Kalaupapa National Historic Park is one of those places that you can tell is special from the moment you get there. Isolated from the rest of the Hawaiian Islands by towering sea cliffs and from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of open ocean, this small peninsula was once a colony for people with Hansen’s disease (or leprosy), reminding us that even the most beautiful places can be a prison. Under orders from King Kamehameha V of Hawaii, victims of this disease were snatched up from their lives with little to no notice and indefinitely interned on this remote peninsula. Facilities were minimal and compassion was almost entirely absent. The patients were left to live in isolation, unable to have any type of physical contact with visitors, from 1866 until the end of mandatory isolation in 1969.

Bay View Housing, formerly for the patients but now occupied by NPS employees

Since the cure of the disease, the settlement has become a much happier place, with some of the patients choosing to stay on what is now their home despite the lifting of travel and visitation restrictions. Around 9 patients still live on the settlement, with the rest of the residents being employees of the NPS or the Department of Health, who remain on site to maintain and support the park and patients.

My visit to Kalaupapa wasn’t always in the books. Due to personnel changes in the park (the long-time marine ecologist, Eric Brown, moving to a new position in American Samoa), I was told that I wouldn’t be able to visit during my internship as the annual marine surveys wouldn’t be taking place. While in Channel Islands National Park, I met Kelly Moore (who is taking the Kalaupapa marine ecologist position) and learned that the surveys were back on the schedule and were going to take place right after my time on the islands ended. After some quick arrangements with various parks service folks, I found myself on a flight out to Hawaii just two days later, eager to join up with a new team.

My ride into the settlement

When the strict isolation laws of Kalaupapa were let up, the governing of the peninsula was turned over to the patients. In order to retain control of the land that is now the only home that most of them know, they set up some rules to ensure that it remained a happy place for themselves. These rules include ones like no children under the age of 16 (as historically children weren’t allowed on the settlement and any birthed there were taken from their mothers as soon as they were born, so children spark unpleasant memories for some patients), a strict limit on the number of visitors allowed, and an escort required for all visitors outside the settlement grounds. The last rule was the first one that I noticed, as I wasn’t allowed to leave the airport until my park sponsors were there to pick me up.

The peninsula and settlement from the sky

Landing on Kalaupapa’s airstrip in a small, 8 person passenger plane, I walked across the tarmac and picked up my luggage to be greeted by Sheila McKenna, marine ecologist with the Pacific Parks Inventory and Monitoring,  and Glauco Puig-Santana, a biotech working for both Pacific Parks I&M and Kalaupapa. From there, we rode into town and met Eric Brown and quickly began to orient ourselves on the survey protocol. We had a lot of sites to get done, around 20, and a short window to complete them all so we got right to work.

Pre-dive setup

Following a typical I&M protocol, these surveys were straight forward. Eric Brown, a seasoned Kalaupapa surveying veteran, handled the fish counts, while a buddy (either Sheila, Glauco, or myself) would cover the benthic photoquadrats to determine bottom cover. Temporary sites, ones that were randomly selected each year, had an added survey type – rugosity measurements. This required another diver, who would work with Eric to reel out and lay down a rugosity chain while the benthic diver finished their photoquadrats. This chain was reeled out along the transect line and laid flush with the bottom, following all contours. Once it reached the end of the transect, the length of chain laid out would be counted to give a measure of benthic complexity. The more chain was laid out over the 25m transect line, the more complex the rugosity was.

The team laying down a rugosity chain on transect

Permanant sites, ones without rugosity, were alot easier and faster than the temporary ones. With only fish counts and benthic photoquadrats to complete, the work went by pretty quickly. Working as a photoquadrat diver was a pretty good deal too. You’d have to wait for Eric to get some headway on his fish counts before starting, which gave you a little time to look around and enjoy the site. I took full advantage of this free time and took my fill of photos.

Glauco Puig-Santana taking some benthic photoquadrats

Another important part of the surveys, something that happened at both temporary and permanant sites, was water quality measurements with a sonde. A sonde is a multiparameter that collects data with six user-replaceable sensors, collecting a wide variety of data, ranging from conductivity and temperature to turbidity. This high-tech piece of equipment would be used to compare subtle biotic and abiotic differences between sites and see how they might influence biological life.

The sonde working away taking measurements

For the first couple days our team consisted of Eric, Sheila, Glauco, myself, and Randall Watanuki. Randall, a long-time employee of Kalaupapa, covered the boating as he was highly experienced with it and had a recent injury that kept him from diving. We started off with some easy sites close to town, on the leeward side of the peninsula. Kalaupapa is subject to high winds, making the leeward and windward sides of the peninsula have drastically different weather.

Randall Watanuki, our expert boat operator

Shortly after knocking out a couple easy protected sites, we got a weather window allowing us to venture over to the exposed side. This area is rarely visited by anyone due to its remote location and exposed nature, so it hosts some of the finest diving on the peninsula. It also has some very dramatic views of the sheer sea-cliffs and assorted islands. The north shore of Molokai has some of the highest sea-cliffs in the world, which made a lovely backdrop for some fieldwork.

Those are some serious sea cliffs

The diving in Kalaupapa NHP was beautiful and different from anything that I’d done before. Unlike a lot of the rest of the state, there aren’t any aggregated reefs surrounding the peninsula, but instead lots of scattered individuals of cauliflower and antler corals. This is a low, but relatively stable, coral cover and is pretty healthy, with a low frequency of disease and bleaching. The seafloor is a lava boulder habitat, composed of primarily large chunks of bedrock and huge scattered boulders, making lots of sharp relief and fun diving. While the corals and rocks are cool, the fish life is what makes Kalaupapa really shine. It boasts a high fish abundance and biomass, the highest in the main Hawaiian Islands. With very little fishing pressure, these fish are free to thrive without fear. These waters were also incredibly clear, with some of the best visibility I’ve experienced.

Hidden on the far side of the peninsula was an incredible treat. Underneath one of the few islands dotting the clear blue waters was an awe-inspiring structure – a massive underwater arch, allowing for a swim-through underneath the island itself. Around 70 feet tall and 30 feet wide, this was a truly unique experience unlike anything I’d done before. I had heard about this from past interns and was sincerely hoping I’d have a chance to visit it myself, and thankfully Eric found some time at the end of a long survey day to take us over. Our trip through this arch was made even more special by a visit by two turtles, who gracefully glided around the opening. It really was a dive to remember.

Each dive day was meticulously planned out by Eric Brown. The high potential for rough weather meant we had to take full advantage of good windows to visit the exposed side. Winds could quickly whip up a small craft warning, preventing us from using the boat and from working efficiently. Even when conditions were below that threshold, swell could prevent us from working. It wasn’t really the diving that was hard to do in rough weather, it’s all pretty calm when you’re underwater, but more so the water quality measurements. Certain sites required water samples to be taken from a variety of depths, which typically took about 20-30 minutes of sitting on the deck carefully collecting and securing the samples. This work was easy enough in calm weather, but much more difficult when the small boat is being thrashed around by 3-4 foot waves. We ended getting almost all of our sites done before a small craft warning came through, forcing us to visit our last 3-4 from shore with a little swim (up to 800m offshore).

Glauco collecting a water sample

While out on the water, we visited some of the finest lunch locations I’ve ever been to. Whether it was a view of crystal clear water and seabird-doting islands, sea caves and sea arches, or seasonal waterfalls, each day brought on a new lunchtime treat.

An unforgettable lunch by a waterfall

One thing that struck me about this park was how safety-conscious they were. Every morning before going out we all gathered and discussed potential hazards, changes from previous days, and risks to make sure everyone was comfortable and on the same page. We were very careful to have extreme redundancy in terms of communications, bringing 4-5 different ways to contact help if needed. This park was also the best in terms of all the units I’ve visited in terms of using PFDs. As soon as you got back on the boat after a dive, PFD time. Stepping on the boat from the dock? Hope you’ve got your PFD. These precautions are all understandable when considering the remote location and the proximity of any potential help. The Park only has one vessel (the one we’d be using) so any assistance would have to come from elsewhere, the closest spot being on the other side of the island. Safety had to be a big concern.

Sleeping monk seal, shot under NOAA/NMFS Permit #16632-02

Alongside all of the marine monitoring, I was able to help out with a more land-based survey as well – monk seal walks. I joined Glauco for a couple treks along the coastline, searching for, identifying, and counting any monk seals that we came across. These endangered seals have taken a liking to the Kalaupapa peninsula and have chosen to return here often to pup, making it the number one pupping location in the main Hawaiian Islands. Since 1997, 123 pups have been born on these beaches – a substantial amount considering their small population size of around 1400 individuals, only around 300 of which live on the main Hawaiian islands. I really enjoyed getting to go along with Glauco and get an up-close glimpse of these seals, who spent their afternoons slumbering like logs on the beach. We got lucky on a couple of our dives and were greeted by some underwater, so it was cool to see them on land as well.

Staying in Kalaupapa for almost three weeks I had ample time to explore around, which was great as there was a lot to see. Just being a Hawaiian Island means it comes with some inherent beauty, but this peninsula had a lot more than blue water and nice beaches (although it did have a lot of those too). Travelling around with Glauco, who made sure to show me all the cool spots, I was able to see some of the treasures that Kalaupapa has to offer – lava caves, sea arches, sea caves with seabird rookeries in them, historic buildings, sea cliffs, and a small lake inside a crater with the greatest depth to surface area ratio of any lake in the world (814 feet deep and 160 feet wide). I took my camera all over with me, taking in the stunning sights and beautiful views.

All of the work that we were doing really highlighted some of the difficulties of being such a remote park unit. Eric told me that, despite the size, the NPS employees for Kalaupapa are the costliest out of any park unit simply because of the expenses of shipping out all the necessary supplies. With no roads leading in or out of the park as the peninsula is flanked by steep sea-cliffs, all supplies must be either flown in on small passenger planes or brought in on a ship. A supply barge comes once a year with various foods, supplies, and equipment, and is a major event for the town.

The settlement and its adjacent sea=cliffs

As well as being remote, Kalaupapa is a small park with an even smaller dive team, so some things ran a little bit differently than other places I’d been to. The compressor where tanks were filled is shared with the town’s fire station. Having only one park vessel meant that help is often very far away. Fueling that vessel is another challenge – the Park’s only fuel source is a small gas station, which is only open one day a week, meaning fueling consists of waiting in a long line as everyone fills up, filling up 6-8 gas cans, and then swimming them out to the boat’s mooring. Lots of things take a couple extra steps. A small team complicates these marine surveys even more, as there are only really two full time Kalaupapa employees who dive. This makes the help of the Pacific Parks Inventory and Monitoring that much crucial, as they not only send out someone to help with the surveys (Sheila McKenna), but also fund a joint biotech with Kalaupapa and the Pacific Parks unit to assist with work like this (Glauco Puig-Santana). This collaboration is crucial to getting the necessary work done.

The size of the town is another thing that really makes this place special. It’s small. Small enough that everyone knows each other, making for a really tight-knit community. Spending a little under three weeks there, I just brushed the surface of how close of a bond this is. Weekly volleyball games, game nights, movie nights are times for the town to catch up and enjoy each other’s company. Travelling around with Eric, who before recently leaving for a new job had spent years living here, I saw how not a single person went by him without saying hello and catching up a bit. Even to me, an outsider, everyone was very welcoming.

Near the end of my time at Kalaupapa, it became apparent that there was interest to see some of the videos I had taken during our survey dives. Pretty much everyone who lived in the settlement had never really seen the marine environment in depth, anything past a quick snorkel near the jetty. There’s a wild and beautiful ecosystem down there right off the coast, but rocky cliffs and rough weather make them pretty inaccessible if you don’t have a boat. With a little arranging from Glauco, we setup a little marine presentation for the town. Eric was to give a quick talk on the state of the marine program and environment, while I would create a short video highlighting their underwater backyard. While taking some time to complete, this video was very well-received and much of the community came up to me afterward to express their wonder towards what lies just offshore. It was a very fulfilling experience, being able to give back a bit to the community that was so welcoming to me, and I’m glad I was able to share a bit of what I’ve been lucky enough to see. This video, if you’d like to see it, can be found here.

In a little under three weeks, we were able to knock out the entirety of our survey sites, making excellent time with a nice clear window of weather. With the marine work winding down for the year, I had to move on. I had one final park left for me on this internship, one that I knew I’d remember for a long time. Pearl Harbor National Memorial, where I’d join their dive team to visit the USS Utah and USS Arizona.

Santa Cruz Island

Kelp forests are a magical place. An incredibly productive ecosystem packed full of biological life, these temperate underwater forests are an absolute delight to dive in. The image of towering kelp is what initially inspired me to pursue diving, so I was understandably excited to visit one of California’s finest kelp forest diving locations: Channel Islands National Park.

I was visiting Channel Islands to join up with their Kelp Forest Monitoring (KFM) team on one of their week-long monitoring trips. This program, which has been surveying the islands for 38 years now, is one of the longest running monitoring programs in the NPS. Visiting sites all around the five islands that make up Channel Islands National Park, the KFM team collects a huge amount of data to assess the health of this diverse ecosystem and to aid in management decisions.

The island areas closest to ports are heavily impacted by fishing activities. Despite 20% of the Park’s water being closed to fishing, sport and commercial fishing are allowed in the remainder of the Park and is the greatest impact on the marine environment there. The Park’s islands make up around 3% of the California coastline yet account for 15% of all California commercial marine fisheries landings. Unique ocean conditions mix warm and cold water currents around the islands, making them an incredibly diverse location for marine life – more than 2000 marine species live in the area. Such an abundance of life in a place so close to millions of people needs to have some type of monitoring keeping an eye on it, and that’s where the KFM team comes into play.

In order to effectively monitor and gather information on the complex environments, the KFM team collects a litany of data to monitor fish, invertebrates, and algae. They employ a wide array of survey types and methods, from quadrats and swaths to count individuals, to size frequency surveys and recruitment modules to learn of recruitment events and size classes, to more specialized types of data collection like plankton tows and collecting acoustic data to answer more specific questions. They utilize special techniques to be more productive underwater, like using a diver attached with surface-supplied air and communication equipment along with a surface-based tender and data recorder to allow for longer dives without the need for the diver to spend any time writing stuff down, or breathing pure oxygen from a hanging bar while on safety stops to be able to do such long and repetitive dives safely.  If you can think of a type of data to collect in a kelp forest, there’s a good chance this group is doing it.

I was to join up with them for one of their week-long trips out on the water. With so many sites to survey and the relative isolation of the islands (the closest being 9 miles offshore, and the furthest 70 miles), this group does their surveying from a live-aboard research vessel – the Sea Ranger II. This 58 ft. vessel is the perfect floating research station, complete with bunks, a galley, scuba compressor, and lots of sampling gear. It has everything you’d need for a week out on the water. Working and diving from this vessel allows the team to get much more work done, staying out on the ocean all week instead of making the trip back to the mainland each evening.

The back deck of the Sea Ranger II

I joined up with the KFM team Monday morning and before I knew it we were off to the islands. With no time to waste, we’d be going straight to our first survey site and going straight to work as soon as we’d arrived. We had a couple hour boat ride on the way out, giving me plenty of time to read up on the group’s survey protocols and to prepare myself for some cold-water diving. While I’m not a stranger to diving in chilly seas, it had been a couple months since I donned a drysuit for Isle Royale’s 36-degree waters, so I had a little bit of setup in front of me.

When we were on site and bundled up in various forms of exposure protection, we jumped off the swim step and got to work. I had done some kelp forest surveying before during my time at university, so I was put right to work on algae counts and size frequencies. Counting all individuals of certain species within 5m quadrats, I swam down the 100m transect with Joshua Sprague, a Marine Ecologist at CINP. We were counting a small selection of algae and sea star species, one of these being probably the most conspicuous resident in kelp forests, giant kelp itself. As the backbone of these forests, giant kelp creates habitat for countless species of fish and invertebrates. Certain conditions can cause rampant herbivory, often at the tube feet of spiny sea urchins, which can result in these bountiful forests being reduced to bare rock, or  ‘barrens’. Unsurprisingly, some of the species that we collected a large amount of size frequency data on was the two most common species of urchin in Californian waters, the red and purple urchins. I spent a large portion of my first day swimming around plucking these living pincushions off the sea floor and chucking them into a mesh bag for topside sizing.

The Kelp Forest Monitoring team does a lot of sizing of invertebrates, as a robust collection of sizes can be used to glean information of recruitment events and potentially even die-offs. Sizing, however, can take a fair amount of time. Calipers are used for precise measurements and sizes must be physically written down – which all sounds easy and quick but can really add up when you’re trying to size at least 200 urchins at each site. Additionally, time spent underwater is limited, so it must be maximized to its full extent. At sites where urchins are abundant, these inverts are sometimes brought up to the surface to be measured in order to increase efficiency. It seemed like after almost every time I returned to the back deck post-dive there was part of the team sitting out there sizing something.

In addition to the urchin size frequencies, there was a whole other source of need for sizing – artificial recruitment modules, or ARMS. These, essentially little stacks of halved cinderblocks designed to create available and desirable habitat for juvenile invertebrates, are a way for the KFM team to learn a little bit about waves of larval recruitment happening inside their park. Each year, these modules are visited, taken apart and picked clean of their invertebrate residents, brought up to the surface, sized, and then brought back down and put back away in their little artificial homes. This task was a coveted one by the team, and was described to me as the kelp forest monitoring equivalent of opening a Christmas present – you never really know what you’ll find inside. I grew to agree with them, it was always a fun surprise. Sometimes you’d get nothing but some small urchins and a what seems a couple hundred brittle stars, and other times you’d be greeted by a mother octopus and her clutch of eggs (no, we didn’t bring those up to size them as well).

An Artificial Recruitment Module

Diving with the Channel Islands crew, it really was work pretty much all day long. With so much data to collect, there isn’t much time for slacking off. Even when all of the diving was over there was still more data to get – a plankton tow to complete, hydrophone recording to make, or a species list to compile. It was inspiring to see them working nonstop to gather all the information needed to thoroughly monitor these special forests.

After finishing up our site on Santa Rosa Island, we headed off to the neighboring Santa Cruz Island for our next stop. Santa Cruz, the largest of the northern Channel Islands, also has the most native vegetation – the result of a huge effort to remove introduced grazers and reestablish a natural landscape. This made for a beautiful commute, getting a chance to view these sheer sea-cliffs and the greenery that blanketed them. We also got a chance to visit a unique Santa Cruz Island feature – the Painted Cave. One of the largest sea caves in the world, this enormous cavern extends a quarter mile into the island with an opening big enough to fit a 60-ft boat into it. Keith Duran, the skilled captain of the Sea Ranger II, brought the vessel all the way into the cave to give us a close look.

The entrance to the Painted Cave, which stretches up to 160ft tall at its opening

Once we arrived at our new site off of Fry’s Harbor, Santa Cruz Island, we went straight to work. I was starting off with the familiar 5m quadrats, but little did I know I was in for a surprise. The previous sites were relatively easy for these quads, with only a couple species to count, but this one was a different story. A silty bottom with scattered boulders, it seemed like every exposed surface was covered in an invasive algae species called Sargassum horneri. Resigning ourselves to an a long, mind-numbing dive, my buddy Laurie Montgomery and I committed to the count, in the end reaching tallies of thousands of individuals, a task which took 75 minutes and almost all of my sanity.

Understory growth, like the ones pictured here (not Sargassum) can form dense carpets and severely complicate counts

Also while on Santa Cruz Island I got a chance to break out the camera. For most of this trip there was too much work to do to be able to take photos, but I seized an opportunity to join Rilee Sanders and Cullen Molitor as they finished up some work. As visibility was low, I opted to shoot macro, something that I haven’t gotten a chance to do much of recently, in hopes of getting some nice photos of the California morays that everyone was talking about.

The next day we finished off our final site of the trip, and then went to do some logger retrievals. The KFM team has set out some acoustic loggers throughout the park and I was able to join some of the pick-up dives. In hopes of being able to use these hydrophone recordings to gauge ecosystem health, these loggers take 5-minute recordings every 15 minutes until they run out of battery or memory. Diving with Joshua Sprague and Kelly Moore, these dives were short and sweet – drop down, grab the logger, and bring it back up – but a nice way to get a quick view of some diverse sites. While doing these logger pickups, I visited my first marine protected area of the trip – a beautiful, lush kelp forest full of healthy marine life.

Channel Islands National Park is home to a network of marine protected areas. A mix of State and Federal marine reserves and conservation areas, these designations offer various forms of protections to marine life and serve as a sanctuary to preserve species diversity and abundance. In 2005, the KFM team added new sites to their protocol to survey inside and outside of these protected areas to try and gauge their effectiveness, and the results are clear. These MPAs work wonders for preserving species diversity and sizes, which allows for the maintenance of a healthy ecosystem. This is pretty clear when diving in them as well – the protected sites were among the most beautiful ones I visited on the trip, a telling testament to the importance of protection of special places.

We wrapped up our final day with some diving on Anacapa Island, the smallest of the northern islands and the closest to the mainland. This was one of the two islands out of the seven that I had never been diving on, so I was excited to check it off my list (only San Clemente Island left!). Even more exciting was that we had enough time to get a survey dive in after finishing off the last bit of work. We’d be working a couple sites around Anacapa, picking up loggers and such, and would have a little bit of free time before needing to head back to the mainland. I was able to jump into the chilly waters a couple final times and got to enjoy the beautiful kelp forests in the marine reserves off Anacapa Island for a bit before heading back home.

Shortly before leaving the Channel Islands I was met with an unexpected surprise. I was chatting with Kelly Moore, a long term KFM veteran who is about to start a new position at Kalaupapa National Historic Park. Kalaupapa NHP is one of the parks that is frequently visited by OWUSS NPS interns, but was one that I didn’t think I’d be able to visit this year due to shifting personnel and an unfortunately scrapped survey season. I mentioned this to Kelly, and was surprised when she mentioned that the fieldwork was in fact not scrapped, but still planned and was to start literally the day after I returned back from the Channel Islands. Even more exciting, she thought they could probably use an extra hand. At this point in my internship, I had no parks planned for me after CINP, so I sent out an email and before I knew it I was booking flights to Hawaii two days in advance from my phone while on a boat 50 miles offshore. With these exciting plans ahead of me, I drove straight to San Francisco as soon as I left the Channel Islands harbor in Ventura and hopped on a flight to another beautiful island chain, one a little bit more remote – the Hawaiian Islands.

Santa Rosa Island

As soon as I saw the bright blue tropical water from the small plane window I knew my flight was going the right way. The unmistakable vibrant waters of the Caribbean were moving closer and closer as we began our descent. I was eager to return to this part of the world and was looking forward to more picturesque beaches and wildly clear waters. This trip I was returning to the Virgin Islands, but to a new one this time: St. John, home of Virgin Islands National Park.

Virgin Islands National Park, encompassing 60% of the land area on St. John and about 9 square miles of the adjacent ocean, is a beautiful place full of tropical forests, historic ruins, and fringing coral reefs. Surrounding it is Virgin Islands Coral Reefs National Monument, adding an additional almost 20 square miles of protection to the reefs around the island. I was here for the second leg of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program (NCRMP), a nation-wide effort to survey and keep track of the health of coral reefs. Lead by NOAA, this was a collaborative effort including groups like the NPS and University of Virgin Islands. This work was identical procedurally to what I worked on in St. Croix, as the survey methods must be the same in order to create comparable data. After my previous warm-up round a month before, these surveys collecting information on reef complexity, fish diversity, and coral health felt very comfortable and familiar. There was one big difference between the two for me though: in St. John, I collected much more data.

In St. Croix, I spent 3 of my five diving days photo-documenting the work at hand and shadowing to try and pick up the survey methods, only jumping into data collection on the last two days because the team was short a member. In St. John, I collected data from start to end – forcing me to data dive with a bulky camera strapped to my BC if I wanted to get any photos of the reefs. This was fun, as I like scientific diving and data collection, but did have one major downside. All of this fun data collection was paired with another, far less fun, task: data entry.

All that data has to go somewhere

All data entry had to be done by the end of the trip, so each day of diving 5-7 dives a day means 5-7 data sheets are waiting for you when you return home, tired after a long day of diving. Sure, you could wait to enter these until a little bit later in the trip but they’ll quickly pile up, creating an imposing stack of impending work. This data entry obligation was difficult to manage, with all the other internship duties I had along with dinner and other evening activities. To make matters worse, the survey type that I was doing, line-point intersect, was collecting information on percent cover of the benthic environment – meaning that I’d always have 100 points to enter, regardless on how barren the site was. Certain less-than-interesting sites gave the fish and coral surveyors a welcome break from the intense data collection, but the hapless LPI diver was doomed to work tirelessly.

Sometimes the tables were turned, and recording point after point of turf algae seemed preferable to counting and sizing hundreds of fast-moving fish

All of my gripes aside, this data entry is a key portion of the survey process – completely necessary if you are interested in doing any types of analysis or learning anything from all of these numbers that have just been produced. Additionally, doing it right after collecting it leaves little room for forgetting key information. It’s much harder to decipher messy underwater handwriting a month after it was written rather than a couple hours later.

So what was all this survey data on? If you were to ask members of my vessel during the St. John NCRMP leg, you might get a lot of answers of ‘scrubble’, a lovely benthic habitat composed of sand and rubble (and often not much else). The protocol is designed to survey any type of habitat that could potentially harbor coral, including the ones that may boast one small coral colony in 50m of seafloor (we visited some of these). As long as there was a single piece of hard substrate, we’d survey it (and yes, that little rock over there in that seemingly endless sea of sand counts – we checked). The words ‘coral reef surveys’ may invoke beautiful mental images of expansive living grandeur, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you have to monitor the sites that are what I imagine it would look like if a coral reef sneezed and forgot to cover its mouth, or sites that have so much algae and so little coral that you’ll have to double check you aren’t diving in California. However, someone has to collect this data – after all, zeros are important data points too.

Sometimes the algae/coral balance was skewed a little bit more towards the algae than you’d like it to be

As with St.Croix, these were randomly selected GPS waypoints that were chosen based off of benthic maps created using bottom sounder data.  This means that you’re often diving on sites that have never been visited before – and that no one really knows what type of habitat you’ll be dropping in on. Sometimes, that hard bottom that you (and the quickly growing dataset) have been pining for isn’t so hard after all. My team had more than our fair share of bounce dives, dropping in on large swathes of sand or seagrass and coming right back up. Sometimes, these seemingly-uneventful bounce dives would unearth thrilling sites: a school of hundreds of adult bonefish, tiny cryptic sargassum-dwelling invertebrates, or potentially my favorite sight of the trip – the largest palm tree I’ve ever seen. Sitting calmly on the dark ocean floor at around 90 feet deep, this submerged giant must have been over 70 feet tall.

While these soft-bottomed dives sometimes had fun surprises, the reefs were still much nicer

Despite feeling as though our team had somehow angered the gods who pass out the site survey assignments and were doomed to spend our days ticking off point after point of turf algae, we did still manage to visit some pretty spectacular sites. The Friday of our first week was the uncontested peak of the trip – visiting five aggregate and patch reef sites, with unparalleled visibility and surprisingly high coral cover. To top things off, our very first site was on the fringing reef, the reef furthest away from the islands and widely-thought to be the nicest around.

One of the nicer reefs we got to visit

With not many observed instances of disease or bleaching by our team, these reefs seemed pretty healthy. However, it was pretty clear that they had recently been subjected to some wild, intense, storm-driven swells. Occasionally, we’d run into coral colonies that looked like they’d been bashed in by a couple of angry garbage trucks on a bender, huge chunks of growth split apart in ways that seem impossible to comprehend. We’d also run into other signs of storm damage as well. Entire trees underwater was a common one, unintentional visitors from an outside world who’ve turned into a semi-permanent reef feature. Fragments of roof was another one, forcing one to imagine just how strong winds must have been to rip this huge chunk of metal off of someone’s house and deposit it a quarter mile offshore. We also ran into the wreckage of what looked like a rather large ship, broken apart and scattered across the reef.

Remnants of an unfortunate ship

While not a huge amount of disease was observed, as it has relatively recently made its way to the Caribbean, this doesn’t mean that we didn’t take any precautions to avoid spreading it. This park was the most cautious out of all the ones I’ve been to in terms of taking preventative measures – they were promoting what they hope to become ‘the new rinse’. Consisting of soaking gear in a diluted bleach solution (less than 1%) and then rinsing in freshwater, this thorough procedure is designed to remove any possibility of disease transmission through diver’s gear. The Parks Service is attempting to popularize this procedure throughout the Caribbean, supporting local recreational dive operations in their transition by supplying the bleach, with hopes that it’ll become widespread.

With a lot of the surveying gear touching the bottom, disinfecting is a crucial precaution

This disease, stony coral tissue loss disease, has only recently been detected in the U.S. Virgin Islands but poses an incredibly dire threat. Affecting 22 different species of coral with a mortality rate from 66-100%, it poses to decimate Caribbean reefs. First making an appearance near Miami in 2014, this disease quickly spread through the Florida Keys and has recently made its way out to the Caribbean as well, putting reefs already in major distress from climate change under even more stress. Described by researchers as being comparable to an underwater Ebola, this disease is currently incurable and ripping through reefs, killing corals that are hundreds of years old in mere weeks. Scientists are forced to result to dire containment measures, physically removing infected coral colonies from the reefs in a last-ditch effort to stop the spread. The speed and intensity of this disease make it a very real issue, putting even more importance on the island-wide monitoring we were undertaking. With a wide distribution of sites surveyed, this program has a good chance of locating and identifying disease before it becomes too widespread.

A diseased coral quickly losing living tissue – this may be a different disease, black band disease

Diving off of St. John, there’s a lot of boat traffic. Ferries travel around constantly moving between the many islands peppered through the area, private charters zip back and forth between beaches, and seemingly every other person on the islands has their own boat. This meant that we had to be extra vigilant when surfacing, especially as we managed to do a surprising number of sites in major boating channels. For some reason, vessels in this area don’t really seem to care much about dive flags – despite being clearly marked and obvious in the water, they’ll power right over them. Thankfully, the largest vessels (the ferries) weren’t very stealthy – their powerful, rumbling engine was audible even 90 feet down, and was hard to ignore when its booms resonated through your body.

Another hazard that we had to deal with was currents. While sometimes simply a nuisance, causing more exertion than desired, these had the potential to cause more serious issues. We had one memorable dive with such a raging current that I was almost unable to swim against it. The LPI diver has to swim into the current twice in the dive, once to reel out the transect and once more to collect their data, so I had to fight this angry stream of seawater twice over, exerting myself much more than I would have liked at depth to make the tiniest bit of headway. When we’d finally finished that dive and were able to stop fighting it, we noticed that our gas consumption and physical exertion weren’t the only things that this current had taken a toll on – it had also pulled down our dive float. Lying pitifully on the end of a suspiciously slack line at 85 feet down, wrinkled and compressed to half its size, our small buoy and handheld GPS combination had been yanked down to the depths by a whole lot of fast-moving water. With the help of a lift bag and a quick decrease in pressure, it happily returned to its former full and turgid state but was the subject of quite a few post-dive discussions in the days to come.

Strong currents really made us appreciate the dives without them

One final hazard was weather. Despite St. John rarely getting thunderstorms, we had quite a few during our monitoring trip. Often these storms would quickly materialize out of dark clouds without warning, surprising us in the middle of our day. We had one memorable dive where a lightning storm started while we were under – I remember the eerily calm surface of the water, the surface mottled with the impacts of thousands of raindrops and the occasional blast of illumination on the darkened reef from a flash of lighting.

Calm and serene underwater, cold and wet above

One small perk of doing all of these high-traffic, high-current, scrubble dives in the middle of the channel was a small novelty that I’m really pleased to be able to say that I’ve done – an international dive. With the close proximity between the USVI and the British Virgin Islands, it only made sense for a couple of these randomly selected points to fall right on the border. And sometimes, the transect happens to head across international lines, or a drifting safety stop takes you a little into someone else’s territory (it’s hard to see these borders underwater). While essentially meaningless, I got quite a kick out of these globe-trotting dives.

Some British fish

Like St. Croix, the dives for this program were fast and seemingly non-stop. Over the course of the two-week period, we quickly worked ourselves up to an average of 6-7 a day, occasionally even doing eight. Diving a range of depths and a mix of air and nitrox gases, high numbers of dives were achievable and safe – but sometimes lead to long days out on the sea.

Long days underwater are always worth it when you’re rewarded with sights like this

A huge perk of spending two weeks in St. John was that it gave me an entire weekend off between surveying to explore a bit more of the island. A huge amount of the island is National Park, encompassing a vast expanse of undeveloped forest and beaches. While lovely to see from the water as it really highlights the scale of the whole area, it was nice to get up close and personal as well. During time off I got a chance to see the sea turtles at Maho Bay, juvenile lemon sharks at Reef Bay, and even to take a quick visit to the British Virgin Islands. This was a really beautiful area that I’m glad I got a little time to see.

Juvenile lemon shark in the shallows at Reef Bay

I was happy to join on for another couple weeks of the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program as it’s such an important cause. At such a pivotal point for the fate of coral reefs it’s exciting to be on the forefront of the monitoring, collecting the data that will be used to inform policymakers about the ocean health. Additionally, I welcomed the opportunity to learn more about these reefs and the issues they face – all relatively new stuff to a cold-water diver like myself. After two busy weeks full of diving and data, I left the Caribbean for good. I was now heading to the opposite side of the country, to spend the remainder of my internship diving in a completely different ocean. It was time to say goodbye to the corals of the Caribbean and hello to the ecosystem that got me into diving – the lush kelp forests of California, at Channel Islands National Park.