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Published: August 21st 2010
This has been an amazing week. It didn't start off like that though. I felt a little under the weather on Monday, so I stayed in bed for the day. On Tuesday I had a quiet day again. I stayed on base and helped input date from a previous expo. Wednesday and Thursday I was out on the boat. Both times we got out to the Marine Protected Area, called Mpunguti, and the Marine Park, Kisite. The snorkeling there is so much fun! Lots of amazing coral, starfish, sea urchins, and so many different kinds of tropical fish. There are literally thousands of them. Surgeon fish, and angel fish, and butterfly fish, and parrot fish, and clown fish, and many more that I can't even remember the names to. There are 2 snorkel transects on each island in the marine park and protected area. One on each side of the island. Depending on tides and sea roughness, we snorkel one or the other.
But hands down Friday was the best day of the week. We were on the base all day, and spent most of it doing data entry, photo ID (which is looking at photos taken of dolphin dorsal fins and comparing them to our catalogue to compile a list of resident dolphins) and landwatch surveys. Landwatch is when we take telescopes and try to spot wildlife from the land. So far I've never seen anything. In the afternoon we had a debate about the marine park, then all of us had some time to pack because we were all crossing over to the mainland for the weekend. We still were supposed to have some time before the crossing, so most of us were hanging out in the main banda. Then one of the staff comes running in screaming, "Grab your bags now. There's a whale in the channel!" The science officer was in Shimoni and had heard about a whale, and was watching from there. We sprinted to the boat, packing it faster then we ever have before. We drove across the channel, and saw her near the Shimoni peer. She was coming from west to east, and we turned and followed as she headed through the channel. We were all yelling and grinning like fools. After watching her surface several times, we noticed that there had to be two of them, because one was significantly smaller. Then we realized, it was a mother and her calf. We were thrilled. We followed them for around 15 minutes, all the way to the east end of the channel. From there they headed out into the open ocean and the waves got too big for our small boat, so we turned around. We were all running on that high for the rest of the night.
That night 6 of us stayed at the house of a friend of GVI's. It was the going away party for one of the volunteers, so we were all out for a while. We ended up getting locked out of our house for an hour when we got back because of a mix-up, but it all got sorted out.
This weekend I am in the town of Diani, staying at a hotel. The best part of that is that I can shower. All we have on Wasini are salt water bucket showers, so I've only taken 2 actual showers in the last 2 weeks. Luckily I've been in the ocean most days, so it's still kind of a bath.
Well, I think I may still be a little high from the whale sighting yesterday. I can't stop smiling whenever I think of it. If I see nothing else for this expo, that will have been enough.
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gramma
non-member comment
whale watching
How wonderful to see the mother and baby. You,ll have so many exciting experiances to tell us. Your Mom phoned me [before they went to Banff to hike with Mark tomorrow.] to tell me youve received my messages. I'm so glad. Nothing really exciting in my life, but I;m wll and so glad you are hving a super time, but I must admit I;ll be glad to see you. Lots of love dear thanks for the blog. Gramma