Today we started out a little early considering our cabin consisting of Clay Walters, Bryce Ozier, William Name, Henry Droese and myself stayed up till midnight throwing the frisbee around the cabin and talking about what we wanted to do for the week and how excited we are. We arrived at Yacht Harbor and ate breakfast at the restaurant, while being introduced to our dive captains. Bryce, Clay and I then boarded the “mystical” Sea Dragon and Dan, our dive instructor, gave us a crash course lesson on how to set up the scuba equipment since we forgot how to do it after not diving in a year. We took the boat out to George Dog Island to assess our diving skills, that we may or may not have remembered. We dove to a depth of about 35ft and went through the basic skills of buoyancy, and mask clearings. We passed the skills test with flying colors and were rewarded with burning eyes from the salt water and a cool trip around the coral. While exploring, Dan somehow found a nice watch buried in the sand, and we ran across a spotted moray eel, which was by far the coolest species I saw today. We packed up from George Dog, and made our way over to Great Dog Island to dive the “world famous chimney” according to Becca, another one of our dive instructors. You may be wondering why there are so many islands named after dogs, well it’s a very thrilling story when Christopher Columbus traveled passed the islands, they heard some sort of barking, which they thought was a pack of wild dogs when in fact they were just the barking of seals. Moving on, we swam around the chimney on Great Dog Island until we eventually got to swim through the chimney, which is only about 3ft wide, and narrowly escaping the dangerous sting of fire coral. After we took our 3 minute safety stop at 15ft, we packed up our day of diving and headed back to the marina where we disassembled our gear and hung it up to dry. Then best taxi driver in all of the land, Glen, picked us up at the marina and took us back to Guavaberry where we too a break for lunch down on the beach. I made a pretty fantastic pb&j, and after eating everyone was enticed by the flying plastic disc that I brought. Wanting to cool off, I sought shelter underneath the trees, while drinking my ice cole water. Then everyone put on their snorkel gear and prepared for the journey to the baths. The baths are named that way because when slaves were taken across the ocean for weeks, the slave owners would take them there to have them bathed before auction. After learning about all the geography of the rocks in the baths, we had the ability to climb on some of the massive rocks, while yelling “parkour”, and getting one of the best views of the surrounding islands that I have ever seen. We then snorkeled all the way back to Guavaberry beach where we would end our day until dinner. Day 1 on the island was a success!
