Day 2Today was all about business. We started off the day with my cabin serving breakfast. It was once again: cereal, honey buns, guava juice, granola bars, and strawberry newtons. It was all served by my cabin which means it was the best breakfast ever. We then proceeded to go down to the marina and meet with our diving instructors and plan out the final steps of the project. We first headed to Ginger’s island to a dive site known as Ginger’s backside. They say it is because it’s considered the back of the island, but if you look at the island from that site it really looks like, as immature as this may sound, a butt. Anyways, we then searched for any sign of a cleaning station which we happened to find 4 within a 50 square foot plot and were able to split into two groups and survey as much as possible. We weren’t necessarily seeing the kind of results that we expected, but my partner Harrison and I were able to practice neutral buoyancy pretty well. All in all we only saw about 3 parrot fish at each cleaning station with only a few other fish species comping and going. But one fish that came into both cleaning stations my partner and I surveyed multiple times, turned out to be following us the entire dive. This friend was a dog snapper and was about 2-3ft in length. That’s all for dive one.
Dive two was at a dive sight known as Cooper’s island. The dive plan was the same, swim around until we find something significant. We were only able to find one Gobi Cleaning station and one blue wrasse cleaning station. Finding them alone took us about 20 Minutes, but it was still pretty cool. After seeing literally nothing at our cleaning station we proceeded to explore the surrounding area. We then saw 3 tarpon all about 4-5 feet long as well as a barracuda about the same size chasing a school of blue tang around. After that not much happened until because freaked out an octopus which was pretty cool I must add.
After dive 2 and before we went back to the marina, we got the chance to jump off of the top deck of the dive boat, about 10-15 feet off the water and that was pretty fun. We then ate lunch and prepared to head to the baths.
The baths is a national park funded for by the Rockefeller on virgin Gorda. This consists of massive volcanic rocks leaning on each other with pockets that yuh can swim in or walk through to get to a very beautiful beach. The small hike through w very cool and many a picture was taken. We then got a chance to swim at the beach before snorkeling to the beach in front of our cabins. The snorkeling was breathtaking, but it didn’t start out that way due to a few guys splashing and swimming as hard as they possibly could in order to stay at the front off the group. Myself and trip simply stopped swimming in order to drop behind and actually explore a bit. We saw squid, massive puffer fish, and, most exciting, a sting ray.
We then came up, had dinner, and swam a bit at the beach.
The end… until tomorrow
