Scariest night of my life!

I'd like to start out my blog by letting you all know about my night last night. At about 2 a.m. here a huge thunderstorm broke out with rain, thunder, lightening, and wind. SO MUCH WIND. I woke up to it in the middle of a deep sleep and the first thing I thought of was everyone's clothing that was hanging on the clothes lines and if they were all going to be blown away. Luckily, as I was thinking about this I heard voices, apparently everyone else was thinking the same thing. I went outside and we all were frantically putting things away in people's rooms. When that was all done I laid back in bed and could not fall asleep for hours. All I could think about was if the door was going to be blown in, or the shutters knocked off, or even if some huge wave was going to come onto the research center. I was honestly scared for my life!! Eventually, we all woke up this morning to a very messy center and a gloomy day. 

Luckily, we didn't have a whole lot going on today, so the gloomy day set for a "relaxation" day. We started off learning about our next research project, which is again a group project. This one is much more interesting to me though because it has to do with marine life and actual research instead of policies and regulations (like our other project). Our group is determining the effects of fish population and coral reef cover inside and outside a Marine Protected Area. After we learned about everything we went out and did a practice research transect. Tomorrow we begin our actual field research. This project isn't due until next Friday, and we will continue our research until next Wednesday. After that we have until Friday to gather our data, analyze it, and make our powerpoint for Friday. It's going to be a lot of work and very time consuming, but it will definitely hold my attention :)

Once we finished our practice transect we were free to work on our projects that are due Friday until lunch. After lunch we had even more free time. We were supposed to go to a fish processing plant this afternoon today, but due to the storm last night none of the fisherman caught any fish today, so it had to be postponed to hopefully tomorrow. So, that left us with even more free time until dinner. It was awesome, a group of us made friendship bracelets (one of our favorite things to do here obviously) and watched "The Devil Wears Prada". Then, after dinner, we had even more spare time. So, now my group is trying to finish editing our paper! We are almost done, which is really exciting because I'm so over writing about this stuff (it has nothing to do with science and research). After this I am going to bed, and I can't wait haha! I just hope there isn't a storm tonight! Have a good rest of your night all! :)

P.S. Good news! Here are my pictures from my dive yesterday! :)

Green Sea Turtle

 A picture of me getting ready to take a picture.

 This is the huge Southern Stingray I was talking about, it was bigger than me!

 My dive group, I'm the second from the left in the back w/ the "OK" sign LOL.

 Some pretty fishies on the reef! 

 Me under the arch! :)

 Thumbs up! 

A little fun after our dive! :)

There are a ton of other pics too, I'll be putting them up on facebook soon :)