For the first flight I arrived at the airport about 20 minutes before 5 am after getting less than one hour of sleep due to a mix of excitement and anxiety. I was really looking forward to this trip especially since it is my first time traveling outside of the United States. The first and longest flight went to Puerto Rico with a six hour layover when we arrived there. Six hours later we took a second plane to Tortola and from their took a boat to Virgin Gorda while we meeting the head dive staff and ate dinner on the boat. It was already night time when we arrived so we were just given a briefing on Day 1 and assigned our cabins for the week. The following morning and the start of day 1 we ate breakfast and I had guava berry juice for the first time which was amazing. We then met all of the dive staff and were assigned our group leaders with my group being on the “Sea Dragon” boat. My dive group of 4 included Luke, Joe, Davis, and myself and our group leader is Zoltan from Hungary. They took us to the two different sites of Dog Islands for both our dives after we set up all of our dive equipment on the boat. On the first dive we went over basic diving skills and swam around the area to get ourselves used to diving again. During this dive I saw several different fish species including a queen triggerfish a spotted moray eel as well as multiple fairy basslets. Once we ended the first dive we moved on to the second dive site which wasn’t very far from the first. We had a small briefing of the dive and then we explored an area called a “chimney” which was a small canyon that consisted of cup coral, a yellow coral found in areas with little sunlight. I also saw another spotted moray eel hiding under a couple of rocks as well as several different types parrot fish and squirrel fish. Once the second dive ended we headed back to the docks and unloaded all of our dive equipment so we could return to our cabins to prepare for lunch and snorkeling. After finishing lunch, most of the guys including me used the spare time we had before snorkeling to go into the water nearby with our masks and fins. It started to rain which made that experience that much more interesting and that lead to our briefing for the snorkeling. We snorkeled around the rocks to an area called the “Baths” which is a very unique series of giant rock formations on the sand with shallow patches of water. After traveling through the Baths we snorkeled back to the beach to retrieve the rest of our stuff and go back to the cabins to take a shower, rest, and write our blog. Overall, I had a lot of fun and new experiences on day one especially with it being my first time out of country and being in a different culture.
