I awoke to the shouts of my bunkmate, Sean, running through the cabin exclaiming that rain was pouring in through our open windows. My bed was perfectly dry so naturally, I just laid there and watched the chaos ensue. The rain quickly put me back to sleep so well, that not even the alarm clock woke our room up. At around 8:20, Hector was kind enough to gently awaken us from our deep slumber. We ran to our taxi which took us to our boats for the day. The conditions were beautiful, slightly overcast, drizzling, and little wind. The water had excellent visibility, but it was colder than my ex-girlfriend’s heart.
Our first dive was our final “fun dive” which helped us get acclimated to the reef and the surrounding area. After a short surface interval, we split up into our teams to do our fish identification dive, the climax of our class. I was buddied with Will. Our job was to take a survey of all the fish within a specified region of the transect. This was one of the absolute coolest things I’ve done while I’ve been here. Knowing that my survey will affect the conservation of coral reefs here in the BVI is a reward among itself. Our dive lasted nearly 30 min, though we only covered an area 100 meters long by 5 meters wide. After we surfaced, it was a little depressing to see that our diving portion of the trip was over.
After we ate lunch, we were given our final exam. Broad questions were aimed at our overall understanding of the course. Our question was over the relationships between animals that we saw while diving and snorkeling. As the number of unanswered questions approached zero, we began to realize that the academic portion of this class was over. Were now off to Mad Dog for a very special birthday celebration for Nick and Sean.
