Dive #1 — Anticipation
December 23rd 2018
Funding for the project is not likely to be approved until March 2019, but there is still plenty to be done in the meantime. Although we have a rough idea of where the sites for our pilot project might end up, there is a lot of checking out the lay of the seabed to find some locations that meet our test site criteria:
Sites will be chosen based on physical characteristics e.g., urchin barren habitat with moderate densities of urchins (e.g., > 5 individuals per m2) within isolated rocky reef habitat surrounded by sand — this has less potential to be rapidly recolonised by urchins once removed.
Ever the optimist, I scheduled our first dive for two days before Christmas, down at Hekerua Bay.
This is what happened:
The appointed hour came and went. Nobody showed up. Then it started to rain.
Plenty of opportunity for feeling discouraged here, but instead I decided to get in the water and go for the first dive of the project. What I learned from this first day out in the water:
- About Hekerua Bay, what a lovey area, there is lots of snorkelling to do to properly explore it all. The map says there is a blowhole along the western side of the bay, must check that one out!
- Also, there are some fairly isolated blocks of rocky reef just offshore from Hekerua Bay steps, which in many ways looked like good candidate sites… but… I didn’t see any Kina… would be good to return with Scuba gear and have a proper look around.
- And… I realised that at my relative beginner lever of snorkelling, not being able to stay down underwater for very long, it is going to be very hard work indeed to survey the area snorkelling… I see huge advantage in scuba diving and being able to spend proper amounts of time down there looking around… and in learning how to free dive.
I’ll take the lessons from today, and it’s hard to express quite how delighted I am that the work of this project, two years in the making, has now started!
