Today was action packed and I had a great time. We started the day serving breakfast at our cabin while enjoying an amazing view of the ocean. Next we hit the ocean in our boat to record data for our experiments. When we went down, we set up a perimeter and began counting fish in our zone. It was a really cool experience to do an experiment under water. Towards the end of the dive, I turned around into a large anchor chain covered in fire coral. My hair and mask got caught in the coral and I luckily did not get burned as my hair stopped it from hitting my skin. When we came back up we left to go on another dive. This next dive was through a massive forest of stag horn coral, the exact type we need for our experiment. We found our site and did our experiment, seeing parrotfish, blue tang, and even a couple of angelfish. Towards the end of the dive, we came upon about 30-40 reef squid. We surfaced soon after and left for lunch. For lunch we tied the two boats together and had sandwiches and snacks in a beautiful area near the shore of two small islands at the north of Virgin Gorda. We snorkeled around after lunch and saw lots of yellowtail snappers. After this we rode to a mangrove area where we snorkeled along the shore and saw some more cool creatures. First we saw some barracudas and a lot of bait fish. As we continued through the sea grass we saw a basketball sized pufferfish(uninflated). As we continued to the corner of the shoreline, we saw these beautiful upside down jellyfish. First we saw them about every couple of feet and eventually they covered every square foot of the ground. On the swim back we saw more cool fish, mainly barracuda and small fish. Once aboard the Sea Dragon, we began our long boat ride back, on which many of us took a nap. Once back on land we had about and hour to work on our projects and then headed to the beach. We relaxed in the shallows and skipped stones for a while before Harrison, Teddy, Evan, and I ventured off to a rock in the middle of the water. We saw cool barnacles and snails on this rock and even a few blue tang that came right up to the rock. We headed back in for dinner, a delicious barbecue sandwich. We watched the sun set over the sea and ate before heading back to bed after an exhausting day.
