Today’s agenda consisted of the Kodiak Queen shipwreck dive, cleaning coral stations, and snorkeling next to mangroves in North Sound Bay. After a delicious breakfast, we headed out to board the Sea Dragon and sail out to the wreck site of the Kodiak Queen. The Kodiak Queen was one of the only surviving ships after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Many years after World War II, a group of divers decided to turn the ship, which was out of use by the military, into a wreck site. They also created an enormous Kraken out of wire and mesh to place on top of the ship. We arrived at the site and had a short briefing by our instructors about the dimensions of the ship and our path around and through the ship. We were told that we would see arrow crabs, tiger grunts, and various types of snapper. As soon as we decended, large, fadeded letters spelling out “KODIAK QUEEN” greeted us about 15 to 20 feet above us. Our decent ended around 60 feet, where we saw plenty of arrow crabs hiding in the hull or in chains dropped next to the ship. They almost look like daddy-long-legs spiders with tiny claws. Creepy or cool, they were an interesting find around the ship. As we went around the ship, we entered a small opening in the side of the ship and passed through a dark, small hallway. We carefully made our way into a small room where an old phone, Mac, and floating bottle of alcohol rested on tables. We took a couple pictures, and moved into the head of the Kraken, where we took a group photo. Carefully we moved out of the head and out onto the topside of the vessel. Realizing that our air supplies were running a little low, we as a group decided to head to the Sea Dragon. After safely boarding, I quickly snorkeled out to get an eerie view of the wreck one last time.
Next we sailed toward the coral nurseries off of Virgin Gorda. There we split up into groups of two and cleaned the PVC trees which were covered in algae, razor clams, and worst of all, fire coral. The trees were set up to hold Staghorn Coral off of small strings in order to grow, but many other living organisms found the trees to be a habitable spot. We began to carefully clean off the algae and scrape off the fire coral. The instructors came around to remove the razor clams, and inevitably most of us got stung by the coral. Once we cleaned off the trees as best we could, we boarded the Sea Dragon once more, and went to a spot next to a large group of mangroves to eat lunch. We were briefed about the mangroves being home to a large variety of creatures, including barracuda and sharks. We took a short snorkel out to see the mangroves, where we saw a 4-5 foot barracuda, plenty of sea cucumber, and a 6 foot hammerhead shark. Today was a long yet exciting day of diving and snorkeling, and tomorrow will be a full day of service to a local high school and presenting our projects, which we have been preparing to present to the dive staff her in the BVI. 
