Day 2 and the South Shore

What out second day of diving at Wake lacked in first time excitement it more than made up for in conditions. The wind and swell has continued to drop and while today was not quite like bath water in terms of temperature and sea conditions, it was pretty darn close. The is still a decent long period swell rolling on from the east, but we were still easily able to tow the eastern and souther coastlines and passed out surface time watching the swells crash toards the beach as they crested the reef. The turquoise water turned emerald green topped with wisps of white as we looked through the back side of the curls.

Along the south side of the island we resurveyed part of our previous tracks and were greeted by many of the same bumphead parrotfish we saw yesterday. The large parrotfish can easily reach over a meter in length and bite off whole chunks of coral as they feed.

We passed the REA team several times underwater and were in turn passed over by the AHI, the multi-beam launch, as they were mapping the bottom. We were all excited to be part of the map of Wake until we found that we would be trimmed out as so much useless noise during the data processing. Party poopers.

The south side of the island also contains the entrance to the small boat harbor which in the past seems to have been home to much larger ships. The reef is littered with anchors, some old and some new. Many are much larger than the anchor on our ship with links of chain I could easily stick my arm through.