Dive #2 — Awesomeness
December 31st 2018
This morning Maurice, Jahman and Rangi showed up, plus four more of Maurice’s friends from the marae, and we did a dive out towards the outer reef between Hekerua and Sandy bays, then worked back inshore towards the inner of those two reefs, before swimming back to Sandy Bay where we started.
We gathered plenty of kina, there are way too many of them on and around the reefs, so they were very easy to find. They’ll be on their way to a 21st birthday party tomorrow, as food for the guests there. I hope they are delicious!
I gathered my first kina too (there is an example in my hand in the photo above). Now I feel like I am fully involved, not just talking and organising!
Plus, I learned that you can pick kina up with your bare hands. Although the are covered in protective spikes, they aren’t especially sharp at the ends, so if you don’t exert too much pressure, you can pick them up gently and carry them up to the surface.
On our dive I saw a couple of spots just to the east of the outer reef that looked like good candidate sites, plenty of kina, and some isolation from other rocky reef areas nearby:
I’ll return and photograph and video them for Tim to have a look at.
About that, I ordered a GoPro online today, hopefully it will show up by the end of this week so I can start to document what we are finding under water.
More generally, I have noticed over the first two dives that Sandy Bay frequently has sediment run off the land into the water, even when there is no rainfall:
A local resident told me that this has been going on for about 18 months, since a huge slip took a chunk out of the cliffs overlooking the bay:
Given that there is a lot of sediment in the water (kelp thrives in clearer water which gives it more sunlight), and that it looks like it will be an ongoing problem, I wondered if this might eliminate Sandy Bay and maybe even neighbouring Hekerua Bay as candidate sites? Although on the other hand, such landslides are a naturally and frequently occurring phenomena here, and choosing a different site to avoid one is no guarantee that we won’t have the same problem somewhere else during the project.
Another one to discuss with Tim. I’m sure there’ll be at least one of these every trip!
All told, a really successful day, lots of kina gathered, lots of data about the location gathered, some good experience actually gathering kina for the first time… am looking forward to getting back in the water again tomorrow.
