(Day 5: A “Shark”ing Surprise)Another great day in the BVI, had a great breakfast. Another hearty breakfast and trip with Glen to the boats where we began the two dives for the day. Today, we first went to the Rhone wreck, a natural wreck that happened in the mid to late 1800’s during the 2nd biggest hurricane to hit the BVI. It was a really cool dive, about 80 feet at the deepest and the wreck was in three parts, stern, middle, and front. We entered at the stern next to the mast and swam through the hull for a small bit, exited, and had a nice, easy swim back to the boat. Some cool fish we saw were a big southern sting ray, a few massive lobsters, lots of squirrel fish, and another lionfish. After that, we had another break on the ship, combos and water included, and we went to our second dive near Ginger Island. There, we had our second dive which was a max depth of about 60 feet, and a neat feature about the place was that it was almost separated by depth in a stair-like fashion, there were several sections at lowering depths and it looked like a large, long staircase. We dive from the boat, and slowly made our way down to the 60 foot step, swam around there, came back to another area of mostly sand, and then came back up to the boat. While in the sandy patch, I saw three Reef Sharks swimming around, and we got to lie down and see them pass up above us. Finally, we took one more break, had some delicious fish and chips for lunch at Cooper island, and went for a snorkel at Cooper Island. On the snorkel, we saw lots of cools fish, some sting rays, several juvenile blue tangs, and a ton of other small fish. After that, we came back to shore, got our gear for our second test dive that we would be doing that night, went to the beach, sank the gear, and waited for dinner. Dinner was a delicious choosing of soft shell taco’s, rice and beans, and I had 5 little soft shelled tacos. After dinner, we went on our last test dive, got the data, took a nice shower, and went to bed
Next day (Day 6: Just Another Day “Dragon” Some Turtles Aboard)
Had another great wake up on Virgin Gorda. Got to have a good, hearty breakfast like usual and was then picked up by Glen for our last day of being in the water. Today, we went on the Sea Dragon instead of our normal boat, the Sea Monkey, and we went turtle hunting today. We went out with a marine biologist and were towed behind the boat, 5 at a time and tasked with trying to spot any turtles. The first group spotted a turtle and chased after it for a while until the rest of the crew and I went in to help capture it. We ended up slowing it down for one of the guys, Cooper Marshal, to make a clutch snatch and grab on that turtle and finally bring it to the surface and, a few minutes later, the boat. There, we took some measurements on it, and 2 tags on it, one in each flipper, then we let it go back into the ocean. After that, we came back to the dock and took a ride with Glen to Savanah Bay Bay where me and the rest of my group had lunch, did a invertebrate study and a small snorkel afterwards. While on the beach, we heard a random local blasting his music, the funny thing was the songs went like this, a hardcore rap song, a pop-like rap song, and the Frozen’s Let It Go, I kid you not. All of us just heard the song and laughed, considering the previous songs. But after that, we left the beach to meet back up with everyone and drove back to the homes where we met with our research groups to work on our final presentation for the research we did, the data we collected, and the conclusions of our research. All the groups did a good job and after that, we enjoyed another great pizza dinner on the beach with the same interesting favors as day one. After that, several kids had to mimic themselves in order to get their lost stuff that Casey had kept from being permanently lost. Then, we enjoyed some more delicious cupcakes baked by Beth, one of our dive instructors, and had another briefing of the next day or two. I’m looking forward to having another fun day tomorrow, and especially the donut breakfast.
