Today was good. We woke up and after breakfast we started our day with two very shallow dives. They were for our groups project. They went well and my job in the process was keeping track of the time, clanging on my tank when it was time to start and end, and take pictures and video footage of coral, bleaching, algae, and fish. Jeff was a huge help in this and he made the experience fun, less confusing and he was very kind and patient with us. I’m not saying this to be nice or sarcastic as some people might think, but I mean this and I appreciate his help.
On the first dove we visited a healthy reef and everybody did their job well. We had some little hurdles we had to jump over but it was fine. On this dive we saw in total 111 herbivores and a fair amount of algae with fish feeding on it. There was very little bleaching. On the second, dive we visited a unhealthy reef and that was very different. There was a lot of muck floating around and we counted 43 total herbivores and lots of algae and fish feeding on it and once again, very little bleaching. After those two dives we checked out some coral trees with little bits of healthy coral that is meant to grow in this safe, protected environment so that they can grow since our coral and VERY expensive and fancy underwater camera was a bust. Once we were done with that we had lunch on the boats and then snorkeled to Virgin Gorda from the boats and we saw a dried up lake that had salt lines on it and it was pretty cool. On the way back, we had a swimming race back to the boats and then we went back to the island where the harbor is. Once we got back to the cabin, our group hit the ground running with our project. At five, we were ready to present and then presented and we all were freaking out but hopefully it went well. We had pizza for dinner and some good dancing and “turtle” entertainment.
