After a long night of sleep I was rested and ready for our last day of diving in the BVI. Following our typical breakfast and loading of the dive boats at the dock, we headed out to sea to learn about our dive sites for the day. Today we had a typical two tank dive in the morning, with lunch on the boat and a snorkel in the afternoon. Our first dive this morning was at the newly sunk wreck, the Kodiak Queen. The Kodiak Queen was a former navy fuel barge that was one of the five surviving fish from the Pearl Harbor Attack. Somehow, it ended up in a junkyard when historian Mike Cochran found the rotting ship and thought it would be a beautiful artificial reef. With help from local artists, a huge kraken was made from wire that lies on the front of the boat, to enhance the beauty of the dive. The dive around the ship was breathtaking and exciting due to all the history surrounding it, but a downside of seeing a newly sunk wreck is that not many corals have grown on the ship yet, so at some points it had a tendency to look very bland. After our first dive at the wreck, we headed to our second dive site where we focused on coral restoration. We were tasked with the job of cleaning and measuring the coral trees that were being grown. Overall, it felt good to be making contributions to the environment after watching the documentary last night, but also seeing the amount of coral that was plagued by disease at the nursery was sad as well. After those two dives, we had lunch on the boats and began to learn about our snorkel that we would be doing in the afternoon. Our snorkel was focused specifically on mangrove trees, as they possess tons of life around their long and winding roots. These trees are unique in how they can survive in salt water, where most plant life would die. Through a special process of filtering out the fresh water and salt, these trees are actually able to sweat the salt out through their leaves, which helps them survive during high tide. On this snorkel I saw tons of barracuda and jellyfish hiding in the roots. After a long day on the sea we finally got back to shore where we finished our projects for tomorrow and ate dinner. Today was an action packed day.
