Hello there, hope this finds you well.
The highlight of the last week was finally getting a dive or
two in, I tagged along with a couple of Belgian medical students who are out
here on placement and just got their certification. A few of their friends had
been a week or two ago to a dive site called shark point and seen the sharks so
we were keen to give that a go, after the obligatory safety briefing and
kitting up we got on the boat and headed up the coast for about 20 minutes. I
was pretty impressed with the dive, saw loads of fish and assorted corals but
no sharks, on returning to the surface I was informed there had been loads of
them around but I’d somehow missed them, which was pretty frustrating. Three of
us had a good amount of air left in our tanks so we jumped back in for 10
minutes but still didn’t see any. For the next dive we gave up on shark point
headed a bit further south to a site called Taa, where we promptly saw loads of
white tip reef
sharks and a few green
turtles, pretty awesome!
Monday was my birthday, it was a pretty quiet affair as I had
work and didn’t much fancy a big do. Penny and family took me out for a meal at
the Tamarind, a posh restaurant with super tasty food and I had a few presents
from home which was nice.
On Friday I’d set up a boxing session with a local coach on
the recommendation of a friend, a few of us went along and it was brilliant. Whilst
it’s pretty intense exercise that left my muscles feeling a bit like a marshmallow it’s
also really good fun and a bit more technical than I’d been prepared for. It’s
definitely something to carry on with alongside the gym for sure.
On Sunday I went round to a friend’s house who’d cooked a
proper Sunday roast. I couldn’t work out quite why but it was definitely a bit
odd eating roast dinner in the tropical sunshine, but damn tasty nonetheless.
On the work front, routines took up most of the week, but there
were a few interesting nuggets. We had a meeting with a scientist from the Kenyan
marine research body who’s working on starting up an artemia farm up the coast
from here, he then invited us up to the site on Sunday morning, it’s a
brilliantly simple exercise, that just requires a load of salty shallow ponds
and a good supply of green (algae filled) water. There’s a good chance that,
given a bit more land and time, it could become a fairly profitable enterprise
for a few local people which is grand. We may even be able to get out artemia
from there which would save a lot of airmiles and a decent amount of cash!
I also spotted a slight error that I made when designing one
of the broodstock tanks that one of our H.
capensis pairs is in. In a bid to conserve acrylic stocks I tried to keep
it on the small side. This was a bit of a mess up, as there’s currently not sufficient
depth for the pair to mate. H. capensis
mating procedure consists of a dance along the bottom which then transitions into
the pair rising through the water a fair distance before the female deposits
the eggs in the males pouch. This rise is an obligatory part of mating and if
there isn’t enough depth mating will not take place and this is what was
happening in our tanks – luckily we’ve got the facility to produce new tanks so
a bigger one was put together today, hopefully we’ll get them moved tomorrow
and they’ll be able to crack on!
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