Location: Great Harbor, Peter Island
Today our staff woke up at 3:30 am to drive us to the Rhone wreck dive site, the spot of our final dive for the trip and our first dive as certified advanced open water divers. We slept at the place where the Rhône’s anchor lies, and we motored through the same route that the crew of the Rhone went through on the night of the explosion of the ship. The staff went on a dive at 6 am to scout the site, and the whole boat woke up and sat up on the hardtop to speak. When the staff came back, they started playing sandstorm to motivate us for what would be, in my opinion, the best dive of the trip by far. We were all very hyped for the dive as we set up our gear, and we started the dive on a great note. We split ourselves into three groups for the dive; the first group was Luke, Blake, Brendan, and me. The second was Cobrin, Louella, and Evan, and the third was Scarlett and Matthew because Micah was not able to dive with us. We descended about 100 feet from the shipwreck, and as we swam closer, the bow became uncovered. We hovered around the wreck for a while and then penetrated a hole in the hull. It was a relatively small hole, and our instructors were impressed by our finesse while swimming through it. We later swam to the stern of the ship, which was broken off from the bow, and swam through the propeller and rudder of the ship, which was enormous and about 15 feet in diameter. My group saw a ginormous lobster, and Matthew and Scarlett saw a spotted morray peeking through the coral. We ended the dive, and everyone was equally impressed and amazed. We later went to another boat in the AQ fleet to take our sailing exams, some of us the advanced and others the basic. We went on a hike on Salt Island, where we saw amazing views of the ocean, and Scarlett even said it was her favorite spot in the BVI’s. There were also some very interesting conversations had on the hike. We had ramen for lunch on another boat and later went back to our boat and relaxed and conversed as other students from Mango Tango did their Rhone dive. We got ready to head back to where the anchor of the wreck is to do a mega raft and we struggled to connect ourselves to a hurricane mooring ball that would hold the weight of the whole sail side a fleet. Luckily we had very willing and helpful shippies, including Luke, Micah, Violet, Brendan, and several others at times, who made the process much smoother. We had fun with the other boats and went to sleep a little later than usual.