Onwards, Upwards

There have been sightings of turtles mating, turtles being chased by a lemon shark, another shark sighting today, schools of squid, dolphins, giant barracuda... and what have I seen? A turtle head 100m and 4 squid (which were actually very cool).

But, I am pleased to say that I was the first to attempt and finish a real monitoring survey for one of the sites, and I've now started on the Coral Communities part of surveying. What we'd learned before was called Point Intersect. I won't go into the details, but essentially it's a different way to survey coral and the method includes information on size, predation, disease and tissue death. It's good fun and interesting but pretty hard work: for a given site, doing a Coral Communities survey means recording a lot of data over the typical 30m transect line. And being a coral dude, heads are down and so we miss out on all those other cool sightings.

The buddy pair that spotted the shark today came across an eerie 'Patch of Death': a partially eaten, huge eel, half eaten lobster and fish, dead coral... Just to be safe (but really just being geeky), I brought the dive knife out for the first time. Of course, the fact is that sharks aren't very likely to attach humans... But hey, why not bring it if you've got it? Who wants to be a shark's dinner, anyway?

I made a wicked bean stew with spicy chorizo the other day, which was a bit of a hit. The cookies I tried to make, however, weren't so much of a hit, unless you wanted extra dive weights or something to fend off large predators with. The meals have been pretty good on the whole, a few people have more than half a clue about what to do in a kitchen. But, the biggest bane of everyone's breakfast continues to be porridge. I'm so glad I'd bought the Honey Bunches of Oats in Playa.

Speaking of Playa, we're back there next weekend for the end of Week 5 party. Some people in each group (called Phases) sign up for 5 weeks and not 10, and so those people leave, and we get a fresh batch... and this is an excellent excuse to have a party in a place that includes all the running water you can shake a stick at and food ANYtime you want without you having to make it or wait for a cruise ship to pull into town for. Ah, civilization.

It was great to see Jessica and Willem here in Mahahual, and I'll be seeing them again this weekend, when I'll go up to Tulum to hang on the beach and see some ruins with them. I shouldn't say anything before there's more solid info, but if you know me, I don't tend to keep my mouth shut about interesting news... anyway, the company I was working for in Beijing, Wunderman, is looking for people for the Microsoft account. Jessica, who is in charge of operations globally for the Microsoft account, is recommending me for an Operations Lead position in Singapore, and I'd mainly be looking after Korea and India (yeah, it'll be a challenge). I'll pop into the New York office for an interview when I'm there at the end of June and we'll see what happens after that. But, that's all back of my mind right now - right now, it's all about the coolest thing you can see on your dive. I saw a very cute Manicina areolata today with a weird oblated growth. Yay!