Today was another fantastic day! I woke up at around 7:20 this morning, which was nice. I guess I am progressively adapting to the warm, humid environment. We came down to the cattle guard and then went over to the Internet cafe to grab breakfast. For breakfast I had Pops, banana bread (which was like cake), yogurt, and a Nutrigrain bar. After breakfast we were introduced to Mem and Sarah – two more awesome instructors of Dive BVI. Our first stop was the Baths, which are pretty much a bunch of HUGE rocks with a whole bunch of cool caves, cracks, and tunnels. The water in the Baths were really cold at first, but it was actually really nice. Sarah was our “tour guide” and was awesome; her brother is a geologist so she had a lot of neat facts about the Baths. Our tour of the Baths was actually really cool and we learned about the geography of the Baths and how they were formed from volcanoes and magma. I also learned that the large rocks were known as Batholiths; hence, the title: the Baths. After we explored the baths for about an hour we came out to an amazing beach where we would start our snorkel. I honestly didn’t think that the snorkel would be amazing, but it was the best thing I’ve done on the trip! It was awesome because the water was crystal clear and super shallow! On the snorkel I saw flounder, a stingray, and a trunkfish. Our snorkel lasted about 50 minutes and then we hopped out to another beach for lunch. I had an awesome lunch of a PB-and-J, Powerade, Snickers, and garden salsa Sunchips. When we went up for lunch we were split into our boats groups. One group had about 40 minutes to go over fish ID again and the other had 40min to play at the beach and snorkel. We did our fish ID stuff first which was cool. I think it’s really cool to see a huge abundance of fish species everywhere. After our ID stuff I went out into the water to go snorkeling. Me, Michael, Henry, and Sam all headed out to check out some huge rocks. There was so much fire-coral and Henry almost face dived into a small patch of it. After his close encounter he came over and asked me to reassure him what fire-coral was. We found a really cool cave and Sam free dived down into it. Then a huge Grouper came out of the cave, which was the coolest fish I’ve seen all trip. It was also the largest fish I had seen. After our awesome snorkel we came back in and headed to the Marina. We did our next dive over at Ginger Island. We were on the Sea Dragon boat today! Our captain was Jeff Jr. and our other instructors were Caitlin and Mem. We were split into two groups, my instructor was Mem, and we hopped in the water. Our dive was the fish ID “test.” After our fish ID stuff we just continued to enjoy the dive. We saw some really cool fish; unfortunately my camera died mid-dive so I didn’t get any super cool pictures. We had a 51 minute dive with a max depth of around 35ft, I think. After our dive we headed back into the Marina, we then left to clean up in our casas, and headed off for dinner about an hour later. The weather was fine when our group (me, Garret Buckley, and Tom Huber) got to the cattle-guard. We started playing frisbee and then out of no where it started to pour! It rained for a good half hour or so while we started to walk up to Mad Dogs. Dinner tonight was chicken wraps, pasta salad, and potato salad, which was so good! After dinner, we went out into the yard and played frisbee for about an hour. We returned back to the Internet cafe and started writing our blogs. It seems that each day I get progressively more tired, which I guess is a good thing. Tomorrow we will go on another snorkel, and I will definitely bring my camera, and turtle tagging adventures! Goodnight!
