This trip has been full of ups and downs for all of us. I personally had to visit the doctor on May 18th of the trip and was pushed into quarantine for the next two days. I would be lying if I said that the quarantine wasn’t a nice break from the constant sun and no-see-ums. I was sadly not able to enjoy the room to my full capacity due to feeling very under the weather and being slightly comatose from the medication. The experience of visiting the island doctor though, was nothing less than surreal. I got to take a sneak peak into the day to day of someone who lives here, and it shows how much we take for granted to have at our fingertips in the United States. The doctor, emergency room, pharmacy, dentist, surgical unit, and delivery room are all conveniently located in a quaint pink building about 20 minutes from the Gerace Center. I found out from our guide Sandy that the dentist comes once a week from Nassau, and that the same is for the surgeon. This means that there are only certain services offered by the hospital each day of the week on top of general care. Thankfully I got to join the group again on the 20th day which was a little bit of an adjustment back to student island life.
Today though was much better and, I felt so much more adjusted with the activities we did. We started the day with a visit back at Dixon Lighthouse and went on a back trail which led to a cave. (Fun fact: I did in fact bump my head on the top of the cave) The tide was sadly at high tide so there wasn’t very much of the cave to see when coming down the ladder. The cave has a delayed tide by about 2 hours according to our guide, which is pretty interesting to think about since the cave is so far from the ocean. There were several bats accompanying us in the cave and giving a show around the caverns. Sadly, one of the girls didn’t want to come in the cave but, she lent me a flashlight which made it so much easier to see my way around the cave. There were about 3 bats from what I had seen as well as many stalactites and stalagmites lining cave as well as some very slippery rock, which made maneuvering around the cave slightly difficult especially with 20 people down there.
On the surface right outside the cave was one of the largest cacti I have ever seen in person and, when returning from the woods we were greeted with a beautiful tree to give us shade. In this tree was a tamarind fruit which I have never tried until today and, it instantly reminded me of this Mexican candy Pelon Mini which I found out while writing this that it is a tamarind flavored candy. It was really cool being able to grab a fruit straight from the tree and eat it though definitely not an everyday occurrence for me. I'm really grateful for being able to have unique experiences and doing things I normal wouldn't even think of back home.
Later in the day we stopped by Conch Beach (real name unknown) and looked at the poor side effects of overfishing. The Queen conch is a very popular organism throughout the Caribbean islands and, in the Florida Keys. The details of the conch that we were interested in looking at today were the age and size of conch shells. The legal ways to harvest conch means that it must be an adult conch shell with a fully developed lip. Sadly, today we found many shells that were harvested that were not up to these standards. The conch we observed was a range of barley mature adults with a brittle lip, or a juvenile conch which is illegal to catch. The conch population has been dramatically dropping off in the past years, with little to no signs of it slowing down. It takes about 5 years for a conch to become mature enough for reproduction but, overfishing coupled with ocean acidification has caused the mature conch to struggle with even reaching reproductive age. Following this little excursion, we went out to snapshot reef, which is a popular diving spot for tourists, so we had to bring this big yellow donut with this in order to show the boats that people were in the water. We saw many different fish at this reef and the current wasn’t super strong while we were out there. I would definitely put it as one my more comfortable snorkel spots, the yellow donut helped ease my nerves of boats and, the very timid current made observation much easier. Some of the organisms we saw were a Brittle starfish, some Blue chromis in a school, and two types of stingrays (Yellow stingrays and Southern stingrays). These were very different types fish from I have seen previously so far in this course and, am looking forward to seeing more. We ended this long da with a lesson and, watching the sunset which has become a comfortable routine to end our days. Looking forward for the week ahead and, excited to start my second course soon!
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