Today we woke up late at 7:35 so it was a rush to get to breakfast. For our first five site we looked at a wreck. The ships name was the Kodiak Queen. The ship is famous because it was 1 of 5 ships that survived the bombong of Pearl Harbor. The ship was 120 ft and at a depth of 65 feet. They sunk the ship so it could be used as an artificial coral for fish like the tiger grouper. On top of the ship was a mesh model of a kraken which also served as an artificial coral. We also got to explore the inside of the ship which was really cool. For our second dive we went to the coral nurseries to clean the coral there. The coral we cleaned was the staghorn coral. We cleaned the corals so that the algae wouldn’t kill them. We had to clean the algae off the corals, pvc, and buoys. There was also large amounts of fire coral on the pvc which made it difficult to clean because the fire coral secretes a painful oil which burns. After cleaning the coral we had lunch on the boat and jumped off the top for about an hour. After lunch we snorkeled around the mangroves which are very important trees. The mangroves keep pollutants from leaving land into the water and keep the soil from braking away from shore. The mangrove trees can also survive in saltwater by filtering out the salt and sweating it through the leaves. During the snorkel we saw many baby fish and Sea cucumbers. One of the favorite things I saw on the snorkel was a very large barracuda. Afterwards we came back and began to finish up any finishing touches we needed to do for our projects that we will present tommorow.
