I resentfully woke up at 6:20 am this morning, despite being up for nearly 20 hours the day before. The first thing we did was to walk to the commons area to get picked up by the taxi. We were driven to breakfast at the dive shop restaurant where we were introduced to the staff of Dive BVI and our group leaders. My group is on Sea Monkey, captained by Ben, and we have Beth as our group leader. After breakfast we were driven to the yacht club and boarded the Sea Monkey to head out for our first dive. On the way to the dive site we put together our BCD and equipment, once we arrived at the site, Beth and our group jumped in to start the dive. It was a pretty basic dive, we went over the basic drills like mask floods and regulator recovery, once Beth was happy with everyone’s performance we swam around and explored the area. During the dive we saw fairy basslets, four-eyed butterfly fish, and a couple squid, another group of Marine 2 guys even saw a small reef shark. With everyone running low on air, we began our ascent to the boat. After all groups were back on the Sea Monkey we headed to the second dive site in the dog islands. This dive site is home to the world famous underwater chimney and was meant to explore and identify different fish. We swam through the chimney and saw some a lot of the islands diversity, including pederson cleaning shrimp, squirrelfish, parrotfish, fairy basslets, and a feather duster worm. Once we exited the chimney, Beth began searching for sea urchins because we need them in our group project. Beth showed us a lot of Black Sea urchins, which is what our project mainly deals with, and a few other species of urchins. After being 40 feet underwater for about 40 minutes everybody was once again run I g low on air so we swam up to 15 feet for our safety stop the proceeded to board the boat. We got back to the yacht club and were sent back to our cabin, Plum Cabin, to put back our dive gear and get our snorkeling gear. With our snorkeling gear on we headed back to the beach for a lunch of ham and turkey sandwiches and chips. After eating lunch we all hung out on the beach and threw the frisbee.
Beth and Becca then came to lead us on a tour of the famous baths. We snorkeled for what seemed like forever to get there and once we were there we had to squeeze through giant boulders to get to the baths. The baths got their names from when slave traders let the slaves bathe in the caves. I learned that the caves were formed by waves crashing against limestone slabs, hollowing out air pockets trapped inside the rock. Once the tour was done, Becca and Beth said that we were snorkeling back to our beach. I thought the way there took a long time, the way back felt like it was three times as far. We got back to our cabins at around 4:30 and were told to meet back at the lounge for dinner and to complete our blogs, after dinner Jim, Killian, Logan, and I met with Beth to discuss our research projects for the next few days.
