Tofo Tangents

We did a double dive today, first Manta Reef and then Giants Castle again. The sea was very choppy and we were the only boat that went outside the bay, heading south to Manta Reef. Current strength was a little better than the day before but I was still not thrilled about it. We were able to do transacts though, which is good. We didn't see any mantas---apparently no one ever does on Manta Reef anymore now that divers have scared them all off---but we did see a bunch of rays and a shark. It was a grey reef shark, which, like most species of shark, is not particularly dangerous. They are usually only 4 or 5 feet long, and although there have been a handful of attacks on record, they are very few relative to the shark population, and none of them were fatal. This is particularly exciting for me because it ties directly into the data modeling work I'm doing in R for Callum in predicting under what conditions shark encounters are likely to happen so that we can provide shark a

We dove Giants Castle Reef today. Conditions were rough again, and that's the closest deep dive site to the dive shop. With choppy waters we weren't going to get out of the bay, unfortunately. We were able to do some fish transacts at least. Every five minutes, we had to stop and Katie would take notes on all the species of fish in the area and I would record a video trying to rotate a full 360º without moving. As you can tell from the video, I was having some difficulty. You can tell how strong the current is by watching the the trichodesmium (sea sawdust) fly by. I'm definitely a stronger diver than I was yesterday, but once again I was the first one out of air, despite having a 25% larger tank than everyone else. Tofo's pretty far off the beaten path so it mostly gets experienced divers and divemaster trainees. The two other non-professional divers in the group not only beat me in air consumption rate, they also saw a humpback whale while on scuba, which is

We dived Sherwood's forest today. Unfortunately, visibility was only 6 meters and the current was too strong for us to do any transacts. All I got was this photo of Katie the Coral Queen signaling to me that conditions were too rough. We did encounter a green sea turtle, which is good for the logs. They are an endangered species, growing up to 5 feet long and weighing 150 - 400 lbs. Less than one in a thousand hatchlings survive to adulthood, but those that do live up to 80 years in the wild. We also spotted a lot of humpback whales on the boat ride to and from the dive site. There were 2 mother and calf pairs and 6 other whales which we couldn't determine the age or gender of.

We got the grant proposal approved and headed back to the school to make the first payment. The school had some of the students draw marine life themed thank you cards for us, and I was really impressed. The kids were much better at drawing than I am. We collected a receipt for the first payment to give to Underwater Africa for their records, and the school director (pictured in front of the children below) assured us that next month they would have a breakdown of the use of funds prepared.

Underwater Africa was providing school supplies only when volunteers expressed interest in visiting a local school, and I felt like that was too haphazard and unpredictable so I talked to Callum about organizing a formal grant for 1,000 MT / month. That way the school would have more flexibility on what supplies to get and it'd be more regular so they could plan it into their budget. He said to go talk to the school about it, but the car wasn't available and we'd missed the chapa (small van that runs a routelike a bus), so Katie and I set out to hitchhike. Katie normally gets picked up pretty quickly--apparently western looking women have an easy time getting rides--but with me there it wasn't so easy. We got about halfway there before I started walking ahead so it looked like Katie was alone. The first car that passed with this new strategy stopped and picked us up. The driver was just coming back from a fishing trip and I squeezed in back alongside his fishing lin

Underwater Africa works with the locals to create and maintain protected areas for mangroves and coral reefs within the estuary to help with conservation. Recently, they've started doing school visits with volunteers who buy extra school supplies to bring, and today it was clear why that was necessary. Many of the students had to share pencils and notebooks because there weren't enough to go around. We sat in on a Portuguese class for 7th graders, and at some tables there was only one textbook for three students. The kids were good about sharing though, and shockingly well behaved. They were learning about poetry, like the definitions of verse, stanza, monostich, couplet, triplet, and quatrain. The particular poem they were reading was rather dark, although the subject matter wasn't discussed. They were focused more on structure than content. I tried to do a little analysis myself. For context, Mozambique has many coal mines, and during the colonial period there were

The Coral Queen descending with quadrat Today was my first research dive. I went out with Katie, the Coral Queen here in Tofo, to monitor one of the many patchy reefs here. We were diving Simon's Town Reef. Katie carried a quadrat, which is a 1 meter square piece of plastic used to standardize the measurement of coral activity, and I carried an underwater camera. The idea is to photograph what's in the quadrat and then analyze it later to see what is growing in the reef. It's a two-person job because it's not possible to hold the quadrat in one hand and take the photo with the other without losing control and damaging the coral, particularly in strong current. And Katie always says, the coral comes first. There's no point in monitoring the health of the reef if doing so destroys it. It seems easy at first, until I realize how hard the shots are to frame. I want the edges to be squared off with the quadrat, but somehow as soon as I've got the camera ready

Humbled by my thoroughly embarrassing failure yesterday, I was meticulous today. The shallow dive at Fingers reef went flawlessly, the divemaster's only comment was that I should stay a little closer to the seabed where you don't have to swim as hard against the current to save energy and air. He greenlit me to try for my deepwater certification at Giants Castle reef. Again, I was obsessively focused, and everything went off without a hitch. Now I'm deep water certified! This means I can do my first research dive tomorrow. To top it all off, we saw a giant turtle and a giant ray. I'm over the moon, but also exhausted. We'll be back at it tomorrow and I need sleep. Diving is extremely tiring.

I remembered a lot less than I thought from my dive training. On my first dive in the shallows, I flubbed the negative entry, struggled with buoyancy control the whole dive, was the first to run low on air, left the group behind, and ascended too rapidly, forgetting the safety stop entirely. As a result, the divemaster told me I'd have to stay on the boat for the deepwater dive. I'll have to try again tomorrow in the shallows, delaying my deepwater certification at least a day, possibly more. I spent the next half hour feeling seasick and burning in the African sun, waiting for the second dive to end so we could go home. By the time we reached the beach I was exhausted from the nausea, from the disappointment, and perhaps from a little subclinical decompression sickness. At least sleep will come easy. Tomorrow I will do better.

I've finally arrived in Praia do Tofo, where my marine megafauna conservation volunteer work will start. There's just one flight to the nearest airport in Inhambane, and this little propeller plane makes the trip in fits and starts a few times a week. A comfortable 25 minute cab ride later, I was in Casa Barry, where the NGO Underwater Africa is based. It was built by the eponymous South African who, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer and given 6 months to live, decided to come to Mozambique to live out his last. According to the staff here, on good days, he fished, and on bad days, he built. Maybe it was the diet, the exercise, or just something in the air, but instead of 6 months he lasted 10 years. What started out as just one straw hut became a complex of many cabanas, including a restaurant (specializing in fresh-caught seafood, of course). It's late now, and tomorrow I'll be doing a diving refresher course and getting my deep water certificati

I find it striking, wandering around the streets of Maputo, and seeing avenues named for Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse Tung. They seem like remnants of the country's communist past, vestiges of the days when revolutionaries set out to end 5 long centuries of Portuguese colonial rule and replace it with communism.  This street, 24 de Julho (July 24th), is named for O Dia das Nacionalizações (The Day of Nationalizations), a long forgotten holiday commemorating when revolutionary and first president of Mozambique Samora Michel nationalized all real estate. I asked a few locals what they thought of the holiday, but none of them had ever heard of it. It's vestigial, a communist tailbone in the Mozambican calendar. The same is true everywhere, I suppose. Apparently the street name Bowery in New York comes from the Dutch word bouwerij which means farm. It's left over from the Dutch colonial period when it ran through farmland. These echoes of the past go unnoticed by the locals