Shark day! Day two of snorkeling

Today started out with a kaboom! At around two in the morning the rain, thunder, and lightning began. It rained hard for hours until about 9:30am.

We had to delay our start to the day because of the storm, but it cleared up just in time for our boat ride on "Goliath" to Mexico Rocks. It took around an hour to get to the spot. Once we got there, it was worth the ride! Mexico Rocks has boulder coral with a plethora of fish. We saw Queen Angelfish, French Angelfish,Spade fish, Southern Stingrays, Stoplight Parrot fish, Spanish Hogfish, Spotted Goatfish, and many more! The Southern Stingray swam right underneath me and today I had my camera so I got a video.

 Another cool thing we saw were the squid. In our briefing, Ken told us how squid like to follow you around when you are snorkeling so if we see some, we should yell "squid" and them try to encircle them. If you do that they will stay in the center of the circle until they can find an escape opening. We surrounded three squid before they escaped! It amazed me to see how beautiful they looked in the water! I have dissected one before, but in real life, they are breathtaking!

 Another interesting find today was a small Lionfish. I learned that these fish are invasive to this area so one of our boat guides took a spear with him to kill any Lionfish that he saw. The Queen Angelfish are very bashful and like to hide, but we were able to see some today. As we were heading back to the boat, I saw something slither around on the bottom of the ocean floor below me. It was an eel! It wiggled along the bottom and then stopped after several of us stopped to see it. Not sure what kind it was, but I did get a photo.

 After the experience at Mexico Rocks, we ate lunch on the boat and moved on to Mexico Cave. This is an underwater cave about 10 to 15 feet down. We went here to practice free diving. When we got in the water here, one of our group members who got down to the cave early came up and yelled "shark!". When I heard him, I quickly looked down and saw an 8 foot Nurse shark swimming away from the cave! The shark hung around for a few seconds looking flustered from all the people and then took off away from the area as fast as it could. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to get my camera on and take its picture! Rats! After the shark sighting, I had a hard time focusing on free diving because I kept looking back for the shark. Free diving is not easy! You have to hold your nose and breath and try to swim down. In the ocean, you pretty much float anyway because of your snorkel gear and the saltiness of the water so going down takes practice. After leaving the cave area, we went to Playa Blanca for some buddy snorkeling. My partner and I just snorkeled around looking at whatever we wanted. We enjoyed the freedom, but the waves were tremendous and hard to swim into.   Dr. McGinley called us from about 20 feet away and said he found a small nurse shark sleeping under a coral spot. I swam as hard as I could but was barely moving at all because of the waves, but finally made it over. It took several different tries, but I finally was able to see the little shark before the waves carried me back. The closer you get to the reef, the harder it is to fight the waves. Because the area is so shallow, you can stand up, but the waves will knock you into the coral which is bad. Some of the corral is fire coral which will hurt you and some is really sharp! Mainly though, anytime you touch or make contact with the coral, it can cause problems for the coral and may kill it. Avoiding the coral is very important to do. When we finished there, we headed back to the dock and our short walk back to TREC. What a day!

Front door of TREC