Our first official day on the Island was as exciting as the ferry ride over to Herron's research center. All of us students were able to settle in nicely, get fitted for our snorkeling gear, and of course see and experience everything together! We started the day off by waking up early to beat the sunrise for a morning introduction of snorkeling, which to my surprise, everyone was very excited and easy going about being in the water. Like most of the group, we were worried about everything that could go wrong in the water with sharks, rays, etc., but it turned out to be the most relaxing experience being in the water with some experience snorkel divers, to not as experienced--like myself. The day was already off to an incredible start!
Shortly after we had snorkeled for about an hour, we had some breakie and we were off to our first lab assignment. I have to admit I feel inadequate to most of the students here with their knowledge and skills, but the lab was a great experience on having me ask for help and understanding the material after being out of school for so long. I was paired with Sienna and we had name our group "The Assholes". We had a blast trying to figure out how to stake our measuring tape after a couple of attempts of floating to the top, but finally managed a system and we were rewarded with some fun specimens to exam. After we had recorded our findings we then had to enter them into a database sheet from the other groups, and that was an adventure trying to figure out the graphs. During the middle of the excel mess Trisha came into the room saying baby sea turtles had just hatched...we dropped everything and high tailed it to the opposite end of the beach! We were huffing and puffing by the time we got there, and had just missed them unfortunately. It was worth the run and excitement of getting to sea little baby turtles. We had finished our assignments up and had the rest of the day to relax and use our time to blog, relax, or work on homework. I finished my day off by going to the jetty to see an incredible sunset go down, with colors I have never seen before on a horizon like this. This has been a once and a lifetime opportunity to experience this with an amazing group of skilled individuals, and I cant wait for what the rest of the trip has to offer.
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TiaG'day Mates! My name is Tia Jeppesen. I would love to introduce myself about who I am; where I am from, and also blog about this once in a lifetime experience in the beautiful country of Australia. Archives |