As I stated in yesterday’s blog entry, yesterday was one of the most interesting days of my life. Today was one of the outright best. The day started with a pedestrian sausage and egg breakfast prepared by Dr. Kirby, followed by a search for invertebrates on the reef at Savannah Beach. The search yielded two rock-boring urchins, a giant hermit crab, four lettuce slugs, a cone snail, three sea pearls, and a handful of unidentifiable snails with marked shells. While searching, I also observed an orange-lined filefish and a sizable bar jack lurking around the flats. This was followed by a search for sea turtles to tag at Little Dix Bay. Initially, my colleague Dawson and I were not successful in locating any turtles, but as we were resting while our boat moved across the bay, a large green sea turtle swam in front of us, and we began to follow it. The turtle led us around the bay for about twenty minutes, when a smaller green sea turtle crossed paths with us. We decided to follow the smaller turtle, and after a single unsuccessful attempt to catch the turtle, Dawson was able to apprehend it. Getting to see and actually catch sea turtles in the wild was one of the most magical things I have ever experienced, and although Dawson did the dirty work, I was able to capture the entire chase on video, something that I will cover for the remainder of my days. That sequence was impossible to surpass on the awesome scale, but the house games came within a reasonable distance. Our team (Dawson, Teddy, John, Andrew, and I) got off to a rocky start, we shot up the leaderboard and earned a spot in the final two. Our face off against team Lime did not go as smoothly as we had hoped, our silver medal finish was more than satisfactory.
