We are beginning our fourth day of saturation in Aquarius with a full menu of tasks ahead of us. Craig Taylor and I are teamed as the fish trackers. We use a hand held device made by VEMCO to locate signals given off by sonic tags surgically implanted in various large fish, mostly black groupers, parrotfish, and yellow tail snappers. When we get close to a tagged fish, the LCD readout on the VEMCO locator shows a bar graph near 100 percent full. We then scour the underwater landscape to make visual contact and take notes about the condition of the tagged fish, its behavior, location etc. to make a more complete picture after we gather the computer data.

Our biggest success so far has been a foot and one half black grouper that Les Kaufman put an internal tag on last Saturday at the northeast waystation 1000 feet from the habitat itself. We have found the same fish in good condition, swimming and exploring its natural environment for the last three days, about 325 feet from the waystation, almost always in the same place. We know it is the same fish because of a scarred lower lip and because of the strong signal given off by the VEMCO locator. The fish carries a 1.8 cm locator tag made by LOTEK, one of the sponsors of this expedition and represented by scientist and diver Mitch Sisak.