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Here are some excerpts from Julianna's journal: Day 2: “After chores and a quick siesta we had the morning activities and we were separated into our groups. I am part of the Goonies…yes, that is our name. We then had lunch and after lunch the new people…me…went to the refresher dives. It was amazing; it was like a giant pool. We didn’t see any sharks or anything but I didn’t care because I could see in every direction unlike Lake Travis. After this Richard, Darius, Alex and I went down to the beach just to put our feet in the water, and when we did there was a baby nurse shark that was like a foot away from us. It was so cute.” Day 4: “This morning the Goonies went snorkeling first… We were in about 5 feet of water the entire time and the main purpose of the snorkel was to identify the specific species of coral that we had learned the night before. Audrey took around Celine, Sydnee, Darius and me for about an hour. She picked up a lot of things that we could hold, my favorite being the lettuce slug. It was hard to hold onto and it was about an inch and a half long, and it stuck to my hand. But it was really cute…” Day 5: “This morning I woke up at 5:15 to go on a morning “dawn” dive. We went 87 feet and the water was perfect. This was the best dive in the history of dives. The water was dark purple/blue on one side of the reef and light blue on the other. This was because the water on the dark side dropped 2 miles. The 4 of us and Audrey, Ada, and Susie were down for about 40 minutes; it was amazing.” Day 8: “Today was so much fun, we woke up late, and had my favorite…cereal…I’m not kidding I really, really like the granola cereal that we have on Sundays and Wednesdays b/c those are church days for the cooks. After breakfast we relaxed a while and then put on our nice clothes to go to church. It was so much fun. If St. Davids was like this church I would want to go every Sunday. We sang, we snapped, we clapped. We did everything; it was so much fun. Everything was really loud and happy and joyful.” Day 9: “After breakfast Goonies went diving…this was the best dive ever; it was just me, Richard and Allie. We saw one thing after another…an eel, a spider crab that was laying eggs…a lettuce slug and then a SEA TURTLE. My first one. I was so excited.” “After the siesta we went diving. This was a fish dive. We were to identify fish the entire time. I found a flamingo tongue – I was so proud – and a spotted scorpion fish. Arch got really excited when we got to the surface – he said that it was a really big one…It was so beautiful – when it spread its wings (fins) there were so many beautiful/bright colors. It was a good dive.” “We were told that we were going to be down for only 30 minutes so I felt like it was a race to see how much we could see, my flashlight was darting everywhere. Audrey told us to turn off our flashlights at one point, we then waved our hands everywhere to see all of the dinoflagellates glow. After that point we didn’t have much time left. So I flashed my light to the coral where I could see millions of little shrimp/fish/lobster eyes looking at me. They were bright orange balls of light every place that I looked. When we got back on the boat we all exchanged stories and the different creatures that we saw. We got home around 10, and fell into bed still thinking about all the cool night creatures we had seen.” “After breakfast we started our group projects. My group is Lily, Lauren and me. We are mainly studying the density of upside down jellyfish in selective locations. We spent the morning making an outline and then scouted out the area behind the dorms. After lunch we then went to a salt water lake really close to 4th hole. We were so excited because the bottom of the little cove was covered in upside down jellyfish. We took down our data as quickly as possible…” “At 2:00 the Goonies got in one of the vans to check out the ruins from the resort that used to be on the island but was then burned down by the locals. It was so hot; I used one Nalgene to drink and one to cool of my sizzling body… I think steam literally came off my body. Arch showed us the ruins for about an hour and then took us to the water tank that the resort used. We climbed in! It was so cool when we went in and it made us all go quiet really fast. There were holes in the top of the tank which looked like little stars.” |
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