Day two on the island:
Everything on the island is moving splendidly along. Same wake up time at 7am, same meeting place at the cattle guard, and same look of exhaustion on the faces of everyone. However, we got to eat breakfast at the marina about fifty yards from the water. It was a great breakfast. Most of the guys either had a BLT with eggs on it or a cheese omelet. Soon thereafter, we boarded our boats and got underway. We headed for a little island, that had smooth rocks on one side and sharp jagged rocks on the other side of it. Today we put our fish identification to the test. We got slates and a helpful book that had a few main species of fish. Shortly after our briefing of the dive, we assembled our gear and then took turns jumping into a water. After we got in, before diving down, we saw moon jellies. The moon jellies have tiny stingers around the sides of its body that don’t really have a sting. So, naturally, we started playing with the tops of the jellyfish. After all the instructors got into the water, we dove down. We began swimming around the side of the small island, where we descended to about sixty feet. As we swam around, a friendly reef shark swam past us, just checking out the people in his water. It was a small reef shark, and didn’t swim very close to us at all. We continued swimming and came upon a little cave that had a lion-fish in it. It is an amazing fish to see and it looks awesome, but they are hateful to the environment. They have no real natural predators and they eat pretty much everything. Scuba Steve, one of the Dive BVI staff, was actually swimming around with a speargun to kill the lion-fish. It was one of the coolest things I have ever witnessed. At that point we slowly made our way back to the boat. Once out of the boats, Casey let us begin diving of of the sides of the boat for fun. There were a couple people who could do a nice dive and some that just dove to make everyone smile, those people could not dive nicely at all. Next up on the schedule was the cave dive. We jumped into the water, with gear on, and descended. It was a great dive, the first thing we saw was a beautiful hawksbill turtle. We swam around identifying more fish, coral, diseases, and other various things we have learned. Then, it was time for the cave. The opening to the cave was about fifteen feet wide and we swam in single file until we got to a pitch-black room. The instructors shinned their flashlights on the little animals that were living there. We swam back to the boats, got on, and headed to the marina for lunch. Lunch was held on a patio overlooking the entire marina. Towards the end of our meal, Glen our driver, met us at the restaurant and took us back to our cabins. Next, we walked about half a mile to the baths, a natural formation of rocks that create caves. We learned about two different types of rocks, batholithic and xenolithic. Batholithic rocks are rocks that are formed deep into the crust of the earth. Xenolithic rocks are sharp with ragged edges. Finally it was time to snorkel. We began by putting our gear on and swimming through the ongoing boat traffic. We made our way about a half mile around the edge of the island back to our private beach at GuavaBerry
