I didn’t think this trip could get any better, but it really did today. Despite the rain, today managed to be phenomenal. This morning we woke up at 7 as usual. In our cabin we made coffee to wake up. It’s really surprising how good Folger’s tastes when you’re tired. After completely waking up with my coffee, my cabin headed down to the office for breakfast. Today’s breakfast had a couple new items: chocolate covered donuts and pop tarts, which tasted really amazing because I was monstrously hungry. After we got settled, Dr. Shannon Gore, a turtle specialist and researcher, gave a presentation on the various turtles found in the British Virgin Islands. It was surprising to me concerning how far a distance turtles were willing to move in order to lay their eggs. Following the presentation, marine 1 got in the taxi and headed to Savannah bay to look for invertebrates while snorkeling with Caitlin and Laura. My personal favorite invertebrate was the West Indian Sea egg. It looked a lot like a snowball and it did this cool trick for camouflage where it would take algae and move it on top of itself.
We also pulled several of the invertebrates out of the water and got to touch them. The sea urchins were a lot less pokey than I thought they would be. Following that, we had time to do whatever, so I decided to take some close up photos of the various mangrove branches and leaves that I found.
Right as were about to leave savannah beach it started to rain pretty hard so we all crowded under a little hut. Then someone had the idea to go back into the ocean, which I did not take part, but apparently it was warmer in the ocean than in the rain. When the taxi got to Savannah bay, it then brought us to the Marina for lunch. We ate at the rendezvous restaurant and had cheese burgers and fries, which were quite tasty.
After lunch was over, we got on the sea dragon and headed out to actually go turtle tagging with Dr. Gore. This was easily my favorite part of the trip so far. It’s a lot like trying to catch a baby pig on a ranch, except the turtle is really good at hiding and a lot faster than you. What we would do to find the turtles is something called the “manta tow”. This is where someone would be hauled behind the boat on a line and look down at the ocean floor looking for turtles. When you see one, you raise your hand and go off after the turtle. Today we saw two turtles. The first one, we chased around the ocean for about 10 minutes until it finally got too tired and let us pick it up. Jackson White was the one able to pick up the turtle off the ocean floor, as he was the only one not out of breath. When we got it to the surface, we tagged the turtle with and ID and collected its measurements. We also got to name the turtle, which we decided would be named “Slappy”.
This choice was made because whenever you picked it up he/she would slap their flippers at whoever was holding them. We also took advantage of the situation for a photo-Op. After we let it back into the ocean, we only saw one more turtle but we lost him, so we all decided to just go snorkeling around. For me, the coolest part of this snorkel was seeing this huge school of fish. You could never touch them and they also somehow swam perfectly in line with each other, continually switching direction.
When we got back from turtle tagging, we headed back to Guavaberry for showers and then dinner at Mad Dog’s;Today was lasagna and garlic bread. Then we came back and wrote this blog.
