This morning was again hard to get up from everything we had done prior to the day. W evoke up and went to the Lime Cabin where they served us a cereal breakfast with Greek yogurt and oranges. We then got on the bus and headed down to the docks. Once out on the boats, we had two dives at two different dive sites, both in which have sunken ships to look at. On our first dive, we went down about 60 ft to where about 20 years ago, BVI intentionally sunk 4 ships for tourist sights, The Ocean Seal, Beata and two others. The ships were supposed to be evenly spread apart but only one ended up perfect, one flipped upside down and the other two were overlapping. We went down and and saw an abundance of marine life. We saw many different types of wrasse, juveniles of many fish, several Souther Stingray and two Spotted Eagle Ray. We saw many giant snapper and in the control room there were over 1,000 juvenile fish. On our way back up to the boat, we saw two turtles, a green turtle and a hawksbill turtle. We then surfaced and went to the other other site was the Rhone.
The Rhone was a ship built in the 1860’s and was said to be unsinkable. It transported wealthy English people to the Caribbean islands. On one of the trips, they were caught in a hurricane, possibly the worst hurricane ever recorded in the BVI. The storm made the captain fall over board and was never to be seen again. The people were told to strap themselves into there beds so unfortunately, all but one passenger died. The hazard of these dive sites in today is that while diving, if you get cut, the corroded metal can kill you because of disease and infection on it. But it can make a massive ecosystem around it which provides new fish for coral and fish. At the dive site, we saw another Eagle ray and another Southern Stingray. We also say a lion fish, a giant snapper, some queen angel fish and some grey angel fish. We than saw a barracuda trying to catch its next meal. After that dive, we went to Cooper Island and had a great lunch. I had fried squid with fries and salad. We then walked a little ways down a path and had some great ice cream, many of us got Oreo and others got pomegranate. After getting back on the boats, we drove for about a minute and then snorkeled in some turtle grass for about an hour. I was with Matt Anderson and we saw 5 barracuda at once, either getting cleaned or hunting. On our way back to the boat we saw some more Southern Stingray and a tarpon. We then got back on the boat and rode back home to write our blog.
