3 More Dives in the Books

Another 3 dives recorded. Today we started at 8:30 and ended at 5:00. We had a 30 minute brief before we started diving and had two surface intervals, one for an hour and the second for 2 hours. Otherwise, we were in the water any where from 5 feet to 60 feet.

Dive 1: AGRRA fish survey. Just as yesterday, we did a fish survey looking at specific families and functional groups. However, we were at a different dive site. We walked about 10 minutes with all our gear to Something Special dive site. It was cool getting to see another part of the reef besides at the Yellow Submarine dive site (practically out our backdoor). We saw a moon jellyfish before we even descended. Once we were down and headed to the reef slope, my buddy and I saw a group of 5 Queen angelfish. On this dive, I was about 45 feet down.

Dive 2: Coral Survey. We laid a 10m transect to conduct a one pass survey using a 1m belt to identify, measure, and note any beaching, disease or dead corals. Corals had to be greater than 4cm to be recorded. Depending on time and air, we had switch to just identify the coral and tallying the number seen. At the safety stop at the end of the dive, I was hovering over a flounder, which was cool. Also, when I was surveying, a bar jack swam right next to my face where I could have touched him if he didn't all of a sudden appear.

Dive 3: Navigation and rescue skills. Navigation skills included using the compass to swim a box and triangle. We then did a few different search patterns. Switching over to rescue skills, we did buddy breathing where one buddy is pretending to be out of air and we share one regulator. We did this a few times then we did it where the out of air buddy did not have their mask on. This is were trust in our buddy comes in. One person breathes twice then the other person breathes twice. After buddy breathing we did a few other rescue skills dealing with exhausted swimmer (where I almost touched a flounder), a non-breathing victim at the surface, and panic diver at the surface.