Day 4:
Today was different as there was no diving. We started the day with breakfast later than usual and we split off for the day. My group went to the other side of the island while the other group went turtle tagging. For the first half of the day, we were on the beach examining different invertebrates the instructors caught earlier like Sea Urchins, Flamingo Tongue Snail, and a few crabs. Then we snorkelled around a few shallow reefs around Savannah Bay, where the beach we were at was located. Here we saw more lobsters, a few more parrotfish, and a lot more urchins. After lunch, we swapped with the other group and got on the boat to go turtle tagging. We split up into two teams and our strategy for each team was to hold onto loops in a rope being towed behind the boat, three people to a rope with two ropes. When one of us saw a turtle, we signaled to stop the boat and the 6 of us circled the turtle from the surface, the strategy was for two people to swim on either side of the turtle and one person to swim up to it in its blind spot and grab it by the ends of its shell and bring it to the surface. My group did this with one turtle for about 20 minutes before it got away. The other group tried next but didn’t see anything. After a while we pulled into a bay known for having a lot of turtles. It took about 2 minutes before we found a very big Green Sea Turtle. My group tried but couldn’t catch it but then someone on the other group managed to get it to the surface. After we got it on the boat and tagged it, we had to head back to the dock. We had a few hours of downtime before dinner at the top of the baths where we ate on Sunday. After dinner we updated our logbooks and went over the briefing for the coral planting dive tomorrow. Today was a nice break from diving but I am excited to get back underwater tomorrow.
