The day began with everyone meeting at Doc Gruninger’s cabin at 7:15, we ate eggs, bagels and cereal. During the breakfast my cabin found out that we are going to be hosting dreakfast tomorrow for the entire class. Next, we went straight to the boat to go diving. The dive location we went to was Chromis Reef, which got its name from the abundance of Blue Chromis. On our first dive we spend about 80% of the dive looking for Elkhorn coral for our project, we couldn’t find any. During the dive we also set up a ten by ten square and monitored the number of damsel fish that were in the area in a five minute time spend. Also on the first dive Ben pointed out a 5 foot nurse shark and a huge spiny lobster. During our safety stops before we surfaced we spotted a barracuda using the shade of the boat as camouflage. Once on the boat my dive had to snorkel to find some elkhorn coral so we could perform our project on it. The elkhorn coral was in such shallow of water that we snorkeled and did our project while the other groups started to scuba dive. After doing our project for about 10 minutes we returned to the boat and went on a “fun dive”, which means we didn’t work on our project during the dive. During the second dive we didn’t see any sharks but we saw a giant tarpon, trumpet fish and a trunk fish.
After we finished diving we went to Salt Island where there used to be a big salt mine. The last descendant from the original settlers on the island died in 2007. Once on the island I learned that all of the houses were made out of cement and shells. The island also had a giant lake that had a solid salt sheet on the bottom. When we got to the lake me and Josh noticed that there were awesome skipping rocks everywhere so we had a a competition. After our competition, me, Garrett and Josh walked from one side of the lake to the other. Once we were near the other side the sheet of salt got thinner and eventually my foot broke through. As I pulled my foot back up I cut it on the sharp salt edges. As we were leaving Salt island we swam in the ocean and the price to get on the boat was 15 push ups. We finished the day of right with hanging out by the beach and eating dinner on the beach too.
