March 18th, 2011

Yesterday was an amazing day.  We got to travel down to the Southern tip of Palau and watch the Scripps group deploy an ADCP to measure water currents.  This was right off of the island of Peleliu, which was a huge battle site during World War II.    The currents were very strong and the Scripps group did a great job.  We moved on and deployed a wave sensor on the west side of the island and then looked for a good place to run a REMUS mission with two vehicles.  The place that was most interesting happened to be one of the beaches that was used for Survivor Palau.  While the vehicles were out running we got to snorkel around and look at the sea life and coral heads.

Today we headed to the West side of Palau and worked in the estuary to look at runoff from the island and how it disperses in the local channels.  The vehicles had a hard time running since the currents were pretty strong, but we got everything back on board.  We moved over to the main channel and deployed some transponders for the Scripps REMUS and then put out some time lapse cameras to capture a fish spawning event that occurs around the full moon.  We had couple of beautiful dives and got to see a shark and lots of beautiful fish.  We even found Nemo’s anemone.