Today we woke up at 6:20 for our turn to serve breakfast. We had tons of Frosted Flakes and plenty of muffins. After a brief lunch we met our dive leader for a dive briefing at the marina. After we got our plan set we arrived at 3 different dive locations until we found one without a strong current. As we prepared for our decent someone in my dive group got sea sick enough to “feed the fish”. After dropping my weight belt shortly after we made our decent after we located a coral mound with a large population of blue head wrasse for our project we got to work. First we established a 10ft perimeter around the coral structure. Then we swam away for 5 minutes to allow the fish to resettle, then we rushed in and counted the number of wrasse as fast as possible to avoid confusion. After completing our task in the first area we did fund dive for the rest of the dive. After swimming past a large rock formation we saw a school of reef squid dart by. Shortly after we ascended, after our surface interval we dropped back into the water for our second research dive. This time we headed into shallower water of only 15 feet to conduct our research. We roped off 2 areas this time inorder to have more data for our charts. After successful research and barely avoiding fire coral we surfaced. Now the dive boat sea monkey and my host sea dragon joined together to eat lunch on the water. After a great sandwich we jumped in the water to snorkel with a school of snapper that had gathered under our boats. Then we all headed to the far end of the island for a mangrove snorkel. There we saw hundreds of thousands of tiny silver side minnows being chased by barracuda. We also saw a puffer fish larger than a basket ball. When we got back go our hotel we rested for and hour or two and planned the remainder of our research dive with our group. After this we met down at the beach for frisbee and a race to the rock in the ocean. After drying off we ate pork sandwiches and walker up to the only wifi room for another blog entry. Tomorrow we have the shark dive and nigh snorkel so I’m really excited for what’s to come.
