East Coast 2021:
Day 16 - Homestead, FL

	Saturday, September 25, 2021: We slept in a little and were out of the hotel around 8:30 AM. It was looking like another beautiful day, which was great because we were going snorkeling today.
	It was a quick 15 minute drive from our hotel room to ...
	... Biscayne National Park.
	More specifically, we were at the Dante Fascell Visitor Center. Almost all of Biscayne National Park is in the ocean, so to really see it, you have to go out on a boat.
	After a quick trip upstairs to the office to check in, we settled in to wait the 30 minutes until our boat captain was ready for us.
	This compass rose was in the shelter area of the visitor center.
	The latitude and longitude of the center of the national park were on the disk in the center of the compass rose.
	Around 9 AM, there was activity around our boat, Ocean Rider, but we weren't ready to board yet. Be patient. Just a few more minutes.
	At 9:15 AM, our guide, Jason, led us down to the boat and our captain, Brian, gave us a combined safety briefing and rules of the boat talk.
	A few minutes later, we were headed out of the marina, ...
	... past the mangroves, ...
	... and out into the waters of Biscayne National Park.
	There were double-crested cormorants and gulls on the remains of a pier that ran alongside the channel out of the marina.
	The channel is an idle zone to protect the manatees and other sea life that are in the area, so we had plenty of time to see the birds that were perched on the channel markers while we were creeping out to sea.
	After about ten minutes of idle speed, we finally cleared the channel and the captain was able to open the throttle and make progress toward our first snorkel stop.
	Our guide pointed out Turkey Point nuclear power plant in the distance, where he said that 25 percent of American crocodiles live. Like the California Condor, the American crocodile population was driven down to fewer than 300 in the 1970s when they were placed on the endangered species list. When they were discovered living in the cooling canals around the plant, the operators of the power plant, Florida Power and Light, began monitoring the population, tagging baby crocodiles and helping to make sure the habitats are suitable for nesting. Thanks largely to their efforts, there are now approximately 2000 American crocodiles in the wild, and they have been downgraded from endangered to threatened.
	That's Miami in the distance.
	Our boat turned and slowed and our guide pointed out a group of bottlenosed dolphin in the distance.
	He thought they were hunting a school of fish, and while we lingered for a few minutes, they were too busy for any of them to come over and check us out.
	Our guide also pointed out these keys, explaining that a key is formed from coral that is now above sea level, while an island is formed from other geological activity that raises the seabed above sea level.
	We entered another idle zone in the shoal water around ...
	... Adams Key, and ...
	... Elliott Key. Elliott used to have farms on it in the 1920s, and Adams Key used to be have a private resort on it.
	We were through the shoal water and back at cruising speed ten minutes later.
	Five minutes after that, we were at our first stop: Anniversary Reef.
	A few minutes later, Debbie was the first person off the boat and into the water.
	There weren't many fish around, but there were huge moon jellyfish that were absolutely gorgeous.
	Just beautiful.
	They look so delicate.
	Look at the tentacles around the bell on this one. Seriously, just so beautiful.
	There were sergeant majors swimming around these round starlet coral with fan coral growing out of them.
	Here's a blue parrotfish.
	We saw lots of staghorn coral.
	Lots.
	The horns over the eyes of this scrawled cowfish and a sloped profile to its mouth are what gives it the cowfish name.
	This was a rare species for this area. It is usually found much more inland.
	This is a shallow-water starlet coral, usually found in silty water down to a depth of 25 meters. The black dots are very striking.
	Here's a conch shell.
	There's a bluehead wrasse.
	We're not sure what this is. So sue us.
	This coral reef put out its Christmas tree worms a little early this year, or maybe it hadn't taken them down from the previous year.
	This is a good shot showing a typical view of Anniversary Reef - mostly coral and not very many fish.
	We used up the last few minutes of our 45 minute stay floating in the warm water.
	Back aboard, Captain Brian asked what everyone had seen, and then prepared to head off to our next stop, which was the nearby Alina's Reef.
	After falling off the boat into the water, it was just a short swim to the reef. One of our fellow snorkelers was diving down to get a closer look at something.
	Alina's Reef was more vertical, with lots of colorful coral, ...
	... and many more fish. There were lots and lots of fish here.
	Tom went down to take a closer look at something on the coral.
	It was a tag of some sort. There were several in this area of coral.
	Check out the writing! It says "You can help. Take photos of this tag and coral, upload to www.seafan.net/tags." Absolutely! We will do that! (And we did when we got home!)
	And we'll let you try to figure out what the number on this tag is.
	Blue tang.
	Debbie was photographing ...
	... this rainbow parrotfish.
	Beautiful.
	This large beauty is a gray angelfish.
	Check out the bright yellow behind the fins.
	A school of Bermuda chub swam by.
	Tom got this photo of Debbie ...
	... taking this photo of Tom.
	Underwater, you can hear the fish chomping on the coral. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.
	This was the first queen angelfish we had ever seen, and it was gorgeous. The colors were electric.
	The reef was really quite beautiful, and we enjoyed it tremendously.
	Debbie saw this French angelfish just before our time was up. We had seen three of the four angelfish varieties that were here, which means it was a pretty good day.
	We were really enjoying the full-face masks. Once again, neither one of us had any mask-related issues, and they were incredibly comfortable.
	That's a happy boy.
	We headed back toward the marina. About ten minutes into the trip, we slowed down so that Jason could grab a gigantic floating bucket out of the sea. It had obviously fallen off of someone's boat, and we brought it back with us.
	We slowed down as we passed Adams Key again, ....
	... and then sped up as soon as we were past it.
	It had been a beautifully sunny day for the entire trip, ...
	... but we could see the clouds rolling in for the typical afternoon thunderstorm.
	Three hours after we left, we were back in the channel looking at the remnants of the pedestrian pier that had been destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
	The gulls were very happy to stand on what was left of the concrete pilings.
	It was starting to get dark in the distance as we arrived back in the marina, ...
	... and it started raining after we drove away. That's the amazingly great Bundlings weather luck for you.
	Tom made a quick trip across the street to Pollo Tropical for cuban sandwiches, flan, and cuatro leches cake for lunch and snacktime later.
	We showered and washed out all of our snorkeling gear and hung it to dry in the bathroom.
	At 2:30 PM, we started watching the Peregrine Fund's livestream of the 26th Annual California Condor Release at Vermilion Cliffs National Monument. We had driven through the Vermilion Cliffs area earlier this year, and had seen California condors at Navajo Bridge, so we were very excited to watch as they released more birds into the wild.
	There were five that were going to be released, with tag numbers 25, Z1, Z4, Z7, and Z8. Clockwise from the top left was the presenter for the event who was in Idaho, a view from inside the condor enclosure atop Vermilion Cliffs, a view showing the outside of the condor enclosure, and a field biologist near the enclosure in Arizona.
	There was a segment about the World Center for Birds of Prey which we had visited four months earlier.
	There was lots of discussion about the condors who hang out at the Navajo bridges in northern Arizona, not far from today's release site.
	A segment described how the wing tags were made, and the countdown at the bottom of the screen let us know how many minutes were left until the release began. At 3 PM Eastern time, they opened the doors on the enclosure to allow the condors to fly out. They had explained on the livestream that they were not going to force the condors to leave the enclosure, and that there was no guarantee that they would leave at all.
	We watched anxiously as they would hop around the enclosure, getting closer to the open doors, until at 3:12 PM condor Z1 hopped out and climbed up on top of the enclosure.
	A few minutes later, condor Z4 also went out, flying down to a nearby cow carcass that the field biologists had placed there hoping to lure the birds out.
	Condor Z7 followed soon after Z4, ...
	... with condor Z8 not far behind.
	Last to leave was condor 25, and just like that, there were five more wild California condors in the world. Miles today: 14. Total miles from Fort Kent, ME: 2891 Day 17 >