So we would dive each day at 6AM, 9AM, and 11AM. BV has 50 reef sites they are monitoring. Each site has stakes that are 10 meters apart in several locations up to 10 sets per site. On these stakes you place a 10 meter tape, and then swim the tape and write each type of benthic material every 20 centimeters (called a PIT)... such as hard coral and whether the hard coral was massive, digitate, encrusting, or foliose, soft coral, hydroids, sponges, tunicates, zooanthids, etc. Your dive buddy would swim along behind and inspect a 5 meter wide swath along the tape for invertabrates such as different types of urchins, sea cucumbers, or crown of thorn starfish.
Once all the benthic PIT's were done you did a fish belt which was to run a tape of 20 meters and leave it for 5 minutes. Then you come back and swim the tape writing all of the fish species and numbers of each in a 5 meter wide by 5 meter high swath. This list could be as few as a few species or as many as 25-30 or more species. In order to perform these surveys you had to pass a series of in water and computer tests on both benthic and fish identification. We had to learn how to positively identify 151 species of fish. These tests took a good two weeks to master, but all but one passed all the tests. It seemed for a while that you could never complete them, but soon it became second nature. Then you would find yoursezlf diving and naming everything you saw as you dove. Pretty cool.
Each dive we'd try to complete at least two fish belts or two PIT's. It requires 10 dives to complete a site, and each of the 50 sites is surveyed once per year. The data is entered in spreadsheets and transmitted to London where it is analyzed and reports are drawn up showing reef health and recovery if it had been damaged by overfishing or coral bleaching.
This picture shows a sulphur damsel and a yellow face butterfly fish. The second photo is a black backed butterfly.
Visibility on the dives varied due to weather and location of the site. On a good day viz was 30 meters or so, and a bad day it was 5-10 meters. We sat out for one week due to a cyclone hitting the area.
Overall I got in some 50-60 dives including one dive to 30 meters and one night dive. Average dives were in the 15 meter range and lasted 45 minutes. The night dive was particularly spectacular with lots of large unicorn fish, squid, shrimp and more. Getting attacked by a squid was really exciting and made me laugh pretty hard...almost spit out my regulator.
Other great sites were large schools of young yellow tail barracuda, swimming through shoals of hundereds of fish, crocodile fish, octopus, large gorgonian fans and the list goes on and on. No one on this trip saw any sharks...which was too bad as I think most if not all hoped to. We did run across 5 bottle nosed dolphins one day. Tried to swim with them, but they would have none of that and swam off. It was also amazing to see giant clams withe their gorgeous blue and pink colors inside, and various shells such as tritons and cowries alive and in their native habitat.
When you were not scheduled for a particular dive you were usually shore marshall or boat marshall which was part of the safety group for each dive. As boat marshall you assist the boat driver in monitoring the divers locations, log vital information for each diver(there were six on each dive), and handle the satellite phone and GPS in case of emergency. As shore marshall you monitored the other satellite phone and were on call for diver emergencies.
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