brought 3 pairs shorts, 4 tshirts, jeans and 2 shirts, which are more for NYC than Mahahual) but most of the time during the day I'm in boardies anyway. I've attempted hand-washing once, and I think I'm going to find an alternative solution for the bed sheets; washing all that fabric in a small plastic bucket couldn't be too much fun.

The town is very much a frontier town. It's one, sandy road with ramshackle bars and restaurants, and many tsirt and souvenir stalls to cater to the cruise ship tourists. There are 2 cruise ships a day, and they want to increase it to 4, and in conjunction with a 250% increase in the number of hotel rooms, this town is going to change radically in the next year. On top of that, they're building a road through the mangroves just behind us, which will not only facilitate the 'Cancunization' of the area but will degrade the ecosystem. (We had a lecture yesterday on how mangroves prevent errosion and how it scrubs the water clean - something like that. Hey, it was at the end of a long, tiring, hot day!)

All in all, I'm loving the expedition and the people in the group. There are always laughs to be had, stories to be told - but given the duties and the length of the day, there are moments of blank stares around the dinner table or at a briefing.

Right, best be off back to camp to clean out the loos! What fun!

It's been such a busy week, this first week of a little adventure to Mexico (ostensibly to do some volunteer marine conservation, but more like avoiding getting a job).

I arrived in Cancun on Saturday and got straight on a bus to Playa del Carmen, which is an hour's bus ride south along the coast.


OK, I've got to admit that I'm really struggling with writing much... we had a beach party last night, and let's just say that doing anything that requires brain input is proving to be very, very challenging. It's taken me 10 minutes just to write this!

Anyway, it's been great so far - I've been diving 3 times: the first two were underwater skills tests, the third a coral spot, where a member of staff, Mads, took John and I to a coral bed to test us on our coral knowledge. Of course, it was a lot harder 'in the flesh' as opposed to photos in the book, and I got roughly 75% right.

And just to freak us all out, on of the expedition members had a fit yesterday. We're still not sure if it was decompression sickness, epilepsy or something else, but they took him to Playa where there's a hyperbaric chamber. I was right there when it happened - one of the girls held his head so that he didn't smash it on the tiles. He must have bit his tongue, as spit and blood came out of his mouth while his face turned purple, effectively scaring the crap out us. But, everyone kept their cool as oxygen was supplied and pillows placed under him (and I've just got to add that I did my little bit by wiping up all the blood and spit). Anyway, the army and police came and they whizzed him off. I have to say that it all went smoothly, and that the response was rapid: a good thing to know.

There have been a lot of ray sightings, lobsters, rare fish, and people have heard dolphins - I've seen, well, a lot of coral. And what fine corals they are.