Today’s morning started at 8 am at breakfast at the Marina. I ate an omelet for the third time in a row. After everyone finished eating, we all headed to our boats, grabbed my BCD, and set up my scuba equipment. We took a 15 minute boat ride to Great Dog Island for a second time. But instead of sight seeing for fish, we only searched for broken or damaged Staghorn coral. Our dive was only about 20-30 minutes and I came up to the surface with about 2400 psi left in my first tank. After we gathered the coral, we met up with the other boat, Sea Dragon, and headed over to the Jesuit reef, which is right off of the coast of Paul’s Grotto. Once we met up, Casey briefed up on how exactly we were going to transplant the coral. So once we knew our task, I put back on my scuba gear, did my buddy safety check, jumped in the water, and surface swam to the reef. I waited till it was my turn to plant the coral. Once it was my turn, I swam down to the bottom and worked with Casey to plant my coral. She made a mound of epoxy underwater with a hole in the center and my job was to carefully handle and put the piece of coral into the hole. Once placed, I pressed the epoxy tighter on the coral and made sure that it wouldn’t move with the waves and other disasters. After finishing up my portion of the project, the dive instructors told me to get with my buddy and to dive back to the boat. So the dive back to the boat was about 30 minutes. I didn’t really see much on this short dive except various types of Coral and small reef fish. It wasn’t the best dive but still very interesting and planting the coral was fun. After I surfaced I got back on the boat and took apart my scuba equipment. This was the last time we would be in the water so that was a bummer but I’m really grateful for going on this trip. The dive masters then prepared food and we ate sandwiches on the boat. We spent about an hour and a half just relaxing on the boat after we ate and we headed back to Guavaberry. I fell asleep on the boat once again so I don’t even know how long the ride back was. It was a good nap. Then once we settled in the room around 2:30, we had till 6:30 to relax in the cabin. I decided to play a classic card game of hearts with my cabin and the. I took another 3 hour nap and I really needed that. I then walked to the beach where we ate dinner on the beach once again and had pizza and it was amazing. We left the beach at 8pm and went back to the cabins, washed up, and went to bed. It was a fantastic day of diving and playing in the water in the British Virgin Islands.
