The weather could not have been
better for diving today. I’d never been on a wall dive before, so I was pretty
excited to dive at Rio Beuno, which I was told is one of the best diving sites
in the area. The visibility was without a doubt the best we’ve experienced so
far and with virtually no wave action to toss us around it made for the best
dive of the trip so far. It was nice to get out of the lab for the day and
finally get to dive. After the dive we all snorkeled around the boat for a
little while and got to see a couple flounders and eels. Just when we thought
that was all we could see in one outing, we were leaving the anchor site in our
boats a pod of wild dolphins started circling our boat, the Scomber.  It was hard to tell
what happened after that, but people from the other boat told us the pod swam
back at us and then dove right before they got back to us.

It’s too bad that Debbie and I had
to change our project a couple days before hand because of poor weather conditions
that we thought would prevent us from diving regularly. On the bright side
however, our back up plan for our project is progressing very well. We
currently have twelve Diadema sea urchins in three tanks that we’re feeding
various genera of algae under different light conditions. We haven’t been able
to make as many measurements as we’d like to yet because we need to measure dry
weights instead of wet weights, but from just eyeing our specimens we believe
we’re getting the results we want.

Sumo finds a lionfish at Pear Tree.