On the afternoon of May 2, 2012, the Sea Dragon, equipped with its 14 crew members, hauled anchor and slowly worked our way out of the Majuro atoll lagoon. After motoring for about an hour and twenty minutes we anchored outside of a remote island just before Eneko Island. With some time to kill before sunset we launched the dinghy boat into the water and went on an adventure to the little island. This little paradise was a pretty neat spot as it had several huts, a lady and her son, pigs (of all things), a floating dock with a water slide, an amazing windward view of the ocean and not to mention amazing snorkelling. I did a backward roll off of the dinghy and snorkelled around a little before making my way to shore to help Carolynn, my watch mate, conduct a beach transect of macro and micro plastic. We were in search of nerdles, which are tiny pre production plastic pellets that are found on nearly every beach in the world. Unfortunately the sand was too coarse to properly analyze for micro plastics so we continued with macro sampling. Luckily we didn’t find much plastic, but that doesn’t mean there was any present. Once done with transects I raced back to the leeward side of the island to gear up for re-entry into the water. While snorkelling I was thinking about how awesome it would be to see a Moorish Idol, a pacific species of fish that I have always been fascinated with. BAM! They came out of what seemed to be my thoughts, a pair of Moorish Idols just moseying their way across my path. TOO COOL!! I swam off in excitement to see what else I would come across. The reef was beautiful! There was fish and (relatively) healthy coral everywhere. Clownfish, anemones, wrasses, groupers, triggerfish, surgeonfish and even more Moorish idols surrounded me as I investigated their home. With the exception of the Moorish idol, I must admit it killed me seeing all those fish and not being able to key them down to species but my fish I.D skills did allow me to group them into families so I was happy about that.
With the sun minutes away from setting I decided to ditch the dingy and swim back to the boat. While en route back to Sea Dragon there was a sunken airplane and a helicopter adjacent to each other, really cool sight to see. Both wrecks sat in about 40-50 feet of water with giant coral heads next to them. One of the coral heads had this beautiful green whip coral nearly 15 feet long trailing off of it; neat stuff! My journey swimming into the sunset continued until I returned to the boat.
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