Happy Mother's Day, Mom, and to all the other mothers who read this too!  I hope no one minds that I'm always a day behind on my holidays.  I guess that's one of the negatives about being in the last time zone

It's been beautiful this week so it finally dried out.  The sun was out, it wasn't too hot, and there was hardly any wind.  The volunteers have been keeping busy with the albatross chick banding, and Ive been keeping busy on the computer.  I found a few minutes to get out and see some things though.  I'll explain more in the photo captions.

This is one of our Black-footed albatross plots.  The volunteers have banded pretty much all of the black-footed albatross chicks, but have quite a few Laysan chicks to go.

 Here's an adult black-footed albatross.  It wasn't doing anything too exciting, but hte light was kind of nice.

There are a lot of white terns putting eggs everywhere.  This one found some old bedframes in the Ski Warehouse to lay it's egg.

This is the white tern chick that I showed you a couple of weeks ago under its parent.  It looks like it's still doing ok.

 It was too nice of a day to pass up a boat trip today.  The water was about as flat as it gets.  This is a marker that ships use to align themselves to make it through the channel cut in the coral.  The dark spot on the right side of the picture is a spotted eagle ray.  We saw a few of them today.  We also saw a manta ray, which I got a few underwater pictures of, but they were a little far away.

 This is the USS Macaw (ASR-11).  Today was the first time I had a chance to swim down and see it.  There's a really interesting story to this wreck.  It was a submarine rescue ship which tried to rescue the submarine USS Flier (SS-250), which had run aground in bad weather.  It ran aground too.  The weather was terrible and 5 sailors died during the weeks that it was grounded. They ended up having to use explosives to demolish the ship to clear the channel.  This bow section is relatively intact, but the rest of the ship is strewn all over the bottom.  Here are some quick links to some photos and accounts. 
http://www.ussmacaw.org/
http://www.papahanaumokuakea.gov/maritime/macaw.html
  

 I checked out a few new spots today.  There were a lot of whitebar surgeonfish and convict tangs following me around.

 The yellow tangs really brighten things up.

 The dolphins came to check out the boat, as usual.  I got a couple of pictures by putting my camera over the side.

I was going really slow, so the dolphins were swimming only a foot or two in front of the bow.