Today my adventure began at five in the morning, unfortunately, thanks to the local roosters. My roommates Jimmy Bucklar and Clayton Caldwell soon grudgingly arose from their sleep too. By seven o’ clock we had deserted our resort to eat breakfast and receive a briefing over our schedule for the day at a different hotel. There we met the diving instructors who we will be working with throughout the week, and went over the dive planned for the day. After lunch our group left for harbor and began our first underwater expedition. Our boat anchored at Valley Trunk, a somewhat desolate reef with little life. All of us were anxious to get in the water and hurried to put on our equipment. I performed a striding entry, essentially walking into the water from the rear of the boat. I was instantly amazed with the exotic environment. Our dive instructors wasted not a second and made us perform some basic “in case anything went wrong” moves that we already learned as a refresher. Once the skills were finished we set out on a tour of the local habitat. I thought at first that it was desolate, but once we reached a slight drop-off slope zone the reef was crawling with hundreds of colorful fish. Our instructors even spotted an invasive fish that was originally from the pacific ocean that somehow ended up here, and is now destroying the delicate food web. He shot it with a spear. A lucky spotted mooray eel got to eat it. Sorry for typos, I’m on an iPad, it screws up a lot. I’ll try to figure out how to upload pictures from my camera tomorrow as well. – William Farrell
