The cool breeze of the fan swept through the room making getting out of the sheets hard at 6 am in the morning. I told myself it would be worth it and sure enough today I had the best dive of the week so far but I will get to that later. Today we headed to an island by the name of Ginger and the first site was Ginger Hole which was a site cave red in about 50% coral and 50% sand. The depth went from 5 feet all the way out to about 90. We knew all of the Elkhorn coral that we needed was in 1-10 feet of water so we decided to have a research snorkel and then a fun dive. We wrapped up the shallow water research with conclusion changing data and headed to the boat with 40 min left to dive. Once we were back in the water we headed for the depths and saw a crab wedged under a rock next to some bleached coral. A couple minutes later we were around 40 feet deep and we saw a black tip and not a minute later another showed up. We made it to 70 feet deep with two black tip tailing us when more started to show up where we could see 4-7 at a time. We made it to 80-85 deep and then ditched the Sharks to head back in for a surface interval but one tagged along in the back. We made it back on the boat safely but some swells were coming through and they were rocking the boat while making a couple of people nauseous so we started the motor and cruised around to the calm part of the island to complete our second dive. After having a snack since we were done with our project dives we were able to have another sight seeing fun dive. The new dive site was called Ginger backside not only because it is the back of the island but supposedly it is supposed to look like two butt cheeks. This dive was filled with new sights the first being a dog snapper which looked like a tanner and duller mangrove snapper with a white mark running down form its mouth to its chin. The next organism we saw were some more Christmas tree coral which look like red and white Christmas trees that would hide in their tube in a blink if you snapped or made movement in front of them. We also saw a huge 5 foot wahoo patrolling 10 feet above the coral reef. The last new creature we saw was a nurse shark which has a ribbon like fin on the tail and this specific one was hidden under mounding coral and was about 3-4 feet long. We then circled back to the boat and headed over to the other dive boat for lunch and stopped at the marina to drop of the used tanks. The last dive of the day was the coral nursery which was very cool because last year the Jesuit group removed the grown coral and added new smaller coral which grew to the size it is this year. We took measurements of the coral and cleaned the pvc pipes that they were growing on. One thing you have to be careful of is the small fire coral growth on the nursery structures. Half the boat including me were burned/stung by it while trying to clean the pipes. We ended the day on a good note with some great pasta and a game of ultimate frisbee. Tomorrow will probably be the best dive because it is a huge shipwreck. The name of this site is called Rhone and it sunk 149 years ago 1867.
