Today I woke up early and got to see the sunrise across the ocean. I went downstairs and got s big breakfast with plenty of time to spare before the boat was ready. I got all my stuff ready and soon enough the boat was ready to leave. We hopped on and headed to our dive site. This was the deep dive. A wall of coral that plummets 3000 feet into darkness, with caves and tunnels all over the wall. We began to descend onto the top of the wall, about 50 feet down. We then directed ourselves towards the edge of the wall and started doing small swim throughs and looking for any difference in the way that the fish or coral lived and reacted. At 100 feet and deeper, the entire ocean seems to change. The colors aren’t as bright, the temperatures are lower, it’s much darker, and even some of the fish seem to move slowly. I immediately began to notice more and more fish as I focused on the caves and tunnels. Two large tarpon appeared out of the darkness, but their movements were slight. They seemed to just float in one direction without any movements from their tails. Larger versions of the fish we normally see at higher depths became more frequent. On our second dive we stayed much more shallow and saw more colors and a much longer dive time. The rolling hills of the coral makes you almost forget to breathe. The longer you look at the coral, the more creatures you notice. I began to get so focused on the small stuff that I almost missed the giant parrotfish that swam by at the end of the dive. I had never seen a parrotfish that size before and was amazed at its size and colors. It was a spotlight parrotfish that was swimming from coral patch to coral patch. It quickly swam a way once it saw us. On the third dive we went to stingray city, where upon jumping into the water, stingrays swarmed us looking for food. We sat in the sand as the dive master swam around with the food, all of the stingrays followed. They would swim over us allowing us to touch them while they chased the bottle of squid. They stumbled over each other for more than 30 minutes and then they all left in search for more food. We returned to the resort and ended the day with the pool, volleyball, a bug dinner, and then a movie.
