Day 4

Yesterday, I went diving! We met in the morning at the University, which reminded me that I haven't posted pictures of the University. As with the rest of the island, it is covered in the ubiquitous hydrangeas. It is small, but lovely.

 Below is Nicole on the left and Bec on the right, my dive buddies.

 The dive shop was pretty slammed with all of the people from the conference so we went in one of the whale watching boats.

Below is the prison--pretty nice place to be in jail, I would imagine.  A view of the ocean and everything.

This is our first dive spot, right in front of that giant rock.

I wanted to take a picture of myself to prove that I was actually diving too :) And then we started to see octopuses! Here was our first encounter...

  Below is a nudibranch!!! But, my camera decided to be poopy and unfocused... You can kind of tell that it's awesome though

 More octopus love. Our dive master was playing with it and the octopus kept reaching out his arms to follow his hand.

Can you spot the flounder?

 Camo-fish!

 Another camo-fish--red this time

 Unfocused sponges

 Fire worms!

 Sea cucumber

 I loved all of this sea leaf blue lined algae (I doubt that is the real name...)

 This last octopus was one I found at the end of the dive. I was very proud of myself.

 On our dive, there were people from the conference from Brazil who had collecting permits so they spent their dive collecting molluscs and in this case, crustaceans... Yay, hermit crab!

Here is an aplesia on a clam

 Nudibranch on a shell! In a tube... so not super focused

After that, we had another dive in the afternoon on a wreck.  It was about twice a deep as my camera is rated to go, so I decided not to risk it. There were more ctenophores than I have ever seen before! It was incredible, so beautiful.  It was some sort of swarm up close to the boat. Also, there were some actual stinging jellyfish that everyone managed to avoid, thankfully.

The wreck sank at the end of WWII and there was a lot of life that had grown on it and was aggregating around it.  We saw another octopus--so many! I was thrilled!

After, we grabbed a coffee and some beers. Here is Bec with one of the tiny cups of coffee they have here, so cute!

Alright, speaking of coffee, I need to head to the conference to get back to absorbing all of the science! Today is a cephalopod day--yay! Sorry the quality of my blogs is quickly diminishing... My brain is losing power.