July 15-16
I started off the day at the Plum Cabin. I remember eating some cereal that morning along with a chocolate muffin and a strawberry yogurt. We headed towards Ginger Island to continue on our project. Elkhorn grows in very steep areas. So we only had to snorkel to run our tests underwater. Overall we did three tests and brought up water samples. We were able to finish the final pieces to our project in this snorkel. We then returned to the boat and since we had finished all our tests, our first dive was a free dive. We went in the deep area of the ocean at around sixty to eighty feet to try to spot some sharks. We saw about five blacktips circling around. And our guide Ben was able to take a picture of our group of four with a shark swimming around. The dive was one of the many that I really enjoyed.
After we surfaced, we had some snacks and headed down for the second dive. In this dive, I spotted a lion-fish and a nurse shark sleeping in the shade of some corals and a giant lobster under some cabe made by rocks. This dive was not too long either. After we surfaced from our second dive, we met up with the Sea Dragon to eat some sandwiches chips and cookies. One of the cool thinks that I found interesting was the behavior of the black-tips towards us. We were able to swim with them as if we were one of them. One even stalked me from underneath for a good while. Our third dive, I found interesting. The stag-horn coral that they have been growing for a little over a year, we got to measure and take data. Each dive pair of partners got assigned a PBC tree with stag-horn coral growing and hanging from it. Mike Ponder and I counted the spikes on each small coral and measured the biggest and smallest one. All this was so that Casey and her team could track the stag-horn corals’ growth and progress. Once we got back to Guavaberry, my group and I finished up putting all our project data on a Google slides to be ready to present.
