Today was our cabin’s day to host breakfast, we woke up a little earlier than usual and put the table and food outside. While we were waiting for everyone to arrive we had to fend off chickens from getting to the cereal. After breakfast the next cabin took the leftovers and the table from us and we all went down to the meeting spot and got picked up by Glen, he drove us to the yacht club where we boarded our boats and headed off to do research dives. The Sea Monkey’s first dive site was at a place called Ginger Hole off of Ginger Island. Beth and the Gang (the name for our group) was the 3rd group in the water and once we were all in we descended and began looking for a suitable test site. We found a site within a few minutes and started to place down the markers to indicate the area. As we were creating the area we heard a metallic clanking sound (with Beth, she hits a metal clip on her dive tank to get our attention) and immediately looked at Beth and saw her pointing at a shark. This 4 foot long black tip shark was swimming right at us, it turned away when it was about 15 feet in front of us so we continued on with our project. As we were counting fish the shark came back and scared the fish, making it much harder to count them. This time the shark did not immediately leave but instead it circled us for a few minutes and then left. We finished our testing and on the swim back to the boat Logan started waving at us so we swam over and he was pointing under a rock. We couldn’t see anything so Beth swam down and used her flashlight to shine under the rock and sure enough there was a big nurse shark under the rock. Everyone gathered around the rock and took turns going down to look at it, once everyone was down looking we all swam back to the boat to go to the next dive site. The next location was at Ginger’s Backside also off of Ginger Island. Unfortunately I had a cold today and my sinuses were really hurting under the pressure the first dive so I decided to just snorkel and follow my group from the surface. This was the final dive my group needed to collect our data, after this the most important thing for us now was preparing the presentation. I saw a giant barracuda while snorkeling and it kept following me around so at that point my head hurt and I was tired so I decided to get back on the boat. My group surfaced a few minutes later and Ben drove us to the yacht club where we dumped our empty air tanks before heading out to the protected reef to take coral measurements. Before we left we met up with Sea Dragon and pulled the boats together to have sandwiches for lunch again. Sadly, my head was hurting too much to dive and clean the coral so once again I just snorkeled on top of everybody. Snorkeling there was really cool because I got to see a turtle that no one else saw and because Zultan shot at and killed a lionfish with his spear gun. On the boat ride back everyone was exhausted so we all just sat around and talked. When we got back to the yacht harbor we unloaded our boats and Casey talked to us about our final 2 days left in the BVI, tomorrow we have a dive at a shipwreck, mass, and a night snorkel and on Sunday we have our community service project and then project presentations. I wish I could have done the final research dive and help measure coral today but hopefully I will be better tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going to go down 80 feet to explore an underwater ship wreck. I learned that this ship had sunk because of a hurricane more than 100 years ago and now it is a popular dive location.
