Location: Nevis
Good morning Krusty Krew! (@Amanda S, that’s for you)
This morning I woke our crew up to some Banana Pancakes, Sunday Morning, and Betty to ease them into their day of tons of underwater activities. To fuel us all up, Lauren made us a delicious breakfast of Chia Pudding with berries and granola. Right after breakfast, we all donned our scuba gear, and the giant strode into the warm blue water below. Our goal was to complete our first Advanced Open Water (AOW) course dive, which was the navigation dive. For this dive, Amanda sat at one end of a 100-foot transect, and I sat at the other. The AOW students swam between us in their buddy pairs and were given different tasks by Amanda and myself, including navigating a square and a compass reciprocal. All the while, I also had Kacy, our divemaster (DM) candidate, and Elling working on some search and recovery skills as a part of Kacy’s DM training. She and Elling successfully used different search patterns to find some weights and even located one of my small silver double-end snap clips that I hid in the rolling seagrass beds for them.
After that, Kacy showed me her A+ knot tying skills underwater and then learned how to use a lift bag to lift heavier objects from underwater to the surface. After everyone’s brilliant navigating skills, we came back on board and were welcomed by med bowls for lunch. Then, per all of the dry people’s requests, we had our Oceanography lecture right after lunch. Today we talked about Gases and Nutrients in the ocean as well as how different forms of energy are transmitted in seawater. After class, we hopped back in the water to complete our Peak Performance Buoyancy dive as our second AOW course dive. Amanda, Kacy, and I set up an obstacle course for everyone to swim through, and we played a bunch of buoyancy games like kiss the weight and teapot to dial in on everyone’s buoyancy skills underwater. While on the dive awaiting more students to descend, Amanda found a teeny tiny baby short-nose batfish, which was especially exciting because it was so tiny and because I had never seen one before! I can now check that one off the list. After our dive, the crew had some free time before dinner, which was spent collecting data for group research projects, working on lit review essays, tanning, and even swimming with an eagle ray! Our kale salad dinner was followed by a classic squeeze question of “overrated, underrated,” which, as Evan would say, led to some “hot takes.” We’re now all gearing up to head to shore to walk the beach in search of some nesting turtles! Fingers crossed, we get to see some mamas starting the process of bringing new baby turts into the world.
Update: WE SAW A TURTLE!!!! We started the walk by excavating an already hatched nest from about a month ago. We counted 144 egg shells that had hatched, giving the nest a 100% hatch rate! Then we kept walking down the beach and saw a few tracks on the beach, and we were getting excited we might find a turtle. A little while later, we got the signal from the guide that he had spotted one, a Hawksbill! We all went running down the beach to where it was. We got to see her go through almost the entire process of egg laying, from digging her egg chamber to actually laying the eggs, then covering them up, camouflaging them so nothing and no one could find them, and then returned back to the ocean. It was flipping amazing! Such a cool and magical thing to get to witness altogether.
Picture 1: Kat swimming through our obstacle course
Picture 2: Amanda and I are gearing up to brief the Nav dive
Picture 3: Kacy jumping in for our first dive
Picture 3: Rohan jumping in for our second dive
Picture 5: Mine and Amandas in between dives selfie
Picture 6: The teeny tiny baby batfish
Picture 7: Joey swimming through our obstacle course
Picture 8: Drew playing kiss the weight
Picture 9: Group tanning post dive
Picture 10: A volunteer counting the egg shells in the excavated nest
Picture 11: One of the egg shells
Picture 12: The Hawksbill covering up her new nest