Bumper Cars, except in the Ocean

Dive #183: Blue Fish Cove, Point Lobos, Carmel, CA

Went out on Kevin's boat at Point Lobos. We had to haul Randy's zodiac out to the dive site because his engine didn't work. That was great timing, because there were supposed to be storm threshold waves that day. It was all pretty amusing, especially on the trip back. The rope length had a strange resonance frequency with the waves because every few waves, Randy's boat would surf down a wave and come crashing into the back of ours. It was like bumper cars, except in the ocean. I was laughing, and muttering "oh shit" at the same time. Why is it that everytime I go out on a zodiac at Point Lobos, I feel like I could die? Randy was taking video the entire time.

*2 huge white nudibranchs (Discodoris ap. 2) intending to mate. A brittlestar was nearby
*Dendrinotus albus nudibranch
*Vermilion rockfish
*Lots of beautiful anemone
*the dive was as beautiful as some divesites in Fiji, in my opinion
*17 lbs of lead (6 on weight belt, 10 on bcd, 1 on feet)

Dive #184: Mouth of Whaler's Cove, Point Lobos, Carmel, CA

Scary, scary dive. I kept thinking a Great White Shark could sneak up on me, but had to reassure myself that they don't like to swim through kelp. And there was a lot of kelp, more than I've ever seen before.

*2 foot rockfish - I've only seen another that size once before. This one was probably decades old.
*Purple cabezon with the head the size of a grapefruit, perfectly camouflaged against a backdrop of purple rock.

Happiness is Miserable

"Happiness is Miserable" claims Jennifer Aaker, professor of Marketing at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Professor Aaker (http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/aaker/) spoke at yesterday's lecture sponsored by the Stanford Professional Women. And she had some data, hilarious videos and charts to back up her statement that "Happiness is Miserable".

It has been a long time since I stepped on the Stanford Campus. It was fun to visit after so long a time away. The Alumni Center, where the event was held, is absolutely gorgeous. There was smoked salmon, cheesecake and good coffee to stuff my face with. And everyone was dressed to the hilt in their most fashionable attire.

I had trouble initiating conversation with
my fellow attendees at first. I need to brush up on that skill apparently. But another woman who was attending the lecture on her own struck up a conversation with me from her chair near by. Approximately the same age as myself, she had two small kids already, looked older than myself, and was extremely well spoken, which is more than what I could say for myself. Maybe networking at these events more would give me some of that polish.

The lecture itself was hilarious. Aaker presented some photos from her family trip to Disneyworld, where everyone was clearly miserable. However, looking back, only happy pictures with disingenuine smiles remain. The point was: Americans (more so than in other cultures) have a hard time resolving experiences that are both happy and sad, and will usually remember one over the other. This demonstrates that we have an unrealistic vision of how happy we are supposed to be?

Another key to her lecture was that there is more than one type of happiness, and that our definition of happiness morphs with age. For example, happiness is associated by most people by the following words:

Can't stop smiling
Pleasure
Feels good

But there is also a deeper, more sustainable meaning of the word happiness:

Contentment
Feels right
Authentic

Aaker argues that if we can be more in touch with this latter meaning of happiness, we will become happier.

One final point she made was that giving to others usually makes us happier than anything else we can do.

Some other short term fixes to feeling happier:

-Smile more
-Breath more slowly and deeply
-Have a small sandwich (eat a snack)
-Slog through a tough 3 hour task
-Avoid the negative-the negative has more lasting power over the positive
-Anticipate happiness in the future
-Remember happiness in the past
-Control the ripple effect your happiness -has on others (we are happier when our friends' friends are happy)
-Find a project that is meaningful both at work and at home



-- Post From My iPhone

Lost Finale

The Lost Finale was yesterday. We celebrated, with our friend, Eddie, with Buffalo wings, veggies, and Mexican coke (made with cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup).



I'm going to miss:
1. The excellent acting, particularly for the character of Benjamin Linus.
2. Whimsical, genius plot lines: such as Desmond's button pushing in the hatch.
3. Romantic couples: Claire and Charlie, Jin and Sun, Desmond and Penny.

-- Post From My iPhone

Fiji Overview from a South Pacific Newbie

We recently returned from our honeymoon in Fiji. It was our first time travelling to the South Pacific, and I'm excited to share my impressions, particularly of the diving. We had never scuba dived anywhere in the South Pacific so it was interesting to compare the diving experience with the California and Caribbean diving that we were accustomed to. A word of warning: this trip report is full of detailed fish descriptions, armchair science, vast generalizations and way more adjectives than you can shake a stick at.

When I planned our vacation, going to the Beqa Lagoon Resort in Fiji was a distant third choice (Palau and a Fiji liveaboard were my 1st and 2nd choices). Unfortunately, diving is a very expensive activity and due to a tight budget this past year I chose my 3rd choice for it's bottom line.

In case you have never heard of Beqa Lagoon, it is a small resort (accommodating only 50 guests). It is located on a small island about an hour's boat ride from the main island of Vitu Levu, and about a 3 hour car ride from the main airport in Nadi. The resort is famous, not only for it's coral reefs, but also for it's shark dives and for its delicious cuisine, which is claimed to rival any restaurants in Fiji. Guests stay in homey thatched roof huts called "bures". There are no TVs in the bures but there are nice decorative details. There are elaborate wood carvings on the doors and on the walls, which give the accommodations an exotic flavor. The oceanside bures have their own dipping pools, outdoor showers and hammocks overlooking the beach.

The resort is all-inclusive. All diving, meals and entertainment are provided for. This was a pleasant experience for us, since we are used to being independent while on vacation. We never had to worry about money at the resort because everything was paid for in advance. Tipping was not encouraged. As I understand it, Fijians may find tipping offensive because it is assumed they would have to pay something in return. It is suggested, however, to donate to the local grade school at the end of one's stay at the Beqa Lagoon Resort, in lieu of tipping. The no tipping policy multiplied our enjoyment of our stay immensely.

It was also inconvenient to leave the resort, I learned quickly. Little did I know before arriving, but there are no cars, let alone roads on the island. There are only 9 small villages occupying the 27 km circumference island. These are linked by narrow, unnamed footpaths through the jungle. I believe there is only one other resort on the island. Wandering off the resort grounds could result in getting lost in the jungle!

And the famous cuisine? The food met and exceeded our expectations. I tried initially to rein myself in, but I soon gave up and ate everything on my plate, including the starter course, and dessert, which, for my 5'1" frame, is quite a feat. My favorite dishes were their New Zealand lamb shank, and their swordfish pasta salad.

The Diving

Our first time diving in the South Pacific was certainly enlightening for us. Other than our local waters around California, we had only dove in the Caribbean. The underwater life in Fiji is very different from the life in either. There are the colorful soft corals that Fiji is so famous for, and justifiably so. But the Fijian hard corals were also much more colorful than Caribbean corals. Such color could argue for the superior health of the Fijian coral reefs over the Caribbean ones, I learned. It is the photosynthetic organisms inside the coral which gives them it's color, and the intensity of hue is an indication of the coral's health.

The South Pacific fish also looked like they were from an alternative universe from those in the Caribbean. The angelfish were significantly smaller and many of the butterflyfish and the angelfish had developed long snouts. My theory for why the fish are smaller is that they have evolved to inhabit the South Pacific coral which only allows smaller fish to be able to hide within it's dense spikes. The larger fish have developed long snouts, the better to reach in between the dense coral spikes to feed. At least that's my theory.

Many of the fish across many separate families sported exaggerated forked tails. Some tails even had long tendrils hanging off of them. The total effect of these was to lend an exotic, oriental appearance to the fish, so unlike anything you see in the Caribbean or California. I am uncertain why such decorative features would ever give any fish an evolutionary advantage. And why this would codevelop across a variety of fish families is beyond me.

Despite all the color, enjoying the diving in Fiji was more difficult than I anticipated. Looking back on our colorful underwater photographs, I can hardly understand why. But I have isolated the possible reasons:

If you are like me, you have to categorize everything. It was hard to categorize the South Pacific fish into the usual triggerfish, angelfish or butterflyfish categories because the South Pacific fish looked so different. In addition, there are families and genuses of fish there that don't exist, at least not in proliferation, in the Caribbean or the California coast, such as the lionfish, anemonefish and unicornfish categories, to name just a few.

On top of all the unknown fish species, the diving was initially hard to "get" because the fish were so much more skittish than their Caribbean or California counterparts. In Fiji, the fish will hide if you go so far as breathe. Mark has some video of the dascyllus fishes (these are fish in the damselfish category) ducking back into the safety of the reef everytime he exhaled. Often times the largest schools of fish gathered below us when we were doing our safety stops, once most of us noisy divers had left.

As a side note, the small size and the skittishness of the fish is probably also caused by the fact that Beqa Lagoon has been fished for centuries. Many Fijians still fish to this day as part of their subsistence lifestyle. And there are yet no Fijian marine preserves. (Nor is there yet any intention by the Fijian government to put aside any marine preserves.)

Finally, the visibility was poor at Beqa Lagoon - enough to mute the colors that showed more brightly in our photographs than they appeared in real life. During our visit, it rained 50% of the time, which granted was unusual, even for the tail end of the rainy season, which was when we visited. The profuse amount of rain cloudied the water. Average visibility was no better than 50 feet at best.

It was probably on our second day of diving that I was able to enjoy the diving more fully. I learned to look for dartfish, shrimp gobies and their partner shrimps, nudibranchs, banded pipe fish and hawkfish. The lionfish, moorish idols and ribbon eels, which are so compelling in photographs, showed up in volume on every dive! And who doesn't enjoy watching anemonefish shimmying through their anemone patches?

I haven't yet talked about our shark dives. The Fijians from Beqa Island have an ancient belief, that no shark would ever harm them. To this day, Fijian divemasters, who hark from Beqa island, feed large sharks by hand on their famous shark dives. The shark dives are conducted without cages and with no protective gear on the part of the divemasters other than perhaps chain mail gloves and long metal sticks. Divers are gathered in a semi-circle around an area where they feed the sharks with fish heads and other fish parts.

On every shark dive there are lemon sharks, nurse sharks and bull sharks. An on every other dive, a Tiger shark will cruise by. Bull sharks and Tiger sharks are two of the three most dangerous sharks in the world, in case you didn't know (the third is the incomparable Great White Shark).

The safety of the dives seemed to me hinged on the following: the resident sharks are satiated from repeated feedings, and have no desire to eat people. In fact the bull sharks we saw were the fattest ones the divers had ever seen. I saw one very full Bull Shark burp up a cloud of fish juice in regurgitation.

The divemaster to diver ratio was also high - there were several divemasters armed with sticks lined up beside and behind the divers. However this seemed less effective than the other factors I listed. I saw one fish feeder repeatedly punching a bull shark in the nose and the response was quite slow and delayed. It didn't seem as though beating a shark in the nose did a whole lot, and probably wouldn't deter one from attacking. Oh, did I just say that?

Being on the shark dive itself is like sitting beside a high speed freeway. The fish feed is like a tornado with Jacks and other pelagics the size of tombstones swirling among the sharks. I have been on shark feeds in the Bahamas before and the Fiji shark dive was much better. The adrenaline was definitely an addictive experience. After it was over, I remember thinking it was going to be impossible to return to regular reef diving.

Conclusions

All in all, would I dive the South Pacific again, and in particular Beqa Lagoon? The diving was excellent, if a little hard to get used to at first. If I were to dive Fiji again, it would probably be onboard a liveaboard, though. The waters visited by the liveaboards supposedly offer clearer visibility and greater diversity of diving. The diving in Beqa Lagoon, except for the famous Beqa Lagoon shark dives, was dominated by shallow bommies. Bommies are silos that sit between 15 to 60 feet of water.

I am not yet enough of a fish nerd to appreciate the macro life or coral life that abounds in Fiji. And from what all the other guests say, there are other stellar places to dive, other exotic cultures to explore: Palau, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu just to name a few.

In honesty, I wouldn't change a thing to my Beqa Lagoon visit, though. At Beqa Lagoon resort, we had the opportunity to be temporarily welcomed into the Fijian community on Beqa Island. It was the Fijians, themselves that left us with the strongest impressions.

Many of the Fijians live a subsistence lifestyle: gathering fruit, fishing and small scale farming. And many people live in modest, single story, two or three room cement block houses. But I don't think that the Fijians live less happy lives than we do necessarily. Everywhere I looked, there was a clear blue sky, empty jungle and empty farm lands as far as the eye could see. There were relatively few people around for the amount of land available. And there was not much garbage lying around. I never smelled any of the putrid smells that we breathe in crowded countries, including our own.

To say that the Fijian people are friendly is too cliche. There were shy Fijian people as well as outgoing ones, much like there are in the United States. However, virtually everyone we met was warm-hearted, and there was less of a barrier between the warmth they felt inside, and the behavior they exhibited. Whenever our car drove past, pint sized children would jump up and scream "Bula!" (which means "hello" in Fijian), their exuberance was unfiltered..

In a nutshell, visit the Beqa Lagoon Resort if you want to experience a slice of Fijian culture in addition to scuba diving. If scuba diving is what you seek, try a liveaboard or go somewhere else in the South Pacific. If peace and quiet is what you are seeking, do not come to the Beqa Lagoon Resort, either. The resort encourages interaction between guests, and accommodates many dive clubs. Meals, and time aboard the dive boats is filled with conversation, natural and forced. If first class luxury is your thing, try another resort as well. You may find the Beqa Lagoon Resort's geographic isolation more rugged than you would expect. But if you enjoy meeting people, want to feel included in the island community, enjoy good food and want to do things other than diving, then Beqa Lagoon Resort is your place.

Fiji Above Water

It has taken me a long time to write about our experience in Fiji above water. And it has taken me such a long time because I was surprisingly touched by our experiences. As much as we loved diving underwater, I think Mark and I will most treasure the people we met above water and our brief encounters with Fijian culture. I was so moved by the warm feelings extended to us by the Fijians, that on the day we left, it took me completely by surprise to be blubbering like an idiot.

But perhaps the right place to start would be to write about my preconceptions about Fiji and how the reality matched with those preconceptions. Before coming to Fiji, I had never really given the culture there much thought. Skimming through travel guides on Fiji, I was left with images of large, well-maintained resorts, friendly people and of a rich Indian culture resulting from the large Indian population there.

There is a reason why people don't see much of Fiji beyond the large resorts. Fiji is a very poor country. Many of the native people there live a subsistence lifestyle: gathering fruit, fishing and farming to small extent. And many people live in modest, single story, two or three room cement block houses. There are villagers who are so poor and with so little access, that they rarely see foreigners, and are amazed to even see cars driving down the road.

But it is wrong to say that the quality of life in Fiji is poor. Fiji has quite a low population (875,000 people as of this writing). It appears as though such a low population has not yet overwhelmingly burdened the islands, either from a waste standpoint, or food standpoint. Everywhere I looked, there was a clear blue sky, empty jungle and empty farm lands as far as the eye could see. There were relatively few people around for the amount of land available. And there was not much garbage lying around. I never smelled any of the putrid smells that we experience in crowded countries, including our own. I did get the sense, however, that people are sensitive to environmental conditions worsening. When I told our chauffeur that Fiji seemed very clean, she replied somewhat wistfully, "Fiji is still clean?" as though apprehensive that it could all soon change.

Another factoid I had gleaned in my readings was that the Fijian people were some of the friendliest people in the world. I took this to mean that the Fijian people were rambunctious extroverts. That was far from the complex truth. Truth is: there were shy Fijians as well as extroverted ones, but almost all the people we met were warm-hearted. They were also charismatic, funny, and clever. They were elegant and at ease in their bearing. The resort managers at Beqa Lagoon Resort told us that Fijian people are almost always happy, and when they are sad, they don't stay sad for long. They also told us that Fijian people don't hide what they feel, and what is shown on their face is usually what was going on inside their heads. We found that to be true in our daily greetings with people. There seemed to be no filter between the warmth people were feeling, and how they behaved. Whenever our car drove past, pint sized children would jump up and scream "Bula!" (which means "hello" in Fijian), their exuberance was unfiltered by the restraint we so often feel in our cold, Western society.

Most of all, we enjoyed the company of our divemasters, whom we dove with everyday. Our divemasters entertained us with stories, amused us with practical jokes. They showed us a little of their hopes and dreams. One divemaster, Missy, told us how his vigorous schedule of diving 6 days a week wiped him out, and then he made the hand symbol of drinking a bottle of booze. Anyone who has ever dove for a significant amount of time would know what he meant. You feel totally tired and a even a slight buzz after a full day of diving. My heart went to him, because he had two small children and a new baby on the way. It was not a good time to be tired, as a brand new father. Another divemaster, Tusy, expressed his desire to obtain the full divemaster certification. He led divers everyday, but did not have the books necessary to study for this first level of professional diving instruction. , yet a third divemaster touched us with a surprising goodbye gesture When we were about to leave Beqa Lagoon that I can't write about, but caused me to break down into tears because it was such a poignant, tender gesture.

It has been a few weeks since we've come back from Fiji and I am now more fascinated than ever by the Fijian culture and national psyche than ever. Gleaning what we could of the troubles brewing below the surface of all the welcoming smiles, we wished we had more opportunity to explore Fijian culture more in depth. Cracking open my travel guide on the South Pacific, I am itching to explore all the other island nations that await: Palau, Micronesia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and looking forward to soaking up more of that intoxicating South Pacific feeling.

9th Day: Fiji Honeymoon

On our 9th day at Beqa Lagoon we decided to do a couple of dives with the new crew who had just arrived. We were sitting on the fence as to whether we would be diving today. We had already exhausted our dive package, and Mark and I were feeling pretty wiped out from a whole week of diving. Mark was feeling tingling on his face, which he had only previously felt after doing decompression diving in Cozumel. So naturally, we thought he might be feeling something akin to the bends. Ultimately, we decided to go for it. The symptoms weren't painful and it wasn't getting worse with time so we were pretty sure he wasn't experiencing DCS. I also felt we would be missing out on all the action if we sat these dives out. The crew that had just arrived was really cool and it would be fun to go diving with them.

This group, whom we had met at dinner the day before, weren't part of any dive club but were different couples and a single thrown together. This made it easier to converse with them. The single of the bunch was a distinguished lookin Aussie gentleman with a marine biology background who told us about the coral reef rating scale, which is part of the "coral watch" organization in Australia, and which I had never heard before. Coral health is rated on a scale of 1 to 6 and is judged by the potency of it's color which is indicative of the health of the photosynthetic organisms (I don't know their names) residing inside. He rated the house reef a 1.5 out of 6, which convinced me that it was hardly worthwhile to explore it.

Others in the group included a cool, well travelled, and well-tattooed Aussie couple, a San Jose couple, an Arizona couple and a couple from Long Beach who invited us to stay at their house if we would ever to visit the upcoming Long Beach Dive Expo.

Given that the marine biologist was only diving at Beqa Lagoon for one day, and given that coral health was so important to him, we were hoping that the dive crew would take us somewhere that represents the best that Beqa Lagoon had to offer. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. It was many of the peoples' first day of diving in over a year and the dives we were going to do would be checkout dives. There was too much current to do Fantasy or Golden Arches, so we ended up doing a site called Stone Henge, which Seru admitted they very rarely dove but were forced to due to the weather conditions. The dive site was pretty miserable as far as coral health was concerned, but we still saw cool, shallow water things we had never seen before. There were a whole bunch of Canary Fangblennies at this dive site, which are cute, and like many South Pacific marine life I noticed, had long trailing tendrils off their tails. We also observed shrimp gobies for the first time. These are gobies that share burrows with tiny shrimp, which I gather help excavate the burrow. It was fascinating to watch this symbiotic pairing in action. it was hard to spot the shrimp because the shrimpgoby did such a good job sounding the alert.

The second dive, Sea Fan Coral, I considered to be fairly average, below average. Even so, I had a spectacularly good time. I was feeling more comfortable than I had all week, in that my buoyancy control and my trim was better, and my mask wasn't giving me issues. The small anthias and dascylluses werent even bothered by my prescence. And so I was just hanging out watching fish behavior, soaking in my last dive in Fiji. I never felt so reluctant to leave a dive site as I did then. I hung off the descent line during my safety stop like Tarzan hanging from a vine. The line kept swinging due to the erratic behavior of the boat in the choppy waves, and the weighted rope nearly hit the coral of the bommie. At one amazing instance, I saw the rope nearly hitting 3 crinoids off a ledge. But I saw these feather stars recover and grab hold of the ledge again. It is hard to believe these feather balls are animals which can crawl and chose where they choose to reside, but yet they are. I continued to hang off the weighted line to make sure the rope did not damage any more coral life by pushing off from the rock until my safety stop was done and I reluctantly boarded the boat.

Dive 181: Stonehenge
Mina: 65', 1:11 min.
Mark: 51', 1:08 min.
Shrimpgobies
Canary Fangblennies
Pennant Bannerfish
Moorish Idols
Longnose Butterflyfish
Regal Angelfish

Dive #182/ Sea Fan Coral
Mina: 59', 1:05 min
Mark: 67', 1:00 min.
Humbug Dascyllus darting around branching coral
Latticed Sandperch
Picasso Triggerfish
Arc-eye Hawkfish

-- Post From My iPhone

8th day: Fiji Honeymoon

Dive #180: John's Tunnel
Mina: 54', 0:54 min
Mark: 69', 0:52 min
Spotted Unicornfish
Seru spotted a Brown Banded Pipe fish
Black spotted puffer (Fish that looks like a harbor seal)
Black sweet lips

Surface snorkeling interval
12 anemone fish and a black Dascyllus fish

Dive #181: Golden Arches:
Mina: 65', 1:05 min.
Mark: 64', 1:04 min.

Golden sea fans under a large arch
Schooling Spotted Unicornfish
Humpback Unicornfish
Three-spot Dascyllus
Grouper with trailing tail
Orange spine unicorn fish
Scalefin Anthia Fuschia anthia with spine on head
Small black and white reef fish
Longnose Tang
Giant clam that Mark took video of


-- Post From My iPhone