Snorkeling day two Friday)

No one is complaining about doing the same thing we did Wednesday!  We were out on the water for about six hours today, and saw more amazing sea life.  This was Connie's first day on and in the water and the shutter on her camera was flying like mad.  We began the day kayaking in the Rock Islands,which really look otherworldly, like some kind of Dr Seuss landscape. It was lovely paddling up close to these mushroom-like islands, formed of limestone and covered in dense vegetation.  The bases are eaten away by chitons and  other bio erroders.  Our guide spotted a cluster ofmoonjellyfish, the stingless kind, so we all abandoned kayaks for fins and masks and rolled into the water again to get a close look.

Each of the seascapes we've seen is different.  Kent, our guide, even admitted that you could pretty much drop anchor down anywhere and see great corals.  today the sun even popped out for a bit so the colors showed more brightly.  Among the marvels we saw today were, a huge spotted giant clam, red starfish, blue starfish, lion fish (native here) an entire family of damsel fish from millimeter sized to about 3"' feeding on a largish blue coral, farmer fish -- another amazing species of damsel fish.  Carl spotted several cleaner wrasse stations, an alligator fish, sea cucumbers.  , Dietmar and Jen saw a sea turtle, Trina caught sight of an octopus.  Our guides took us fo a break to a spot called the Milkyway, a unique shallow lagoon with white silt bottom, a kind of clay-like substance prized as an exfoliant and skin product.  We clowned around for awhile with mud on our faces, Carl carefully avoiding his beard and Bill going full bore with hair, face and scalp, looking more like a creature of the sea than a human.  Swimming in that quiet aquamarine blue water was another otherworldly experience.  

Our conversations out of the water are often peppered with "business", though when you are in the field it's clear were really talking about life and livelihoods.  Over lunch on the beach (another beautiful conference room), Trina talked us though the Micronesia business plan, it's keystone strategies of protected areas, capacity building and sustainable finance, in the focal areas of marine, terrestrial and climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction.  How do we effectively communicate the work we're doing here in ways that are compelling to donors in the US? To the German government?  To internal partners in marketing and philanthropy on which international programs like this rely?  How do we prioritize work here that can be taken to scale globally and under what context, e.g, saving coral reefs, building sustainable fisheries, creating sustainable economies for developing island states?  And,importantly, working within communities to preserve the dignity and essential nature of the country.  That takes time, and is a challenging strategy to quantify internally and externally.