First thing in the morning after getting ourselves ready we ate breakfast at the Hibiscus cabin where all of the Jesuit staff chaperones cooked breakfast for us. After breakfast we headed down to commissary to listen to a presentation over sea turtles by Dr. Gore to mentally prepare us for turtle tagging later in the day. My boat group, Sea Dragon, was scheduled for tagging later in the afternoon so we headed to a private beach where we snorkeled and searched for invertebrates to examine back near the shore. We caught and examined many invertebrates including a giant hermit crab, a rock boring urchin, and lettuce slugs. This private beach where we snorkeled was the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen in my whole life with the clear light blue water and the rocky islands in the distance. After we finished the activity we went back to main harbor to eat lunch before we took our boat to a shallow bay just west of the beach where we searched for invertebrates. While we were searching for turtles in the bay a couple of group mates and I saw an octopus hiding under small rock on the floor of the open water. I got separated from the group mates I was with so I decided to take it upon myself to catch a turtle. My mask kept fogging up so it made my search a little tougher but I started to follow a turtle and tried to cut it off even though it kept disappearing out of my sight. I surfaced to see where everybody else was and I saw that one of my group mates had caught a turtle. Once it was brought to the boat we named it Dawson after its catcher and tagged it. This catch displayed the superiority of Sea Dragon over Sea Monkey once again. We returned to our cabins after we returned to the main harbor to rest until and beach games an hour and a half later. In the games we split into our cabin groups to compete for $50 credits for the dive shop. After being in 2nd place by the second to last game we came in last place for the final game which counted for more points than the others leaving us at 3rd place. We finished the day with lasagna for dinner on the beach as it started to get dark. Overall this was a very fun yet exhausting day and I learned that you can’t visually tell the sex of s sea turtle until it’s reproduction stage.
