This Week on National Geographic...

      Hello once again. I realize that most of my posts are about running into sea creatures in weird ways... so buckle up for the ride!
      I just went out to the house reef to try to work on my project like normal, and this big ol' barracuda about half my size was just chilling by some brain coral waiting for me. Now I am at the wonderful height of 5'4, so this guy was at least 3 feet long, maybe a little more. I thought maybe if I just gave him some space and continued looking around for corals and urchins it would be okay, but nope, he instantly started to turn around and swim towards me.

      He just starts getting closer and closer and I'm trying to back away as he stares into my soul and opens his jaws multiple times. In my head I'm like just stay calm, stay still it'll all be okay. He finally got really close and then shot off past me into the blue abyss. (Now of course barracuda are just really curious but I was panicking more because it was really close to me and they give me the creeps.
      So right after that I swim over to Dara to tell her what happened and start to look for urchins again when I hear her go "MMMMMM", our universal signal for there is some kind of fish here that is either cool or scary. There was a blue octopus that had just dove into its den, and I looked down to see one eye peering back on me. So I just go out and start looking around the reef again for a little while before once again I hear "MMMMMM". I sped over there and this time got to see a chain moray hunting around the reef.

     I'm just watching him and all of a sudden I see the blue octopus swim up from out of nowhere. Me and Dara are both screaming "MMMMM" because eel eat octopus and they were really close together. So the eel comes around the corner and the octopus slides up into a rock wall trying to stay out of view. The eel swam right past him and dove into the hole that led to the old den of our refugee octopus. After that, we didn't see the eel again, and we narrowly avoided watching an octopus get devoured like a scene found on nature shows. However, we continued to follow the octopus from there and watched him hunt until he finally found a new, eel free den.

Today was just something else.

     ~Lauren