Today started out as a great day with a good breakfast from the mango cabin. I had fruit loops in questionable milk and a muffin. Not the most filling breakfast, but it got me to lunch. After the breakfast we had a presentation in the media room given to us by Dr. Gore. She gave us a presentation on turtles and their history. We learned about Dr. Carr, who is called the ‘father of turtle exploration, and all his studies. After, we split up into our boat groups. Our group went down to a crystal clear beach called Savannah Bay. We studied invertebrates. We also saw T-Swizzle’s house across the bay! She has a very nice house over looking the ocean. After an hour snorkel of seeing all types of cool and colorful fish we came up to the beach and Casey taught us all about different invertebrates. We studied sea urchins first and they were really cool. They moved around in our hands when we took them out of the tub. After that we went over lettuce snails, which were just slugs with little algae looking things on top. We learned all about their scientific names and how they survive in the ocean. We also found out the algae that forms into little orbs contains freshwater and excretes saltwater. After learning all about these animals we took the taxi, driven by Glen, all the way back to the yacht club for lunch. I had an incredible shrimp and crab wrap. Now it was time for turtle catching. We were not going to be dragging from the boat, but instead snorkeling and just catching them in a bay. At first we were just swimming after them for about an hour until we realized we needed to be more organized and planned out. I was 5 inches away from 2 turtles that just got away from me. After about another hour, right before we were leaving, Daniel (the scuba instructor) caught a Green Sea turtle! It was so cool. We brought it on the boat and it was flapping all over the place. Dr. Gore then put it on the ground and took all the measurements. There were two tags in the turtle from the previous catchings. This was the final time we could go in so after we let the turtle out and took pictures we headed back to the houses. When we got back we had 45 minutes rest before the beach games. The games consisted of 4 regular games then the top two houses for the championship. My team was Garret, Barret, Marcelo, and Jack. The first game was water balloon dodgeball. We came in 1st place and got 5 points. The second game was blinding one person and people guiding him through the obstacle course. Barret was the blind one and we came in second by a foot. A moral defeating loss. We had 8 points and were tied for first. The third game, our worst, was pictuonary on the beach. We were horrible at this one coming in 3rd place and only getting 1 point. The word I got was ‘nurse shark’ and I struggled to draw this for my teammates. Luckily, we got one point more than our leading competitor so we had 9 points and still in first place by a point. Going into the last challenge we were feeling nervous. The last challenge consisted of running up a hill and grabbing one item of five and running it back down to a teammate and him running up and grabbing another with the same time. Like a relay race. We dominated this one and came in first, again. We had won free hats at this point for having the most points. We were now going to the championship obstacle course with our leading competitors, whom we’ve been neck and neck with the whole time. This championship is a relay race where one person goes at a time through an obstacle course of running through cones, listing off diving signals, then going for a swim around a cone in the ocean, back up the hill and touch a flag, then down a slide. It was very exhausting. We were neck and neck through the whole race until someone on the other team hit a cone and had to do 10 push-ups and that gave us the lead. We won this race by a good amount of time. We won a free at and a $50 gift card to the dive shop. We grubbed.
Now I am looking forward most to finishing the project and getting more information done. I also want to see what we do on Saturday.
