Day 334, Year 5 One More Snorkeling Day
Date: Saturday, September 25, 2010
Weather: Rain Overnight, Beautiful Day
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
It was a Sakatia happening this morning out in the channel. An hour before low tide, Mark took Peppe of Far Niente and me out and dropped us off. He then went to get John and Heidi from Sakatia Towers. John came with Mark, but Heidi swam all the way out. Ed and Lynne of Constance joined us, so we had a great group snorkel. One person would call out, “Octopus over here.” And then someone else would call out, “Nudibranch over here.” And then someone would call out, “Starfish here.” So we were zigzagging all over the place looking at great sea life. We snorkeled for almost two hours. Mark and I were on a mission to see the strange fish that we have seen in this area twice. It has a head that looks a little like a black and white polka-dotted grouper with a motley-designed red body. I did see it again momentarily and then we saw a much smaller fish that had the same black and white polka-dotted pattern all over its greenish body. It sits on the coral in the same manner as the larger fish and we wonder if it is the juvenile stage. I again searched the fish identification book and the closest thing I can come up with is some sort of scorpion fish. We’ll try one more time tomorrow to make a positive identification. We saw the same Nudibranch that we have seen before, but the two we saw today were slightly smaller. Mark and I differ on the size, but I would say that both were about the size of his whole thumb. He thinks they were smaller. A nudibranch is like a very colorful flat snail without a shell. The ones we saw today were black with patches of baby blue that have bright yellow tips. If I have identified it correctly its scientific name is Phyllidia varicosa. I enjoyed following what I think are Blue-and-Yellow Snapper which are neon blue with a bright yellow zone all across the top. They are about eight inches long, bullet-shaped, and just stunning. We also saw a lot of a fish I call a Smiling Gregory. They are just five-inch long black oval fish with a wide white stripe down the center and a thin horizontal white stripe forward that looks like a mouth. They do look like they are smiling. We’ll snorkel the channel one more time tomorrow and make sure the image stabilizer is ON in the underwater camera. Many of the photos from the past two days have been out of focus and when we checked the camera after today’s snorkel we discovered the problem. We still have some good photos, but not as many as we should. Electronics!
Tomorrow we will celebrate John’s (owner of Sakatia Towers) forty-seventh birthday up on the deck. He is providing lunch for a huge crowd of friends and we are invited to join in the celebration. It is going to be very hard to say our goodbyes at the end of the birthday party, but we must move on. We leave on Monday morning for ports south and then west.
We talked to our children this evening. Justin, Jo, and Ziggy should have been in Reno last night for a Silvermouse performance, but the ‘bus’ ran out of bio-diesel in a small town south of Reno and they have not be able to get it started. Mechanics are working on it, but they had to cancel the Friday night performance in Reno but are still hoping to make the Portland, Oregon performance. We’ll just have to stay tuned and see what happens with the bus. Heather, Jed, Jonah, and Sam are doing fine. Jonah is so funny. Whatever Sam says to us on the phone, Jonah repeats. So we heard “Love You” in Jonahese over and over. It is fall on Cape Cod and the weather is turning cool. We will be there this time next year and I’m wondering if I will survive the cool turning to cold weather.
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| 100925 Day 334 Nosy Sakatia, Madagascar–Underwater Sakatia Channel |
