The third day on the island was full of surprises and many fun events. The first of these fun events was our first dive of the day which was a return to the chimney. While the chimney was fun the first day on the island, today’s dive to the underwater paradise was much more oriented towards our project. The first dive went very smoothly. We got straight to our project finding many parrotfish but not many wrasse or damselfish and once we were finished, we took a trip around the dive site. On our trip around the dive site I saw many squirrelfish and sand divers around and under corals. On the second dive at George Dog Island though, that was when the surprises began. We started off well, finding a good spot and marking off the area. We collected all of our data but, when we went around the entire dive site, there were a lot of jellyfish in the water. In fact, there was an entire wall of jellyfish. If that wasn’t scary enough, I got stung by one. My hand was burning for a couple minutes and we were still on our way to the boat but I couldn’t stay balanced in the water because I was gripping my hand. I began to use my dive partners like bumpers on a bowling lane and they led me to the safety stop and, by the time we reached the boat, the pain had dulled down to a subtle sting that stayed for a couple hours. While most of the fun in the days end with the dives, today was different. Today, we went back to the beach and played a few team games. We began by playing a game of sand Pictionary. Then, we buried our teammates in the sand for the second game. Next, we did a relay race with scuba gear and another race where I ran from the beach swam to a mark in the water and back to the beach then ran back to the end of the beach doing all of this with my eyes closed. After losing the games and grabbing three burgers we took a night snorkel. We saw an octopus and a lot of squid and other fish. I look forward to waking up to another beautiful day and new sea life tomorrow morning. We’re catching turtles.
