Hello and Good Fish Lip Smiles to All! After today's very close encounters with so many different sea creatures I am feeling very much like one.

My day started out with a habitat call from Dr. Dick Courtney. Do you know how hard it is to get a doctor to make a house call? Well, our doctor makes Aquarius Habitat calls! My ears have been giving me fits, and he dove down for a look. I was afraid he was going to tell me I couldn't dive. Instead he told me how to clean and dry my ears thoroughly with some solutions and a hair dryer - yes, we even have one of those down here. I am also to place some medication in my ears three to four times daily to clear up the infection. Apparently this is the most common medical problem among aquanauts, and he was prepared with the remedies. As you can imagine our environment is quite moist. With ears doctored I suited up with my other three team members for our morning's four hour dive.

Gabrielle skirted us as you read in Billy's log entry, confining us to Aquarius yesterday. Her winds kicked up quite a fuss stirring up silt that remained suspended in the water column all of today. Some fell out leaving a fine dusting on our transit lines that guide us to our research areas. Every time we touched the lines the silt came off in long horizontal bands of fine dust. The silt settled on top of dark barrel shaped sponges, on the blades of calcareous green algae, and across the heads of beautifully full lipped Great Star Corals. It looked like frost on a southern winter morning.

James and Laddie decided to stay close to Aquarius to do their fish counting and observing while Billy and I headed back out to the Northeast research area. Even though the viz (short for visibility) was marginal at best Laddie and James managed to do some good work. James said that he observed five Spotted Goatfish working the sand with their barbels that protrude from under their mouths. As they flushed out the tiny crustaceans that make their homes in the sand several Yellowhead Wrasse and Yellowtail Snapper followed right behind, opportunistically feeding on the other creatures the goatfish stirred up. He is thrilled with the amount of social foraging he is observing and is quite taken with the number of different species he is seeing.

Laddie is too. Both James and Laddie have counted and observed fish in many different places around the world, and both are in agreement that they have seen excellent diversity here at Conch Reef. So even though the corals as Billy and I have observed are not what they were prior to the die offs in 1997 and 1998 this area is still supporting a vast array of creatures - especially fish.

In our afternoon dive the viz was still quite limited - 5 feet to 15 feet - so we all stayed closer to Aquarius. Billy and I ran our four 25 meter transect lines off the NE transit line. While I did my point intercept survey for benthic (bottom) cover, Billy assessed the size and condition of the corals along that same line. At one point Laddie was conducting a roving diver fish count, and he came close to our line. At that moment when I looked up and noticed him not more than ten feet away a swirl of Round Scad, small jacks with flattened elongated silvery bodies, zipped by followed in close pursuit by one lone Cero Mackerel, five Yellowtail Jacks, six Yellowtail Snappers and three Great Barracudas, one of which was quite large. The scared scad bounced among Laddie, Billy and I like a pinball in a machine. It is truly amazing to watch allelomimetic behavior in action. Allelomimetic behavior is the phenomenon of flocking birds and schooling fish sensing the pressure changes when an individual of the flock or school changes direction. No one individual is the leader; its just that the detection of one changing direction is almost instantaneously felt by all, so they appear to change direction en mass.

Anyway the predators were trying their best to catch one off guard to single them out for a tasty meal. The scad must have been in good form with not a one sluggish. I didn't see any of them become a meal. It sure was interesting feeling the excitement in the water as the game of predator and prey played out before our eyes and in between our bodies. At one point the scad were using us as protection. I was fine with that until I saw the speed of the big barracuda and realized that even if it just ran into us we would have suffered greatly. The experience was so awesome that I was just thrilled to be a witness to this dance of life.

Billy, my wonderfully attentive partner, and I stay close at all times. Our terrific instructors during our training Mark Hulsbeck (Otter) and Paul Misaki drilled into us the importance of being no more than a breath's distance away from our buddy at all times. When you are saturated, as we aquanauts are, going to the surface in an emergency is not an option. We must rely on our buddy for support and for air should something go wrong with our double tank system. Otter and Paul always gave us good encouragement and strong admonitions: The surface is not an option. Slack is your enemy (referring to the line in our safety reels). And the most often repeated, "safety is paramount." We recited these like mantras in our sleep. By the time training was over we could also do our tank shut down drills with and without masks on a busy street corner while whistling Dixie and blowing bubbles with our Bazooka Gum. Our training was thorough.

Anyway I usually finish a line before Billy does because he has to do a lot of measuring of the corals. I just record and identify what is on the surface of the ocean bottom, so my work is a little faster. While Billy is finishing up his line I have the opportunity to look around and play so to speak-within a breath's distance of course. I had seen a lot of lobster during my survey, and it just so happened one was within a breath's distance of Billy. I lowered myself down to eye level and stayed as motionless as possible. Before long the Spiny Lobster seemed to relax and carry on her normal lobster duties. I kept seeing her use her legs and mandibles to move water over her swimmerets. Then I saw the bright red cluster of tiny eggs she was so meticulously washing and tending. What a treat! This mother was brooding her clutch among the swimmerets on her abdomen. She was constantly working the water over them to keep them clean. Not wanting to cause her stress in her delicate condition I wished her well and sent a silent hope for her eggs to mature and grow healthy and strong. I also mentally promised her that we would try our best to make her ocean a healthy one for the generations of Spiny Lobsters she would spawn and for all the generations of sea creatures and plants to come. When you have close encounters with sea creatures, any creature for that matter in their own environment, you want to do all you can to make it safe and right and healthy. I encourage you all to have such an encounter whether on land, in the air or in a lake, river or ocean. It will broaden your perspective and your appreciation for this incredible world that we share.