Today was probably the most exciting and fun day on BVI trip. We started off the day with another project dive where we had to count squirrel fish in a high and a low coral coverage. I counted 6 squirrel fish, which was the most out of my group, so I was pretty proud of myself. Also during the dive, I was looking for a squirrel fish and I think I got stunk by fire coral because I felt a sting and fire coral was right next to me. The only reason I say is ‘I think’ is because it didn’t hurt that bad and it only hurt for a couple seconds, so if I did get stung it was a good experience to go through. So I learned what fire coral feels like when you get stung. After the first dive, we had to go back to the marina because Andrew was feeling sick and we were pretty far away, so it took awhile till we did the second dive, but it was worth it. We did our second dive on the other side of the island called the ginger steps were we did our first dive and it was amazing. When we dove in it, it was very chopping so we started to drift apart from one another, but once we got to the bottom and got together we started to see coral reef sharks. It was so exciting because we saw so many of them and they would swim so close to you. My scuba partner Luke got to touch one of the coral reef sharks because of how close it got. It was really a memorable experience and was very cool to see in person.
After that we had lunch and stopped by a beach kind of next to the marina. While everyone was relaxing on the boat for lunch, Luke and I got in the water had began to swim toward the beach. On the way to the beach I found a sand dollar at the bottom of the ocean and it was pretty cool to see. Unfortunately it broke when I was bringing it back up to the surface. Lastly, we went to go clean algae off of coral nurseries. It was pretty interesting to see all of the algae and dirt get cleaned off of the strings and poles of the nurseries. Sometimes though when I was cleaning the algae off, I would get stings on my arms and legs and it was weird because there wasn’t really anything to get stung by. The stings didn’t really hurt that bad and didn’t last long and I had a good time doing it. Overall, today was a very exciting day because I learned what fire coral feels like when getting stung, what sharks look like and how they react in person, and what coral reefs look like when growing in nurseries.
