As we headed down the runway I struggled to sleep on our way to Puerto Rico. We then landed in the medium sized airport with over priced subway and domino where we played cards and watched shows for 5 hours. As the sun set we boarded the small 10 row plane for a loud and vibrating 30 min flight to the sea wolf a boat that took us to Virgin Gorda. We made it late last night and went straight to showers in bed after a short greeting from Casey the head dive instructor. Today we woke up at 6:00 and hopped in the ford f550 transport vehicle with Glen our driver for the week. Ben the captain of our boat and our small group leader drove us on the 36 ft diving boat named the Sea Monkey to Bronco Billy for our initial stop to do a short review dive and test all of the gear out. Next we headed over to Great Dog island where we did a fun fish identification dive through a cool rock structure called a chimney which is basically two vertical rocks next to each other so that their flat sides formed a crack about 3 feet wide. We saw many different species of fish including squid. Some of the coolest animals were the stag horn coral, elk horn coral, trumpet fish, yellow tail snapper, grouper, puffer fish, she urchin, and goat fish. After we arrived back at the docks we headed to the private Guava Berry beach on the same property as our cabins for a quick lunch break and a fun game of frisbee on the beach with Dr. Gruninger. Shortly after which we started to snorkel from that beach to The Baths which were boulders pilled on top of each other and formed caves and tunnels. The historic significance of these flooded caves was back when the Atlantic slave trade was going on they would land on the British Virgin Islands and the slaves would bathe in the location of The Bath. The name of the Virgin Islands and Virgin Gorda, the island we are on, also have a historic significance that comes from when Christopher Columbus came over and called the islands a thousand virgin woman and virgin Gorda translates to fat virgin. We ended our Baths tour with a fun climb on the shore of boulders. Today was even better than I imagined but the dive that I can’t wait for will be the one we will be looking for sharks and trying to catch a sea turtle.
