Today was thoroughly packed, yet one of the best days I’ve had this year; There were a lot of firsts for me as well. This morning I woke up to the sound of a Rooster, which was definitely a first. The morning came very fast, but the crow of the rooster was just a symbol that today would not be like anything I had ever experienced previously.
After waking up, I went out onto the porch and took pictures of the ocean. Yes, that is actually the view from our porch. It’s in incredible.
Then we headed down to the road and got in a taxi. The taxi then took us to the village restaurant for breakfast. Once inside, we sat down and ate breakfast. From a large buffet of options, I had a blueberry muffin, eggs, and a sausage dish. There was also fruit juice that was some of the best juice I’ve had. I think that it was fresh squeezed
Following breakfast, The Dive BVI staff had a series of presentations in which they introduced themselves and the week that we had ahead of ourselves. Then we had a short break before lunch where we hung out around the pool at the restaurant. I found it relaxing just sitting out in the sun.
For lunch, we ate a variety of sandwiches and french fries from the village restaurant.
After lunch, we had another classroom session where we reviewed fish identification, which I thought was very helpful and interesting because the dive BVI staff were able to provide their own input on the fish as well.
Afterwards, we jumped back in the taxi and headed to the harbor to go diving. After being briefed on the dive, we headed out to the boats and headed to the dive site: valley trunk reef. As we rode in the boat, the waters were perfectly blue.
Once we arrived at the site, we quickly anchored and got in the water. For the dive, my group descended to about 39 feet. As soon as I got in the water it was almost shocking how far i could see in the water because i have only been diving in very murky lakes prior to this trip. So diving in clear water was another first for me today.
Once at the bottom of the ocean, we went through basic diving skills for review including hovering and mask clearing. Then we started swimming arround looking for fish and plant species to identify. To be honest, my mask was really foggy so it was rather difficult to precisely identify anything. From what I could see though, there were a lot of blue tangs both juvenile and adult in addtion to several squirrelfish, which were larger than I expected. My group also saw a moray eel hiding under a rock as well as a trumpetfish hiding in coral. It was really amazing how well the trumpet fish was able to hide, it took me a while to even know what i was looking at. In addition to marine life, my group also saw a bottle from the nearby fort and an old anchor. It was really amazing how many organisms were found on the anchor. The animals almost seemed to flock to it.
After that, we got out of the water and headed back to the harbor, where we then got in a taxi back to the rooms. We quickly took showers and walked over to mad dogs, a small restaurant and bar that was situated up the road from our rooms. We had delicious pizza there followed by time to just hang out.
There was this game there that had a metal ring on a string and you had to try and get the ring onto a hook, which was a lot harder than it sounds.
From there we headed back to the room and wrote this blog entry. Which as we wrote I had another first, which was seeing a scorpion on the ground in front of me. But don’t worry mom, I’m alright.
