Wow time flys fast, it’s already Friday and we only have one more full day of diving. This morning started off with breakfast as usual with one cabin setting up the meal. I had the usual, Frosted Flakes, a honey bun and some juice. We talked about the expectation of the day which was to finish our project dives and collect all the data we needed for our presentations that we will be giving Sunday afternoon. We took the taxi to the marina where we got on Sea Dragon a little sluggish since we were a little tired from the games the night before. We drove to a place called Bronco Billy, which is named after a rock formation on the shore that looks like a horse from the right angle, and when diving under a bridge formation, the current rocks you as if you were riding a horse. At the site, my project group decided that we should redo one of our original tests because we wanted to keep the depth of the tests the same. We finished our test pretty quickly but still completed everything that needed to be done, so we went on an adventure around the corals in the area. We were finally finished gathering our data, so our second dive could be a fun dive around coral gardens. Right as we went down, we ran into a spotted moray eel just hanging out under a rock. We swam around for the rest of the time looking under overhangs for lobsters and crabs. Wanting to take a rest, the group found a sandy patch and just payed on the bottom for a little while and blowing O rings out of our mouth. But back to swimming, I spotted off in the distance some fish traps, so I decided to go check it out and sure enough they were traps; however, they were useless because it looked as if someone had bent the cage to let all the fish that got trapped in there out. That was the final part of the dive, so we went back to the boat, packed up, and headed to lunch with the other boat. We found the other boat hanging out in a little bay and pulled up alongside them and we tied our two boats together so we could walk back and forth between the two boats. I once again had two PB&J’s and some chips, and once again I am the best peanut butter and jelly maker of all time. After lunch was over, we were briefed by Casey for our next dive which was to collect data of the corals that have been growing for over a year in the coral nursery. We were paired in buddy groups to go down to the coral trees and count how many pointy branches the staghorn coral had grown, and measure the longest and shortest coral on each of the five rows of the tree. After we finished counting and measuring the corals, we took a fun dive around the coral, and uncovered a new boat wreck. The only remnants of the wreck that we were able to see was the boat’s steering wheel and part of the dash, but cool to see nonetheless. As we circled back around to the boat, I failed to pay attention to my surroundings and ran into a tall tree of fire coral for the second time today. It is not as bad as I thought it would be, a good description of it would be like scraping your knee on the concrete, but the sting only lasted about 5 minutes. After that we got on the boat and were told that for the rest of the day, we were to work on our project with our group, then to relax and wait for a delicious spaghetti dinner.
