Today we woke up early, ate breakfast and met our diving instructors. We had a refresher on how to assemble our diving equipment, such as, connecting our regulator to our BCD and making the proper checks for a successful dive. We rode out to these islands that are called the dog islands because when Columbus came sailing through here, his crew heard barking on the shores, thinking it was rabbid dogs. But when much bolder pirates sailed through the islands they went ashore and found it wasn’t dogs but a certain marine animal that produced a similar sound to a dog barking. But the myth of the islands being populated my rabbid dogs helped sustain the names of the islands to this day. After a short history lesson, we began suiting up for our first dives. We jumped into the water, had our weights checked and then descended to the sandy bottom. There we had a refresher on our saftey precautions. We refreshed on the proper way to clear a mask, share a secondary source from your buddy, and having neutral buoyancy. After our saftey briefing we then swam around and saw several fish. I saw hundreds of the same fish swimming in a giant swarm. It was really cool to see how they all moved at once and swarmed all around me as I dove. We also got to see some coral and many organisms that lived within them. After diving for almost an hour, we ascended to the surface and boarded the boat. We changed our tanks and then went to a different dive location. This dive was my favorite because we got to swim within an old airplane reck. They told us that all of the dive companies moved it their from the airport runway where it crashed. They thought it would be bad for business if passengers knew about a plane crash on the runway. We then headed for lunch shortly after seeing the coral gardens. After lunch we went to our houses to get ready for snorkeling. But before we went into the water to snorkel we got to climb through out the numerous caves that line the shore. During this we learned that near the caves, they had bathed several slaves in the so called baths. After climbing through the numerous caves, we went into the water to snorkel back to our starting point. During snorkeling, we saw several fish species including parrot fish and blue tang. I’m excited to see so many of these herbavours because it benefits to my group project. I found that this coral reef had more variety of coral and appeared very colorful. We then headed back to our houses to shower and get ready for dinner. Before dinner we briefed one of the diving instructors about our project and they give great feedback that pertained to the area we were diving, improving our project further. I’m very excited to see more of the BVI. It’s been a great trip so far. It was especially funny when we made three of our fellow classmates dance the single ladies dance for forgetting some of their equipment in certain places. We got video of it too.
