Midway Christmas

It was a nice Christmas here.  We had a gift exchange at Capt. Brooks' on Christmas Eve.  On Christmas Day, some of the albatross nest counters volunteered to do the Christmas Bird Count for the Audobon Society.  I'm impressed that they want to count birds on their day off from counting birds.  We did that for half a day, and after a really good Christmas dinner, a large group went out snorkeling at Reef Hotel.  The water is a lot cooler now, but that makes it much clearer since there's not as many tiny organisms growing in the water.  I got quite a few decent fish pictures, but I'm only posting a few since I've got more pictures than usual.  I'll put them up sometime when I don't have as many.

Capt. Brooks' is all set up for the gift exchange.  The tree is decorated with the marine debris ornaments.

Santa is stating the rules for the gift exchange.  You can only steal presents twice before they are out of play.

The Clipper House staff set up the community table again for Christmas dinner.  We had turkey, pork, baked black cod, and beef Wellington for the main dishes.  I was great as usual.

This is Dasha's marine debris ornament made from 3 plastic floats.  She drew on some Christmas turtles for good measure.

Last year I painted some flying birds on a blue float, this time I put a turtle, dolphin, and some fish on a blue float.

These are threadfin butterflyfish.

This is a bluespine unicornfish. This is an easy name to remember since it has blue spines near the tail and a "horn" on it's head.  There's a tiny saddle wrasse following it.

I've tried for a long time to get a good photo of a pearl wrasse and one finally cooperated.

These are 2 of the Pacific golden plovers that Dasha and I counted during the Christmas Bird Count.

The green sea turtles are taking advantage of some nice, sunny weather on Turtle Beach.