Hey Everyone!
Ben and Matt coming at you from San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Today was a fantastic day snorkeling. The day started about 715 when we all hopped in the breakfast line, yes we wake up early to get in the front. Breakfast consisted of French toast and sausage. We then headed back to the room to gear up and get ready for the day. We headed out on the truck to run right down the road to north point. We have been there once before but this time we headed even farther out on the point to take a look at some of the cool algae growing in the more shallow areas. Once we found a good spot to stop we took weather analysis, this consists of temperature and cloud cover along with GPS coordinates of the area we are at. Although there was a lot of cloud cover the temp was at a nice 82 degrees with a slight wind.
We then were instructed by KR and JW to go out and find five different algae’s and to bring them back to the beach to identify. Some of the algae’s we identified were Udotia, Halimeda, Penicillus. These were the more common ones but we identified about 13 more. We had sonme time left so we went back out to do some more observation of different sponges but got distracted by a pregnant mole crab and a curious box crab swimming around with us.
After a lunch consisting of pizza and pasta salad we went out to Snapshot reef to do some more snorkeling, this time focused on coral. After a decent swim out to the reef through snapshot flats we saw some beautiful coral and amazing fish. Brain coral, fire coral, sea fans, and barrel sponges were the things we saw that we were instructed to look for, other things that got our attention however were a spotted moray eel along with a green moray eel. A little fish decided to follow the students around as we snorkeled and we had fun passing the little guy around from student to student.
After a long day of snorkeling and walking through sand, we came back to the GRC for showers and a nice meal. Before class started we had some vendors show up with some local island trinkets and of course many students bought gifts for themselves and for some of you guys back home. We then proceeded to class were JW educated us more on coral formation and organisms, we then all tiredly walked back to our rooms, some to the snack hut for one last small bite to eat before a somewhat welcoming bed beckoned them to sleep.
Ben Dotson 14, Matt Schramm 14.