Today’s morning began much less eventfully than yesterday’s. We woke up around 6:45 to the sun shining through the windows. For breakfast, we ate at the resort’s main building, and I had a peanut butter sandwich and banana nut bread. After breakfast, we walked to what are called ‘the baths’. Along the quarter mile path leading from the parking lot to the baths, we saw several foot-long skinks. The baths themselves are small crevices in the massive rocks that make up the end of the island. We climbed around in these small caves for around a half hour. After reaching the other end of the network of caves, we put on our snorkeling gear and headed into the water. We swam for about 45 minutes and ended up back at the beach in front of our hotel. Along the way, Caitlin and Sarah pointed out different types of fish and had each of us identify which species they were. After the snorkel, we split up at the beach into our boat groups. My group was given free time first, which we spent throwing a frisbee and attempting to dive and catch it over the water. After an exhausting hour of this, we ate lunch, and I again had a peanut butter sandwich. We then moved to the fish identification ‘section’ of the afternoon, where Caitlin explained the differences between even more species of fish. Once the lesson was over, we took the taxi to the marina to board the boats. Before we left, we went into the shops around the marina and watched Jeff walking his pet boxer. Our dive site, Ginger’s backside (named so because of its location on the backside of Ginger Island), was around a 20 minute boat ride away. On the dive, Laura, my group’s dive master, would point out a fish and have us write down what kind of fish it was. The dive was around 45 minutes, and we went around the reef from about 15 feet down to around 60 feet. During the dive, Laura had me identify a four-eyed butterflyfish. While at the bottom of the reef, I saw a very large Nassau Grouper. However, only myself and my dive buddy saw it.Towards the end, Laura pointed out a tiny eel that was only a couple of inches long. After getting back on the boat but before we left, we all stood on the bow since its illegal for us to stand there while the boat isn’t anchored. Once we began driving back to the marina however, I sat up on the top of the boat. There was also a cruise ship leaving from Tortola (one of the islands close to the dive site) that we watched sailing away. Towards the end of the boat ride, Laura even let some of us drive the boat for a few minutes but this ended once we got within a mile of anything that we could have potentially hit. Once back at the marina, we unloaded the boats and drove back to the hotel. We then sat in our rooms for about an hour getting ready for dinner. While waiting for everybody to meet outside the hotel, Dylan managed to drop his sunglasses right in the bottom of the cattle guard, so we had to use sticks to get them out. As it turned out, he wouldn’t need them for dinner, as it promptly began pouring rain. This lasted for just a few minutes, but we were all completely soaked before realizing that the trees would probably provide some sort of cover from the rain. For dinner, the group had wraps with tuna and vegetables with a side of potato salad. After dinner, we promptly returned to the main building to write our blogs, which you are now reading.
The picture attached is one of the fish we saw on the dive, courtesy of Chris Ayers. My camera’s SD card doesn’t seem to want to upload, so it looks like I’ll be using other people’s pictures for the blogs, but will have plenty to upload to a computer.
