Jeff awakened me about an hour before sunrise (somewhere around 4, you can see Venus in the morning sky) sounding like a kid at Christmas. He’d found a Humboldt squid in the shallows.
Sunday, August 6
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Jeff awakened me about an hour before sunrise (somewhere around 4, you can see Venus in the morning sky) sounding like a kid at Christmas. He’d found a Humboldt squid in the shallows. |
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We were each to do a presentation at the end of our stay in Bahia and Jeff
had decided months ago at home to do his on the Humboldt squid, so he was in
heaven.
We spent a couple of hours taking pictures of the 3.5 foot long squid, and as
people woke up and came down to the beach, he’d tell them stuff he knew
about the animal.
After Jeff and I, the first person up and onto the beach taking pictures, was Jamie. She was a photo taking maniac. She had an awesome digital camera that took photos one right after the other. Clickclickclickclickclick! She took some amazing pictures and I got to see them because I let her use my laptop to check out and delete and those she didn't want. I have used a few of her photos and if you point to the picture it will say what the photo is and if it was taken by Jamie. She has a bird website that you can check out. I don't see that she has put up any of her bird pictures from Baja, but she has lots of other bird photos and you can also listen to what they sound like. She was a lot of fun on the trip. |
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Guy, our Main Man, offered to let Jeff do his presentation that afternoon (since he had the squid to go with his talk). We learned that the squids deposit their eggs in the ocean then come in to shore to die. It was sad that this one was dying, but exciting to see one in person. After the squid died, it was put onto a tray in the courtyard so that there could be a dissection done on it later. It was interesting, the squid could change its color from white to red and any shade in between faster then the blink of an eye. Jeff read that they can do it purposefully, with their mind in less than 1/30 of a second. (Did I mention that our Baja trip was a Biology class/fieldtrip?)
At 7:30am there was a boat trip to Isla Pata, but because there were 21 of us and only two boats, four of us volunteered to wait and get picked up half an hour later when the boat came back for us.
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Those of us left behind, found other things to do with our time while we waited. |
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An hour and a half later the boat finally came in for us. We were beginning to feel just a tiny bit abandoned. It turned out that the water was so rough that the original snorkeling spot had to be changed so the two boats went around the island looking for a good place to swim, and that took an hour. By the time the boat had picked us four up and brought us to where the rest of the group was, the water had become too choppy for the boat to pull up to the beach and we had to go around the side of the island to find a place that was a bit calmer. The beach was littered with bits and pieces of shell so Jeff and I spent about 15 minutes walking along the high tide line looking at shells. We didn’t find anything whole, but it was interesting and Jeff DID find the head of a hammerhead shark. Boy, did that ever stink! We snorkeled, but only for about half an hour to 45 minutes. Just long enough for the boat to take back the first shift of people and come back for us. The water was getting choppier and choppier so we had to go back to the station. It made me not want to volunteer to stay behind any more! :-P
The 4 o’clock lecture was actually Jeff’s presentation and the dissection of the Humboldt Squid. |
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I managed to avoid taking biology in high school because I didn’t want to do any dissecting. Now, here I was trying to get close-up pictures. |
Guy (our fearless leader) showed us the ink sac and what you do with the ink it contains. |
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After the dissection was finished, the squid was sliced into little bits and returned to nature to feed the birds. Talk about a lot of squawking! |
Our 8'oclock lecture was on IDENTIFYING FISH. I guess Guy and Gregg were tired of having to identify fish that were "small and brown with spots". So we learned what kinds of things to look for when looking at fish. Here are two bits of my journal/notebook. I tried so hard to remember these things when I swam, but by the time I got back to the station and the fish book, it all seemed to have fallen out of my head. |
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After the 8 o'clock lecture, around 9 or 9:30, many of us had our cots set up
and were pretty much ready for bed. A few of the “kids” walked down
the beach to a bar (?) to have a beer. I use a question mark because I never
did get down there to see what the place was like that they were going to. Was
it a bar, a café, what? I don’t know. I do know it was called Guierrmo’s.