Week Five

I can't believe that I'm already half way through my time with ORCA. It's going crazy fast.

On Monday we went down to Ocean Blue to feed and measure the turtles. Oscar is still doing well and is steadily gaining weight. Elvis is more of a worry as it's more difficult to get him to eat and he's not gaining any weight. We'll just have to keep trying to feed him and hope he starts to improve. We carried out tasks like changing the water in the small tank. Unfortunately we found out later we had put in dirty water from the estuary and had to do another complete water change because of it which was incredibly annoying. We managed to get out on a boat in the morning which is always good. We went out on Fat Boy and saw humpback dolphins. Humpback dolphins supposedly never jump out of the water (or so the books say) but on this trip we saw a mother and calf jump completely out of the water three times. It was so cool as you properly get to see how defined their hump is. I didn't manage to get any decent photos of them jumping but Chanel got at let 2 awesome ones that captured them completely out of the water. It was great!

Tuesday was a bit of annoying day. We were supposed to go to Tenikwa to do alien tree removal but it was raining hard so when we had finished feeding (attempting to feed - they were being stubborn little shits today) the turtles we came back to the house and Ulrica gave me a presentation about ORCA and Ocean Blue's carbon neutral programme. Basically we plant trees to counteract any carbon emissions we produce through running the boats and car and electricity by planting trees. There's a calculator on ORCA's website where you can calculate your carbon emissions for one year and then it tells you how many trees you have to plant in order to cancel that out. You can then buy trees from ORCA and we can plant them for you! It had stopped raining at this point so we went and did a SASS and a beach clean up. Then it rained again so I watched a documentary about how basically our oceans are fucked because of over fishing and fish populations are basically in collapse and if we don't do anything about it soon then we will literally have no fish left. At all. Scary shit. So please make sure if you're going to eat fish that you know that it has come from a sustainable source. I mean in sushi restaurants in London they sell blue fin tuna which is listed as critically endangered. Yet people still buy it. Imagine the uproar and outrage there would be if a restaurant in England started serving orangutan or tiger??! It would be crazy, but no one really bats an eyelid at blue fin tuna because its a fish. Ridiculous.

On Wednesday we went to Tenikwa to do the alien tree clearing that we were supposed to do on Tuesday. It was still cold and a bit wet which actually proved perfect weather for tree cutting. It's fun using the machete and imagining the trees you're hacking down are people you really dislike. It's brilliant fun. After we'd had lunch at Chanel's parents house, we went down to ocean blue and I can't remember what we did. My memory is so bad. Evening we went to Surf Cafe again. It was fun.

On Thursday me and Ulrica went to preschool. We taught them a little bit about what marine animals eat and then we sang lots of songs and the children loved it! They are so cute. In the afternoon we did a rock pool evaluation and then went back to the house. Again I can't remember what we did next. Again, bad memory. I think we sorted out stuff for me and Marlies to go diving the next day.

Friday was a good day. Me and Marlies had decided that we wanted to learn how to scuba dive, so on Friday we completed a course called Discover Scuba where you learn basic stuff and you do one pool dive and one ocean dive. It took a little bit of getting used to and I had a little trouble with my mask, but I really really enjoyed it! The visibility wasn't very good when we went into the ocean but we still saw corals and fish and anemones and sea urchins and other stuff. It was cool. The next stage is to complete our Open Water course. Once you have done that you're a qualified scuba diver with PADI which is recognised all over the world. We're hopefully doing it next weekend.
At 4 that day everyone from the house went paint balling. I was a little nervous that it it would hurt a lot when you got shot but it was actually not too bad. It was really fun but I think my problem with it was that I'm not competitive enough to care who wins. Saying that my team won the most games, which was good.