Yesterday we dropped off 6 more lobster houses. We were planning on doing all of them, but technical difficulties arose once again. I woke up at 6 and was at the beach for 7. Henry, Raj, and Eliza all accompanied me. The yola arrived around 8:30 and we headed off to Ceyba Park to get Paul and Diane’s boat. The motor wouldn’t start because we finally figured out that the problem was that one of the fuses was dead. We finally headed out to sea around 10 and since the tide was so low, the boat grounded. We had to get out and push. We went to Bowsen’s reef first and dropped four more houses close to the reef in deeper water than the other site.
The remaining two houses we dropped off in the other location that I want to call Lion Fish Reef because every time I’ve gone diving there, I’ve seen a lion fish. This time I saw two! I know they are invasive but they are beautiful. They are really majestic looking fish because they float in the water so calmly and ignore snorkelers. I jumped into the water without my weight belt far from the reefs with a strong current so I had to hold onto the bouy while the boat dragged me to the reef. It was not pleasant because water kept getting into my snorkel. We dropped two houses in an area that I thought would be good location next to the reef, but when the houses hit the ground, they sunk into the sediment at a 30 degree angle. I couldn’t reach them because I didn’t have my weight belt on so we will have to return to them soon and fix them.
After the drop off we went out to lunch at Paulina’s and Raj had his first bandera meal in the DR, the midday meal that Dominicans have every day that consists of rice, beans, salad (cabbage, lettuce, tomato, and cucumber), and a meat dish. We went back to the house and I passed out for two hours on the cot because for the past three nights I had only been getting five hours of sleep and had been waking up at 6 every day for five days. It felt fantastic! The cold shower afterwards did too.
I headed back to los Mameyes around 4 after my break and found Fran. We needed to figure out when we were going to drop off the remaining 8 houses. Fran seems to be a little impatient with us because we’re putting the houses in areas that he thinks are high traffic areas for fishing. He kept joking to everyone that he wanted to get rid of the houses because they are a lot of work. However, he went back to Bowsen’s Reef and found a lobster in one of the houses! I wish I was there. It was a spiny and he said it was small.
I also hung out with Juan, the CODOPESCA representative and collected my first data on the size and number of lobsters that were brought in using other methods. The lobster fishermen come in from 4-6 in the afternoon and from 4-9 in the morning.
I also had a brief conversation with a fisherman who said that the price of lobster increases in the tourist season, which starts around October. I’ll have to look at the prices of lobster that Carlos gave me to see if that is true. He also said that the lobsters get sent to the touristy areas of the DR like Bavaro, Punta Cana, and Santo Domingo.
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