This week I left the warm coral reefs of the Caribbean for a five-day Kelp Forest Monitoring cruise in California’s Channel Islands National Park. After some 23 hours of traveling I made it to the park headquarters in Ventura Harbor, where marine ecologist Josh Sprague met me and led me
Conveniently (presciently, even) timed for the dive stand-down, I was scheduled with a land interlude this week: back in the Virgin Islands for sea turtle patrolling in Buck Island Reef National Monument, off St. Croix. The turtle project on Buck Island has been a continuous effort since 1988 to identify
You might think living on an island of 0.06 square miles during a dive stand-down could get tedious, but my DRTO days have been astonishingly eventful. We continued our turtle monitoring each day, on Loggerhead as well as on Garden Key and the smaller sandy keys. Luckily we didn’t find
After saying goodbye to Mike Feeley and Lee Richter in Miami, I hopped on a flight to Key West to start the next leg of my journey to the Dry Tortugas. I had been to Key West once before this January, for a field trip on the SEA vessel Corwith
The last two weeks in Biscayne National Park have been a great introduction to the variety of underwater cultural and natural resource management projects going on in the National Park Service, as well as the realities of the weather dependency of marine field work. At the Miami airport I was
Hi everyone! I’m Julia Mason, and this summer I’m lucky enough to be serving as the 2013 Our World-Underwater Scholarship Society National Park Service Submerged Resources Center Dive Intern. I’ll spend the next three to four months scuba diving in some of our National Parks, participating in various projects and
