Today we at at the Alamander house and did the same old breakfast routine that has been for five days in a row now. Nothing unusual happened so I’ll just skip over it to spare you the boredom.
So off we go to the first dive site. It is a wreck about 60ft down called the Kodiak Queen. This ship has an interesting history that one of our divemasters Beth told us about. The Kodiak Queen was one of the few ships in Pearl Harbor that survived the attack by Japan. After the war it was used for shipping supplies in the BVI. It was then sunk in collaboration with local artists who added a giant kraken sculpture on the top. We didn’t see much sea life due to it being sunk only 5 months ago but swimming through it was really cool. We also did a “moon race” where we let out the air of our BCDs and took off our fins. Zoltan them drew a starting and finishing line and we tried to run on the bottom. I finished a close second to Matthew, Tyler got third and Nick got fourth. We also saw a hogfish but nothing interesting.
Our second was at a staghorn coral nursery set up off the beach where we snorkeled for invertebrates the other day. I partnered up with Matthew and we cleaned a nursery tree. Unfortunately invasive fire coral had set up there so I was stung no less than 5 times by fire coral that I would accidentally touch or would fall off from me chiseling it. It stung really badly but it went away within 2 hours. At least I know what it feels like now so I won’t be scared but I will still be cautious.
After a lunch on the high seas with the guys from the Sea Monkey we snorkeled st the mangroves which as Beth described it is the nursery of the Caribbean so naturally we saw lots of baby fish. We saw several huge conchs and sea cucumbers, tiny little baby barracuda and other young creatures. As we continued down the coast we started to see upside down jellyfish and they progressively got to the size of dinner plate. Eventually we found ourselves in a mine field of jellyfish but we thought we were safe because these jellyfish rest no the brown but we were in about 2 feet of water. Suddenly a jellyfish popped up like a Bouncing Betty mine and I immediately turned around to get away but the jellyfish landed on Tyler’s arm and it turns out when these jellyfish are threatened they shout out barbs that can get anyone within a 5 foot radius including myself. Tyler starts screaming while we all swim away. Once back on the boat we assess the damage. Mine wasn’t that bad but Tyler got lit up. We took care of it and were fine now.
I am looking forward to the service project and getting to go home to AC and a lack of humidity!
