On our first full day in the BVI, our cabin woke up this morning around 6:30 to the all natural sound of a rooster crowing. After this, we met up at the front of the property, where we then went to go meet and talk with Tina, the owner of the property. We then moved on to go and eat breakfast and begin the day. For the first part of the day, we started off by learning about various things all about marine biology from Casey, Jeff, and Jeremy. We started off by talking about very serious environmental and social issues surrounding the marine environment. We then moved on to learning about the species of corals, fish, snails and other types of marine life that we would encounter later on our dives. When we finished the classroom portion by playing fish identification games, we were ready to move to the marina to head out for our first dive. Once we made it onto the boat we were briefed on safety procedures, in case anything were to go wrong. I was very excited once we took out on the boat because this would be my first dive in salt water. We had to move to a new location though because of a strong current that was surrounding the area of the first dive site. I was disappointed, but I was told that the place we were heading to would be a very cool place to dive at. Once we arrived at the new location we geared up, my dive partner Sean Howard and I entered the water. When I first hit the water I was instantly shocked at how clear the water was. We were able to see around 40 ft down, which meant we could pretty clearly see the bottom. We descended to the bottom where Jeremy reviewed some basic skills with us before we began exploring. After we finished basic skills like half mask clear and removing our regulator, we moved on to the exploration part of the dive. This is where I was able to truly use the knowledge I’ve attained from the classroom. We came across and identified a multitude of fish and coral species such as stag horn coral, sea fan coral, parrotfish, damsels, angelfish, and butterflyfish. During our exploration around the sea bottom we stumbled across a nurse shark on the bottom resting. We watched the shark for a while until it swam away. When it started to swim away, I made sure to quickly get out of its way. We finished the dive shortly after this, ascending but making sure to make a safety stop. We wrapped our dive at the Bronco Billy and headed back to the marina, during this time I was kept company by the great insights of Mr. Golab. After I cleaned off my gear we headed back to the Guavaberry to get ready for dinner. We got to dinner and enjoyed a nice spaghetti meal and filled out our dive logs. This pretty much wraps everything that happened during day 1 in the BVI, a very exciting first day.
