Snorkeling Day

This week the manager left and so I'll be in charge until March. There are 6 of us here now, 5 1/2 volunteers and me. The 1/2 volunteer is working on satellite tagging albatross the rest of the time (we did that last year on Midway and I showed some pictures of it on my Midway blog). I'm hoping it won't be too crazy around here. So far we've had a few electrical problems, water problems, and boat problems. But what can you expect on a remote island?

We work 6 days a week and only get Sundays off, so today a few of us went snorkeling since it was finally a fairly calm day. We saw the usual suspects; turtles, sharks, eels, and lots of other fish.

This is how the waves were looking for the last week or so. It's great to look at, but not that great for snorkeling or boating. Today we went snorkeling from the northeast corner of the island, along the whole north side (which is the calmer area in this picture), and got out at the boat ramp on the southwest corner of the island.

This is a whitemouth moray eel. They are fairly common in Hawaiian waters.

This is a gold-ring surgeonfish (aka: kole tang, spotted surgeonfish), and in the background you can see part of an "old woman wrasse". Don't ask me where that name came from?

Here is a convict tang (aka convict surgeonfish), a yellowtail coris, and a raccoon butterfly fish. You can probably guess which one is which. The yellowtail coris is one of my favorites. This picture doesn't do all the colors justice.

Here are two whitetip reef sharks. The third one was off to the left and didn't fit in the picture.