eels:

A cross the street from the Stenapa office, there is a dive shop that is right on the harbor. One of the dive masters there also catches conch, which he does as a side job. He cleans them and throws the shells back into the ocean. Since no other animal uses them as a home, the shells pile up and start washing back ashore. I went across the street to take some pictures anyway, and then the dive masters told me that there are some eels that have started living in the shells. I went to take a look, they threw down some fish, and voila eels! You can see one of them in the picture on the right, it's got stripes on it and it's on the rock in the center of the picture. It's incredible how fast they move! I went to pick up a shell to take a better picture, and it curved right around the shell and started moving for my hand! In the picture on the left, you can clearly see it's head as it grabs onto the piece of fish that was dropped for it. These eels are the bain of the lobster fishermen's existence. They go for the bait in the traps, and if the fishermen aren't careful, they eels will bite when they put their hand into the traps (they'll also have no more bait if an eel makes it into the trap!)




Snorkel club round 2:

Snorkel club has started up again. The last group graduated after 9 weeks and they were expert snorkelers by the time they were finished! The Stenapa volunteers helped with the swim test yesterday, which was quite entertaining. First we had to see if they could swim about 500 yards because we'll go snorkeling for about 2 hours at a time. So the volunteers and I acted as "rocks" in the water where they could hang on us and rest before continuing to swim to the pier. It was a huge laugh! They were all very good swimmers. However, most of them had never snorkeled before, and after trying to get them to keep their face in the water while breathing out of a snorkel and holding them up while swimming, I was exhausted after yesterday's club.
I was officially on mask duty, helping to make sure everyone's mask was adjusted properly, and then helping to coax them into taking a giant stride off the pier. Once everyone was in the water, they rapidly got the hang of snorkeling and we even had trouble getting them out of the water! It was great! They were so enthusiastic and a lot of fun.