We arrived safely yesterday and got our casa and roommate assignments about 10 o’clock last night. After finishing getting completely situated and affiliated with my new roommates I went to bed at around midnight. We were told that our taxi leaves tomorrow at 7:30 so we had to be up by 7, if not sooner. I actually woke up at about 6:30 after a refreshing night of warm, humid sleep, which was well needed and gladly welcomed. Our class’ group meeting area is the cattle guard at the entrance to the Guavaberry Resort. So at 7:30 this morning, after a quick head-count, we headed off in our taxi to the Olde Yard Village, where we had presentations on fish and coral as well breakfast and lunch. We met the crew of Dive BVI, who were all awesome people: Casey, Jeff Sr., Caitlin, Laura, and we were introduced to the names of the other crew members who couldn’t meet us at the condo. For breakfast I had a lot of eggs, some watermelon, some cantaloupe, a lot of bacon, some orange juice, and finally a blueberry muffin. The meal was a great start to our awesome day, which was comprised of two main goals: a classroom session, which covered coral and fish identification, and a dive session, which was made up of a quick skill check and a dive through the Chimney, a world famous dive, a favorite of Jaques Cousteau, who was a famous marine biologist, who had a TV show on PBS. We sat through about half the day learning and remembering all the interesting things about the coral and fish we would encounter. Laura gave us a presentation on the fish identification and Casey gave us a presentation on the coral/coral conservation. After the presentations we had a delicious lunch consisting of ham-and-cheese sandwiches, French fries, guava juice (which was extremely good), and club sandwiches. After lunch we got to hop on another taxi and head to the Marina! We got our BCDs and our boat assignments then hopped on the boat and headed out to the dive site. We were split up into two boats: Sea Monkey and Sea Dragon. I was on the Sea Dragon, which actually took the Sea Cat boat out today because of prior plans, with Caitlin, Jeff, and Doc. Once we got to the dive spot we all hopped into the water, which was really salty, and did a weight check, where I took 6 pounds instead of nothing. We then did a few simple dive skills and got on our way to the Chimney. The water was so clear and nice; it was about 84 degrees. We saw a ton of fish: trumpetfish, angelfish, parrotfish, blue tang (Dory), a juvenile banded pufferfish, squirrelfish, yellow snapper, and indigo hamlets. The Chimney dive was amazing and I was amazed I fit through the gap, I was afraid I would get stuck in-between the two huge rocks. We went down for 44ft for 44minutes with a 3 minute safety stop at 20 ft. Laura, the instructor on the other boat, speared a lionfish, which we then dissected once we got back to the Marina. After the dissection we headed back to our casas, showered, then got ready to go to Mad Dogs for dinner. Tonight was Pizza night and I had about five pieces of cheese pizza, which was really really good! We filled out our dive logs then headed to the Internet where we started to type our blogs! After this I will go to sleep and we will go and snorkel and see the Baths tomorrow! Good night!
