Okay, so these pictures are a little belated. This is from when we went on our town tour the other day. We went to this place called Coast Guard, named after the abandoned Coast Guard station there. But its the northermost point of South Caicos and it is beautiful. This would be the area where the humback whales would come through, but it was too choppy to tell what was whale and what was wave, so no one saw anything.

View from the other direction at Coast Guard.

Okay. So yesterday was probably one of the top 5 best days ever. Sundays arond here are already fantastic, because we don't have a schedule, but yesterday was awesome. 8 of us got the wild idea we were going to swim to Dove Cay which isn't too far offshore, but its still quite a trek. We swam out there and its this big rocky island and of course, I had full-foot fins on to swim over, so I didnt have booties so I was wandering around barefoot. It was really pretty and we had a lot of fun climbing around and checking everything out. We came to this area of the rock that had been cut out by waves. We realized that instead of a shallow slope down to the sea floor, there was a ledge that was even with the surface of the water, and then it dropped down about 15 feet. So of course we decided to jump off of it...haha. It was much more of an undertaking than it sounds. The waves were pretty rough, so you had to kind of gauge when they were coming next and you're wearing flippers, so you're already pretty awkward. But it was INCREDIBLE. Probably some of the most beautiful corals I've ever seen. THe picture above is a pic of some of the fan corals that were EVERYWHERE.

This is another pic of some of the smaller corals. I didn't get many shots of the big stuff because my camera was dying and I was just in awe of it all. We saw some cuttlefish (related to squid), a big spotted eagle ray and thousands of fish. It was just an awesome day.

This picture is from our first dive Saturday. It's a huge Southern Stingray.The dive was pretty awesome too. SO MANY CORALS! Not many of those pictures turned out very well because we were down so deep. (Accidentally dropped down to 80 feet at one point...oops...) But we were diving on a wall that went down to a few THOUSAND feet.

Aside from that, all is well. We had class all morning and then a snorkel out to Shark Alley where we finally saw our first sharks! I saw a little Carribean Reef Shark, maybe 5 feet long. And we saw another big Eagle Ray. There's so many of them out here!

We learn about our research projects this week and I'm REALLY excited. Our Marine Resource prof, Catherine, is doing one of her projects on the affects of hurricane Ike on the corals and which corals fared better than others. We find out what Richard (Environmental Policy) and Ben (Marine Ecology) are doing on Thursday. And we have another dive on Wednesday!