At the beginning of today, the whole marine biology group went to have breakfast at the marine biology two cabin, which consists of four seniors. On the marine biology trip, the students switch off setting up breakfast for the rest of the Jesuit marine biology group, so tomorrow a different cabin with students will set up breakfast. After breakfast, we got ready for our second dive, which would be at the Dive BVI coral gardens. Casey briefed the divers on the Sea Dragon and I before the dive on how we should clean the coral farms. There were ten coral trees that were made of PVC pipes and had ten branches of PVC pipes with five baby coral hanging from each branch. Casey showed us that we needed to wipe the PVC pipes with a sponge in order to get the green algae off of the PVC pipes.Then we needed to wipe the strings holding the coral with a glove to get even more algae off of the tree. We also had to wipe the rope and the bouy holding the tree to get more algae off. I liked this activity because it was fun and it felt good to participate in the farming of five hundred coral in the coral gardens. After diving in the coral gardens, we left to another island to work on our project for marine biology. Every student in Jesuit marine biology has to work on a project in BVI that involves scuba diving and each group needs to have at least one marine biology two student. So my project group, Henry Percy, Nicholas Pontikes, Wyatt Johnson, and John Saur, went to work with our dive instructor, Beeca. We planned our dive then we wrote charts on slates to record the fish that we see and their depth, activity, color, and abundance. I thought the project dive was very cool because we swam through canyons and we saw a spotted moray eel swimming around. After the project dive, the Sea Dragon took us to a bay on the island Virgin Gordo to have lunch with the Sea Monkey ,which had Jesuit students on it, to snorkel, and to see the salt pond on the island. Casey briefed us after our sandwich lunch. We jumped off our boats and snorkeled to shore. Then we didn’t walk far to get to a salt pond which wasn’t much of a pond because it was very dry. I thought the salt pond was cool because it looked dead yet the salt pond helps the ecosystem by absorbing the runoff sentiment from big homes. We snorkeled back to the boat before returning to our cabins to work on our project. At 6:15 in the evening, we had delicious hamburgers on the beach. After dinner, I got with my dive groups to go on an another project dive this time it is snorkeling and it’s at night. This snorkel trip was very stressful because I didn’t defog my mask before the trip and I brought my go pro which made it much harder to hold my flashlight, slate, and pencil. I ended up losing a pencil, and John’s flipper broke so he was swimming with one flipper. After today, I can still say that I’m having a great time in the BVI.
