Hope you had a fun Fourth . . .
LEAVING FOR YAP MONDAY MORNING . . . WE HOPE - Monday marks the start of our three-week Yap trip (some people doing two weeks, some all three) and if travelling isn't stressful enough already, we just got a notice from United that our 8:35AM flight will now leave at 10:10AM due to crew issues. We will/should still make our HNL-GUM flight but we now won't have a leisurely 3+ hours in the HNL United Club to kill the time. Aside from the distance involved, one of the issues in getting to Yap is there's very little margin for error with the flights. There's one flight each day Honolulu-Guam. (Ironically, there's a 5-hour layover in Guam but the United Club there closes before we arrive.) But there's only one flight each week GUM-YAP. Fingers crossed that this all works out for us.
NO ZOOM SEEKERS THIS WEEK - We were planning on hosting from the Manta Ray Bay conference room in Yap. Our scheduled speaker was to be Steve Wertz from the CA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, talking about the MPAs. But he's had a schedule conflict and his assistant wasn't available so given the complexity of pulling all of this together, we'll forgo a session this month and have rescheduled Steve for November 14. Our next Zoom Seekers will be August 8 and will feature Rachel Cushman, the Dive Safety Office at the Aquarium of the Pacific, and she'll be talking about the dive program there and how you can get involved.
THE OCTOPUS NURSERY - This alsmost too cool for words. Scientist have discovered a rather large octopus nursery off of Costa Rica almost two miles deep and in an area thought to be inhospitable to marine life. CNN did a report about this which you can see here:
DEEP SEA OCTO NURSERY.
FLORIDA SARGASSUM HAS DIMINISHED - We've told you before about the problem Florida is having with an unusually bad season of sargassum washing up on its shores and stinking up the beaches (it smells like rotten eggs). Well, it looks like it's abated somewhat as a recent satellite survey to track how it's moving shows it has shrunk by about 75%. This is much more than was predicted and is good news for Florida beaches.
TEXAS HAS A DIFFERENT PROBLEM: DEAD FISH - There's a big fish kill going on along the shores of Texas as thousands of dead fish are washing ashore. It's due in part of the record heat that's been going on and when the water warms up too much, it can diminish the oxygen content of the water and, in simple terms, the fish can't breathe and they die. Read more abut it here:
FISH ISSUES IN TEXAS.
MEGALODON SECRETS REVEALED -There's also new evidence about Megalodon sharks, which went extinct about 3.6 million years ago. Turns out they were more warm-blooded than previously thought, and that may have led to their demise. You can read about it here:
DEMISE OF THE MEGALODON.
That'll do it for now. I need to finish packing and then obsess about whether this flight delay is going to screw up our trip plans. Never a dull moment. But assuming all goes as hoped for, you'll be getting TWARS from Yap next week. Also look for us on FaceBook with some daily Yap reports.
- Ken
