100 Hours

As of this afternoon, I've spent just over 100 hours underwater since arriving on South Caicos. That's more than 4 full days! It took me 138 dives to do it.

100 Hours

I've been diving quite a bit in the last few days - 2 to 3 times per day. The students are on Spring Break, so the staff have had lots of time on their hands. We've done and seen a lot. First off, we did a little more exploration and re-discovered another lost dive site - The Cone. This site is at the far end of the allowed range and has been missing for quite some time. It was listed on a paper map that we found, so we estimated it's coordinates on a digital map and located it using GPS. Once we were underwater, we located the mooring and marked the exact location.

There's no good reason it's called the cone - at least we haven't found anything distinctly cone-like yet. It's not an overly impressive site, unlike the last one re-discovered. There's a lot of sand and some sickly looking Gorgonians. At the drop-off, however, there are some nice coral blocks, but they're very deep. My low opinion of it might primarily be due to coincidental poor visibility, so I'll give it a chance before I write it off completely.

On our first dive to The Cone, Jessee stayed on the surface - something one person is required to do ever since one of the boats was lost. She missed the dive, but lucky for her, she got to see whales because of it! They passed right by the boat. If only we had gone 15 or 20 minutes later, we would have seen them from below too (we had already passed through the area where they were). So close!

Jessee did go on another dive where we had a really impressive sighting. We saw a swarm of 39 Eagle Rays! And, today we saw them again, but there were only 20 this time around.

39 Eagle Rays

39 Eagle Rays
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1pfXps9VPY)

Here are a few more photos I've taken in the last few days:

Rainbow Runners

Jessee

Diver and Horse-eye Jacks - my favorite fish.

Butter Hamlet

Diver and Hawksbill Turtle
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N48IbwBrD0)

There's also been a lot of big Groupers around lately too. Some of them are quite fat - as if they are carrying eggs. Groupers spawn in large aggregations at precise times of the year. This makes them particularly vulnerable to fishing because the whole lot of them can be scooped up at once. Fin-fishing (i.e. not conch or lobster), though, hasn't been very big in this area so Grouper populations remain relatively high. The spawning aggregations are supposed to occur in December or January, but seeing so many has made us wonder if they could actually be getting ready to do it soon. I caught the following footage of a couple Tiger Groupers on a dive at The Cone.

Strange Grouper Behavior
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wdW3G2GS3s)

To top it all off, it looks like the health care bill is finally going to pass! I've been checking in on C-SPAN throughout the day - which has been surprisingly exciting - and it looks like it will just squeak through.

The Trouble With Islands

The trouble with islands is that they are completely surrounded by water. This situation presents many difficulties, particularly with respect to coming and going. Recently I've felt like I need a break from South Caicos and the School for Field Studies, but getting away just isn't that straight forward here. I'm starting to understand why all those hit TV shows (the ones where they take a group of highly volatile people and force them to live in close quarters) often take place on islands.


I shouldn't make it sound like things are as dysfunctional here as they are on those shows. I've just been frustrated lately with my situation here. There's no official role for "partners" of staff, so I don't really fit in anywhere. I understand that I can't have, nor do I think I'm entitled to, free reign over all the schools resources (boats, diving, etc). Nobody thinks this place is a resort. But I'm not just limited in how I can take part in the enjoyable aspects. I've offered to help with the more mundane things like "staff of the day," radio duty, student activities (e.g. the solar project), and sitting topside while divers are down to make sure the boat doesn't float away (!). But I'm usually told that I'm not allowed. After a while it starts to feel like I'm just being told to stay out of the way. How do they envision my role here? Am I supposed to just sit in my room and twiddle my thumbs until Sunday each week?

What really grinds my gears is that I'm dispensable. When I'm needed, I'm happily included. When the new Dive Safety Officer needed to learn his way around the dive sites, they turned to me. When the new staff showed up in January, we were asked to cut our vacation short because somebody was needed to greet them at the airport and get them settled into the Center. When they needed to know how to run the compressor or tie a particular knot or lead the important guests from HQ on dives, they turned to me. But the rest of the time, it's: "SFS policy says that we can't allow you to _________." What's worse is that nobody's upfront about it. This information is usually passed through Jessee or just not addressed at all.

I rarely write about the struggles of life on this island, so I know this blog must really paint a picture of a life in paradise. More often than not, it is (I do recognize how fortunate I am to have the opportunities I have - dolphins, whales, diving, etc). But there's also a reason nobody stays here that long. You can't expect people to live in such an isolated place and stay completely uninvolved and out of the way. I have too much self respect to whine and cry until they grudgingly treat me like I belong, but if they were smart they'd recognize what I'm willing to offer (for free!) just to have a recognized place here.