Today was the first day of our project dives with the first site having these massive waves that made me and several others feel sick immediately with us going to snorkel immediately. We went out very far with the sea floor right below us being barely visible and seeing very brown and looked like dead or dying or coral with the lack of color and thriving marine life. But we did see 2 barracudas which were very long in length. I also saw many lone damsel fish near the bottom of the sea floor along with many wrasse which seemed to be the dominant species at the first site at ginger island. There was also some beautiful parrotfish near the shore of the island. And on the way back doc pointed out a reef shark under us with another one swimming along the bottom weaving through the coral. Then after leaving the very wavy site we went to another side of ginger island which was just gorgeous even from the boat. With the water not being a dark blue like the first site and now being a contrast of very light green and beautiful sky blue the water was a little warmer as well. Immediately after going into the water you could tell this coral reef was a lot more thriving with doc pointing out an enormous fish that seemed like mix of a tuna and something else being almost as big or bigger than me. The reef near the shore as well was gorgeous thriving with butterfly fish, small damsel fish, small little squid, schools of this blackfish I did not recognize, and beautiful wrasse, and a couple parrotfish. The projected reported from my groups members seemed to go smoothly with us finding two different amounts of algae to contain a habitat for our studies with us visiting another site tomorrow morning to see if there’s. a difference. But as reported it seems as though the less amount of algae there is the more amount of cleaner fish present in the marine ecosystem. Great day especially frisbee at the beach which was the highlight.
