A study in patience...and perseverance

This week I started in on what will be my main project here in Watamu - tidepool fish surveys.

Welcome to my Office! 

Now I know what you're thinking and yes I'm still a diver who is crazy about benthos (coral and algae), but with the SE monsoon stirring up the water and making things quite rough it is a challenge to get any meaningful work done most days on the reef. I will still be making some forays into the lagoon in an attempt to do an informal survey of macroalgae as well.

I remember once watching a behind the scenes special about making the "birds of paradise" episode of Planet Earth (a stunning show my best friend and I would watch regularly during high school). Basically these cameramen constructed camouflaged "blinds" where they stayed for days just watching and waiting to catch the mating dances of these birds. It's their patience and dedication I have been trying to channel this week.

Yesterday was the full moon, meaning that we've been having lovely low spring tides around mid-morning for the past few days. Since Wednesday I have been starting early, packing a snack, and making the half hour walk down the beach to the most productive patch of tidepools (which ironically happens to be right in front of the three main resorts of Watamu). There, armed with a UV protective rashguard and digital underwater camera, I have systematically stalked tiny fish.

I feel like an ibis or heron walking with slow, long steps, stopping abruptly, and moving on until I find a perfect pool or a fish I haven't seen before, or one I haven't managed a good picture of yet. Then I slowly slowly lower myself while simultaneously raising my camera. I attempt to place the lens of the camera beneath the surface of the water and take a decent picture before the fish disappears with a flick of a tail and small poof of sand. Other times I feel more like the videographers I mentioned earlier. I pick a spot, get comfortable (as much as possible - some pools have required some very interesting yoga-worthy poses), place my camera on the sand, and wait - finger on the shutter button.

With the tidepool area being right in front of the resort, it is very much beach boy territory. And by beach boy I do not mean Californian musician capable of great harmony - I mean Kenyan desperately trying to get money out of tourists any way possible. I have been offered snorkeling tours, getting my picture with a moray, kikois, bracelets, and carved key-chains to name a few. It's usually pretty easy to dismiss them with simple polite conversation, especially after I make it clear that I am not a tourist on holiday. Sometimes I wonder what they think about me - wandering the tidepools, refusing snorkeling tours, insisting that I'm doing a scientific study, when all they see me doing is hunching in awkward positions over small pools (or sometimes crawling through larger ones) for long periods of time. Just another eccentric mzungu?

After three days at these northern tidepools I think I have captured images (some rather blurry) of all of the fish species that I have seen, though I think there might be more I haven't seen yet. Tomorrow at the lowest tide of the week I will head south to another smaller, deeper patch of tidepools. I'm excited to see if I can find any new species there.