Today was another tiring yet very exciting day starting off with breakfast at the Plum cabin. It was announced that we were losing a chaperone today with Mr. Kirby returning home early. The main goal today was to finish up our experiment dives and fortunately we finished in three dives with the second not having an stag horn coral. The first dive was just like our other experiment dives using the same materials and creating a perimeter to observe and count specific species of fish. We had less trouble this time setting everything up due to our great preparation and with Joe, who was too injured to dive yesterday, back with our group under the water. Despite the second dive at the Vanishing Rock not having any stag horn coral for our experiment it was one of the best dives of the whole trip so far. It started with seeing a dog snapper which was the biggest fish I’ve seen so far and an amazing way to start the dive. As we dove deeper we spotted a few spiny lobsters hiding under a rock at the ocean floor and we were able to get a close view on a small patch of open sand big enough for all of us to hover and look. When it came time for our safety stop before our ascent a shark sucker got extremely close to me as well as some the other divers with me. It’s long slim shark-looking fish that has fins at ninety degree angles from each other making it look like a rocket ship or a torpedo. It got close enough to the point where I thought it was going to swim against me or even try to bite me but it was just simply passing by. We moved to the third dive site to compete our final experiment dive which turned out to be a success once again. This specific spot had been almost completely bleached among the stag horn coral where I counted very little blue tang. Once we finished we headed back near shore to meet up with Sea Monkey to eat lunch on the boat. After lunch we were briefed for our final dive of the day to clean the coral nurseries that Dive BVI takes care of. We picked up new tanks for the dive and then arrived at a site with an open sand floor right off of a small beach. Cleaning the nurseries took just over an hour with the dive last seventy minutes which was the longest dive for a lot of members of Sea Dragon. This was an interesting experience since it was like cleaning an underwater garden by scraping off any creatures or unnecessary things for the coral that made their growth an unclean environment. We ended the day with a great spaghetti and meatballs dinner on the beach prepared by Casey. Overall this was a great day with the success of finishing our experiential dives and seeing the diverse see life below at the Vanishing Rock.
