7/15/16
Today my group and I finished our research project so that’s one lees thing to worry about. We had three different dives today. The first two were at Ginger island. The first site was called Ginger Hole. It was a pleasant boat ride over there and I was excited for the day. Sadly though about five minutes before we reached Ginger Island my Texas Rangers hat got swept off my head by the wind and went over board. The boat was going pretty fast so I had no chance of recovering my hat which kind of bummed me out since I really liked that hat. So after we got to the dive site we started to look for an are with Black Sea urchins and for awhile we couldn’t find anything but eventually found a good area with about 4 Black Sea urchins. After we established the perimeter a 4ft black tip reef appeared and started to circle us to see who we were. He took a particular interest in me and Jim. I could only assume that he got closer to us is because I was the only person with bright yellow fins while everyone else had blue. We watched the shark for about 7 minutes and then we left the area for 5 minutes to allow the fish to return to the area. While we were swimming away from the area I noticed a tail and a fin sticking out from under a ledge on the ocean floor. I swam down to investigate and discovered a nurse shark just laying under the ledge. I had forgotten that nurse sharks were on of the few sharks that do not need to swim to stay alive. I showed my dive instructor Beth and my dive group got to have some fun with a close encounter with a shark because we were all less than ten feet away and the nurse shark wasn’t bothered by us or even showed interest in us. We just watched it and it watched back. After 5 minutes had passed we went back to the area and collected our data and the reef shark came back and watched us again. He got close but showed no aggressive behavior, just interest. We then headed to our next dive site that was on the opposite side of Ginger island and the site was called The backside because the rock formation on the cliffs had a long crack running down it to make it look like someone’s “backside”. So we dived down for our last data collecting dive for our project. This last site was the most shallow and had the most urchins of all of the sites we went to. So after we collected our data we had time just to luck around and observe the marine life. We came across a species of eel that not even our instructor had seen before. It was brown with large white spots and had what looked like two plastic tubes protruding from its mouth. We then met up with the other group and had lunch. Then we went to a coral nursery and collected data on the growing stag horn coral that ARK has been growing over the past year so they can take peaces of the coral to different locations in the BVI and begin to grow more coral reefs. Later tonight for dinner we will be having spaghetti and meatballs and then finish up our projects so we are ready to present on Sunday. I hope that goes well. I’m looking forward for tomorrow because we will get to scuba dive in a 150 year old ship wreck called the “Ronne” which is considered the first cruise ship. We will also be having a night snorkel which sounds like a lot of fun and I’m curious to see what kind of fish are out an about at night.
