Where Reality is an Option

When I got home last Thursday, my parents gave me a t-shirt that says "Amherst: Where Reality is an Option." Although this is undoubtably appropriate to my home town, I can't help but think that it is even more appropriate to the amazing place I just left. I mean, how is a place where you can see 9 sharks in a single dive, pet a wild adult sea turtle, and swim with eagle rays real? A place where I got to dive twice a week and snorkel for class. I've been home for a week now, and it sort of feels like a dream. Did I really live in the Caribbean for three months? Me, Cassie from Amherst, Massachusetts who has lived in the same house my entire life?

Since my last post A LOT has happened. Possibly the most relevant of these events is the fact that I spilled an entire water bottle across my keyboard, and had no computer for about a week. Incredibly, it is actually marginally working again (although I have to keep it plugged in at all times). But Gmail is my favorite, because it magically saved my final paper.

So our papers were completed, our presentation done, and our brains turned completely to jelly. Another girl and I went to our final church service on South, we bought ice cream from various small stores for the last time, and we...rescued a kitten? Yes, in the grand tradition of the students of CMRS, we found a three-week-old abandoned kitten, fed it home-made kitten formula, and promptly hid it in a girl's room in a wash basin full of towels. The little guy did GREAT, and even got to go home with one of the girls on the program! Here he is:

SO ADORABLE

And very curious...obviously

But kitten adventures aside, is was a great last week. The staff thought up hilarious awards for all of us (I got the "At least she'll get a new Mac" award, haha), we watched lots of final slideshows and videos (lots of tears, obviously), and the funniest perfume ad of all time. No joke.

Yup, welcome to South Caicos. For the record, the salinas smell gross. Gross gross gross. But it was a wonderful ending to a wonderful program. I don't know why I'm still trying to describe it, because I'm never going to be able to, so here are Carl's videos instead!

Hooray for videos! Explaining the amazing world that is South Caicos much better than I ever could.

Well, now I'm home, and I'm going through severe reverse culture shock. Highways are HUGE people. And so are malls. What even is a mall, anyway? And why are there so many PEOPLE everywhere? It's very confusing. But as for how I feel about leaving the Center for Marine Resource Studies, once again I'm going to steal someone else's words, and have you all read Ben's beautiful blog post that really does speak for all of us:

http://www.fieldstudies.org/blog/?p=652

Yesterday I went to Boston for my orientation for working at the New England Aquarium, and I officially have the best summer job ever. Plus everyone I met was awesome. So the summer's looking good, even thought I don't actually start till June 18th! And tomorrow I'm going to New York to see NEWSIES. BEYOND EXCITED. My life is slowly but surely beginning to revolve around Massachusetts again, which is odd, but also sort of relaxing.

So that's it for now I guess, sorry the post wasn't very coherent or organized. But you try to sum up all your thoughts on the last three months when you still get confused as to where you are when you wake up in the morning!

"Is that your real hair?" - Sea Day and 90s Prom

I have to admit, I'm surprised we are alive after yesterday. Not only did we finish data collection on Friday (no small feat), we had the busiest Saturday of all time. But how can a day go badly if it starts out with petting a sea turtle? Answer: it can't. And yes I did pet a sea turtle on my dive, it was a hawksbill.

Photographic evidence by my lovely roommate Juli

Yesterday afternoon we had Sea Day at the center, and spent most of the morning prepping. Organisms were collected, touch tanks set up, signs made, and costumes donned (no joke) in preparation for the invasion of children and their families coming to learn about the ocean. I was stationed at the mangrove station, obviously, and we had a baby mangrove tree, a sea cucumber, a sea biscuit, a sea urchin, a clam, and my favorite: upside-down jellyfish! The kids loved it, and got a huge kick out of learning about all the animals. We also had a live turtle, and a SCUBA demonstration!

Mangrove team, looking super psyched

My babies! So beautiful!

Learning all about seagrass ecosystems

Quality photo ops all around

So Sea Day was a great success, and of course culminated in cake. I believe everything in life should involve an elaborately decorated cake, it is a positive addition to any gathering. And yes, a fair amount of the girls asked me if my hair was real, and were then extremely doubtful when I said that it was! They pulled on it to make sure. 

Then in the evening we prepared for...90s Prom! This is not a joke. Throughout the semester we've had this joke Sigma Turks frat thing going, and have had many "pledge events." This one was obviously the best. We drew dates out of a hat, had to ask them creatively, and then come up with matching 90s costumes. Given our limited supplies, this was actually one of the most impressive groups of costumes I have ever seen. My wonderful data Aurora and I were Beanie Babies, and our costumes were pretty sweet. We also had Powerpuff Girls, green slime, Friends, Mary-Kate and Ashley, and lots of others. Prom was a major success, but now we are all exhausted. 

You bet there are poems inside those tags

The whole crew: can you guess who everybody is?

So after a weekend full of fun, we're going to have to buckle down to work on our final presentations and papers. I have to start wading through mountains of numbers related to jellyfish, and trying to figure out if those numbers actually mean anything at all. And then write a paper about it. And make a presentation about it. And give said presentation. And relish my last week and a half in this amazing place by snorkeling and diving whenever possible. And hopefully sleep somewhere in there too. Yeah, we'll see how that goes...

Three Weeks and Near Death Experiences

I was almost eaten by a shark yesterday. Well, not really, I'll explain later, I promise. But first...yesterday marked exactly three weeks until I leave South Caicos! Which is crazy. On the one hand, that seems like forever from now. On the other hand, it seems like tomorrow. I have come to the conclusion that time follows entirely different rules down here.

We are halfway through data collection for DR (Directed Research, in case I didn't tell you before), and my project is actually shaping up pretty well. Lots of jellyfish to measure! But thankfully not as many as at that first site. Otherwise I'm pretty sure my group would have (understandably) rebelled. Yesterday we collected muck to plant mangrove seedlings...which are not doing well. Apparently baby mangroves do not like being ripped up and then planted in five gallon buckets. Who knew? But don't worry guys, it's for SCIENCE. This afternoon we're heading out to an old US Coast Guard station, one of the most beautiful spots on the island, to get more data. That is, providing the road isn't washed out from the rain storm yesterday!

But about that shark. If you have ever met me, you will know that I have an overactive imagination, and that it sometimes gets me into trouble. Yesterday was one of those times. We were on one of our lionfish hunts yesterday afternoon, with six students and five staff (which is a lot of people, in case you were wondering). We dove The Grotto, which is a fantastic site along the wall, so you're almost guaranteed to see at least one reef shark. We saw two, plus a bunch of eagle rays, throughout our dive, and we caught six lionfish, so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. We'd been down there for about 40 minutes, and a couple people were getting low on air, so we started ascending to make our safety stop. That's when the shark came back. In case you forgot what a six-foot-long reef shark looks like, here is a picture (courtesy of the inter-webs):

Your neighborhood-friendly reef shark

So we were all just floating there in the water, between 15 and 20 feet down, and this reef shark came and started sort of circling us. It would swim towards us a little bit, then swim away, then come back, then swim around us, then swim away, and so on. It never went out of sight though. I wish I could tell you that I was floating there thinking something along the lines of "Wow look at that amazing creature, it's so majestic and beautiful" or even something intense like "It's the shark or me this time" (bonus points if you get that reference). But no. I was floating there like "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT THAT SHARK WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!" and imagining all the shark attack stories I had ever heard of (thanks a lot, Soul Surfer). Turns out the shark was actually interested in our little buoy, not us, but it was still pretty insane when the thing took off towards the surface ready to attack what it thought was a fish. It realized it wasn't a fish at the last minute, and dove back down and swam away (for real that time). Thankfully for my blood pressure, we finished our safety stop at about this point. 

So just to reiterate, everyone was totally fine, and I was the only one who was even nervous. Apparently my eyes were bugging out of my head. And we weren't actually in any danger. The shark didn't really care about what we were doing at all. I am an idiot. 

...I still sort of feel like I cheated death though. I do not plan on doing that again.

Happy Easter!

Creative title, I know. But it is Easter, after all!

This morning, after I finished helping to make brunch, three other girls and I walked over the local Baptist church for their Easter service (I had the rest of my kitchen crew put aside some food for us for later, since we would be missing brunch!). It was so wonderful. Everyone was so glad to see us, and asked us where we were from, and everyone was wishing everyone else a very happy Easter. All of the kids (and adults, for that matter) were in their Easter best, with the little girls practically wearing princess dresses. We felt a little underdressed in our sundresses and salt-water-washed hair! One of the little boys gave us hymnals and Bibles, and the pastor came over to say hi and welcome us to the service.

The service itself was great. Two hours, but it didn't feel that long at all. We sang and sang and sang, which I obviously loved. It being Easter Sunday, we obviously sang Christ Our Lord is Risen Today, Crown Him with Many Crowns, and other standards. A group of women even sang a song for everyone in Creole! As I was sitting in my seat listening, I suddenly remembered a story that an old choir director once told me. When she was in college she had travelled with the college chorale to Africa to sing with a local choir there. No one spoke the other's language, but soon they started teaching each other songs and dances, and only remembered they couldn't speak to each other when it was time to say goodbye. Obviously the situation here isn't quite so extreme, as everyone speaks English and we are here for a much longer period of time, but I think it still applies. We may not understand each other's cultures perfectly, but we can all sing those songs on Easter Sunday. Oh, and the sermon was nice too!

So now that I've finished being sappy about music and singing, a little update on what's going on at the center: we finished finals! Thank goodness! So classroom time is over, and Directed Research data collection has begun. If you think this means that we have more free time, you would be completely wrong. The opposite is true! We're all running around like crazy people, between collecting data for our own projects and helping with other projects, such as turtling and sharking. For my project I'm looking at the presence of the upside down jellyfish around mangroves and how that relates to nutrient levels and the health of the ecosystem. My group of four went out on Friday to one of our sites, which happens to be near the dump, to collect data. It was disgusting. Muck everywhere, and jellyfish literally everywhere you wanted to step! My poor group members had to help me measure them, and we measured over 700! Luckily that is the site with the most, so other days shouldn't be as insane.

I also got to help out one of the other groups with a lionfish hunt! Lionfish are a Pacific fish that are invasive to this area, so one of the other projects is looking at encouraging the creation of a lionfish fishery to get rid of them. So a few of us went diving with nets to catch them. While I personally did not catch any, the group caught five, and it was amazingly fun. And I'll get to help out with that for the rest of data collection time! But tomorrow it's back to the mangroves.

Yesterday we had our recreational dives, and since we are all advanced open water certified now, we could go to a site called The Grotto. Definitely my favorite dive (after the whale, obviously!). We dove along the wall, and saw two sharks, a turtle, eagle rays, and a bunch of queen angelfish. But that wasn't even really the best part. The coral formations at this site are incredible, creating cool formations and passages to swim around. I don't think I've ever felt so thoroughly like I was in another world, it was amazing. Luckily it's a favorite lionfish hunt site!

It's back to work tomorrow, and full speed for the next two weeks, so I'll need to get some sleep tonight! Have a wonderful Easter everyone, and go listen to Godspell or something.

Turtles, Goodbye Parties, and AOW, Oh My!

So I'm getting progressively worse at blogging as this semester goes on. I would apologize, but that implies that I'm going to fix the problem...which is unlikely. We're just so busy! All the time! So you guys will just have to wait and be content stalking the Facebook pictures I get tagged in.

All of that boring stuff aside, I got to go TURTLING last Saturday night! This is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of us went for a night snorkel to catch turtles with our Resource Management professor and one of the interns. This is easier said than done: you only get one chance to catch a turtle. They're pretty sleepy at night, so if you sneak up on them you can pretty much just pick them up as they float lazily along the bottom. If, however, they figure out that you are trying to catch them (which is what happened to me the first couple of times), they will dart away with surprising speed. Turtles are tricky little buggers. However, my buddy and I were very successful and each managed to catch a turtle. He caught a mid sized green who was swimming along, and I pulled a sleeping hawksbill from under a rock. So my catch was not very impressive, but I was pretty psyched all the same. In total we got four turtles, two of each species, including one HUGE green. Two were tagged already, so we took down their numbers and measurements, and two were not tagged. So they got little metal things punched into them (it doesn't hurt them, don't worry!) and were measured as well. In a week or so the turtle research project will start in ernest, and more data will be collected, but for now we're just trying to get some basic stuff. And, since I know this is what you guys really want to see, here are some turtle pictures:

THIS IS MY TURTLE. I CAUGHT HIM. WE ARE FRIENDS.

Getting measured

For some reason I can't rotate this, but here's Charlie with his giant turtle

Yesterday was our last day in the local schools, and since they were having a party anyway before their two week break for Easter (so unfair), we thought we'd join them. So we brought cupcakes and face paint and it was general pandemonium. You may remember by description of the behavior of these kids, and while they are hilarious and I love them they are also completely insane. Telling them to not push each other in the face paint line was like telling fish to climb trees. But they are actually wonderful, and were so happy to see us, and were endlessly fascinated by our cameras.

Two of my girls from the kindergarten

He only looks adorable and innocent...troublemaker level 1000

Aurora being a good sport and doing face paint

Another one of my girls, such a cutie

In addition to all of this, I've been getting Advanced Open Water certified! This means that I can dive deeper, longer, do drift dives, night dives, and all sorts of fun stuff. Plus it's another step along the way to becoming a Master Diver, which is sweet. We've done peak performance buoyancy, navigation, night, and drift, and just have a deep water dive left on Saturday. Pretty fun stuff. On our last dive we saw two HUGE southern stingrays. Like, as big as me huge. It was awesome. 

And on top of all of THAT we have like fifty final projects and finals and presentations and papers and basically my brain is going to explode. So this blog post is really just a glorified study break...sorry guys. Also I've decided that I'm going WWOOFing someday. Spring break next year anyone?

Home Again, Home Again

Back home on the Big South! Hooray! After a ridiculously cramped (but still very fun) ferry ride, we finally arrived back at our wonderful CMRS just in time for dinner on Monday. Luckily I wasn't on the boat that ran out of gas, they were a little late...

You would not believe how psyched we are to be back in the world of no TV, no freshwater showers, no air conditioning, and no grocery stores. Provo just started to feel exhausting and so over the top, South is a welcome change. And it really does feel like home! I probably got one of the best sleeps of my LIFE that first night back in my bunk. Seriously. I slept for 10.5 hours.

But Spring Break was wonderful, and a much needed break from school work. Papa Raker came down, bringing with him many fun birthday presents as well as biodegradable shampoo (YES!). We then proceeded to go swimming or snorkeling every single day and eat lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We found many fun and cheap places to eat, befriended all the gift shop owners, and even visited the famous Potcake Place! But the stars of the trip were the fish, obviously.

In front of one of a the hotels, about an hour walk from where we were staying, was a little snorkel park. I was skeptical at first, being rather spoiled by South, but it was great! Lots of parrotfish everywhere, which is always fun, and very curious yellow tailed snappers who followed us around everywhere. Since I got a camera with some underwater housing for my birthday (woohoo!), here are some (rather blurry) pictures:

Stoplight Parrotfish

Blue-striped grunt hanging out by some fan coral

Flounder! Can you see him? 

Grunt sitting on a plaque that's so nicely fixed up by TCReef

Southern Stingray! 

So lots of fun critters. Plus, we went on an actual official snorkel with Dive Provo, which was fabulous. I even saw a reef shark, which is always fun. So all in all a successful trip, and I only got slightly sunburned!

Civilization?

Yesterday we arrived in Provo, and all immediately walked around like deer in headlights. On the way down to South a month and a half ago, the Provo airport seemed tiny. But arriving in it yesterday, after flying out of the (safe) shack that is the South Caicos airport, we felt like we were in Disneyland. I don't think I have every been more fascinated by cars and buildings in my life.

We established ourselves in the Comfort Suites, which is a beautiful hotel that most importantly has AIR CONDITIONING and FRESH WATER SHOWERS. Those two things make you feel so clean and refreshed you have no idea. Also, we have a TV, which sort of feels like space technology. Yesterday afternoon we went to the grocery store across the street to check it out, and probably looked like we'd never seen one before. So in case I haven't made it clear enough, reverse culture shock is a very real thing people.

Today we set out for our field trip, and traveled by ferry to North Caicos, and then by yellow school bus over an almost completely washed out causeway to Middle Caicos and an amazing series of caves. And I love caves. Stalactites, stalagmites, and lots of bats. Some people got bat pee in the face (no joke), but luckily I was not one of them.

100-year-old graffiti

Lots 'o caves

So that was awesome. Then we boarded the bus again, and headed off to the Middle Caicos Co-op, where local artisans sell traditional crafts. Hand-woven baskets, hats, mats, as well as bowls made from conchs and seagrass jewelry were all on display. After purchasing our crafts, we got back on the bus and prepared to leave. But as we started up, one of the wheels went off the road and the bus got stuck! We thought we were going to tip over. So we all got out, and some of the store owners came out to help us push, and we got the bus back on the real road. After that little adventure, we were all ready for lunch and a break.

Which brings us to The Most Beautiful Beach in the World. I will not tell you where it is, because it is a secret and we all selfishly want to keep it that way. So we all sat down to the most scenic picnic lunch I have ever had. Since I have no hope of ever describing this place, here are some pics: 

Oh yeah. We can do this.

Did Disney come here when planning The Little Mermaid?

Waterfall created by waves

Giant picnic cave

Is this real life???

Who's having the best day ever? This kid.

Sadly, we eventually had to leave, so we climbed back aboard our bus and headed back across the causeway to North Caicos. On North our guide (who was brilliant, by the way), took us to the farm he works on. And there were goats! Obviously, I was super excited. Finally they tore us away from the goats, and moved us on to the greenhouse. Our guide is working on a project to reestablish a native pine tree, as well as cultivate many other native plants. Which is cooler than it sounds, I swear. 

Baby goat! I want to bring it home!

Poor pine tree, get well soon!

Pretty flower, no idea what it is

Tiny baby cactus

Finally we took the ferry back to Provo, napped along the way, and went out to dinner when we got back. We were all ready to fall in our beds, but surprise! Guest speaker! Actually it was really cool, and a guy came to talk to us about turtle conservation on South. He's going to come visit later in the semester, when he'll be able to give us his whole presentation and show us his documentary. 

But now we are going TO BED because we are falling over. Tomorrow we're interviewing tourists, visiting a conch farm (no joke), and finally starting SPRING BREAK!!!!!