One more mooring in the water

Crown of thorns starfish devouring a coral

Lots of three-dimensional structure at Honolua Bay, where
instruments were deployed on Saturday.

After Thursday's boat issues and some small fixes here and there, we hoped that the boat would be issue-free and run perfectly come Friday morning. Our hopes were dashed early on when, after putting the boat back in the water, it failed to start. Eventually we resigned ourselves to the fact that this boat needed a more thorough fix than something we could provide. A few hours of searching for boats ensued and ultimately we were offered two boats to borrow. So on Friday and then again on Saturday we went out on the Whale Trust's Charles B II, managing to deploy one recorder on each day. Saturday's deployment was in Honolua Bay, a popular snorkel and dive site. This site had lots of physical structure and many different fish species, although there was much dead coral overgrown with turf algae.

On Monday we are getting another boat that will help us continue to deploy instruments through the middle of this week. As a result of the generosity of several people, we may yet succeed in deploying all of the instruments that we initially planned on.

Octopus at Honolua Bay