My Best Friend, Fred the Nassau Grouper

Say hello to Fred the Nassau Grouper! He's the local tour guide for Bloody Bay Wall. I swear I'm not kidding. When we descended on the mini-reef before the wall, Fred was waiting for us at the cut to guide us over the wall. He monitored our safety when 107 (the local Caribbean Reef Shark that stalks us on every Bloody Bay dive we've done) came out of nowhere and scared us half to death. He led us through some of the hollows of Cumbers Caves, keeping us company and providing some awesome entertainment. Whoever said fish are boring pets clearly have never met Fred.

Unfortunately, that dive over the wall may have been our last dive of the trip. For the past few days we've been plagued with Tropical Storm Chantal. Jerk. She's been churning up the water so much it's too dangerous to enter. But as of right now, a night dive is still on the schedule for tonight!!! Keep your fingers crossed! I wanna see an octopus!

Right now, I'm in overdrive trying to finish my research project on the recolonization of Scleractinian corals on Acropora palmata skeletons. We've collected and organized all of our data (138 colonies in Grape Tree Bay -_-) and are now just condensing and assembling the significant information on a poster to present to basically the entire island! AHHH!!! Our posters have the potential to be shown at international marine biology conferences in the future. That is just crazy to me. I've been studying marine biology for three weeks and now all of a sudden I've created a research project that scientists from all over the world could learn from. That is absolutely mind-boggling.

I am so thankful that I've been given the opportunity to see and do these extraordinary things. My time here on Little Cayman has been far too short, yet I feel like I've been here forever. There's no way I've learned the names of almost every coral, fish, and macroalgae species on Cayman reefs and put together an entire research project in less than three weeks. It's inconceivable. We've pushed ourselves so hard, and at some times might have wanted to explode, but our professors never gave up on us. Thank you CCMI :)

- Elissa