Today, day 5, was coral replanting day. We started off by eating another quick breakfast at the harbor, right before boarding our boats. We traveled to the tip of Virgin Gorda to our harvesting/planting site. We began with a snorkel at the site to spot possible harvesting points, i.e. medium sized elkhorn or staghorn coral. During the snorkel, I also came across a family of squid, plenty of blue tangs and parrotfish, as well as a spotted moray eel. After the snorkel, it was time to harvest. To do this, we dove and used a weight to break off arms of staghorn (we did not come across any elkhorn) and put them in a mesh bag for collection. We harvested about three pieces each and then placed them near the planting site so that we could find them during our second dive. When we surfaced from our first dive, we took about an hour to eat lunch, and then it was time to replant. We dove and found our deposit of branches on the floor. Then, each buddy team began to plant. We fastened and tagged each colony to a new substrate via zip ties. We made sure that they were as tight as possible and, in some cases, we used two zip ties to properly attach each branch. This is because the coral need to stay still against the substrate, or else they will not successfully attach themselves. It is also important that we keep the ID tag visible for when we track the coral growth over time. Our goal is to have a thriving Jesuit reef based upon the replanting done by our two groups. After the two dives, we had quite a bit of time to rest before dinner at Mad Dog, after which we logged our dives, and went to sleep to wrap up a tiresome day.
