Day 3 was exhausting and still not over. We have a few hours to write this and organize the data from our first project dive today. After that we are going to do a night snorkel… Well I’m just got back from the night snorkel and it was quite hectic! We are going to start from the beginning of the day though. First we went to eat the same cereal breakfast at the marine bio 2 cabin. We then moved on to the scuba boats and boat sea dragon went to the coral farms first where we learned about what the efforts of farming theses corals are for and how to clean them. First we learned that the idea behind these farms is to find healthy corals that have survived some sort of abuse, anything from storms or silt from construction. Using these corals that have survived these traumas and breeding them will hopefully eventually start to create a more sustainable coral species. It’s kind of an attempt at aiding natural selection of the weak corals and strong coral. They placed the coral trees next to a coral reef so fish would feed on the algae and keep the corals clean, but also far enough away so that harmful species such as snails would be hopefully prevented from preying on the coral. After briefing we went down to the trees and started to clean all the pipes and coral off so they could continue growing! After that we swam around for a bit and just looked around the reefs near by that were teeming with fish. Being on sea dragon our second dive that we went on was our first project dive! We got to map out and get down all the logistics with our instructor Becca on the boat before we got in. After making sure we were all set for our project we hopped in the water and started our decent! This was my favorite dive so far! We swam through a canyon of reefs and rock and went through a small tunnel to get there! Once we were in the canyon we set up our 40 foot transect where we would record the fish we saw color activity ect. My favorite fish I saw today was definitely the French angel fish although the smooth trunk fish is definitely a close second. When we finished our surveys of our project we headed back to the boat then made our way to an island to park the boats next to each other and eat lunch, a turkey sandwich. We ate and jumped in the water again to snorkel ashore so we could see a salt pond! As cool as the salt pond sounds it wasn’t as much of a pond as you would think. It was mostly dry and as you could guess had sea salt in it. It’s probably the saltiest salt I have ever had in my life. The significance of a salt pond is its a natural filter for things such as silt that would, without salt ponds, drain into the ocean. Next we had a short thirty minute snorkel around the boats and headed back to Virgin Gorda to gather our data. After a few hours we did our night snorkel which was quite uneventful because we didn’t see many fish but in the mean time lost of few things and almost lost my go pro. Finally we make it to 10 o’clock, now we are finishing our blogs and hanging out almost ready to go to bed and learn something new tomorrow!
