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Location: Great Harbor, Jost van Dyke
Today we started our day with a long sail from Summer’s Bay where we had a BBQ the previous night. When we arrived at Jost Van Dyke, we sailed into Great Harbor Bay and went to shore to do seagrass research. We worked and measured out seagrass in different areas of the bay starting at the beginning of the beach where the water started to pretty far out. It was kind of a tough task because there were a lot of boats everywhere and if one person or boat stirred the water underneath, it was tough to see the grass in the quadrant we were looking at that moment. After measuring and seeing the different amounts of seagrass and what it was growing in and what type, we went back to the boat to get ready for shore time. We had a long lunch on shore at Foxy’s a small restaurant in Great Harbor Bay, before we went back to keep observing the seagrass. We picked up three students from Jost Van Dyke and sailed a bay over to Sydney’s. It was really sad when we arrived there because it looked like nothing had been cleaned up since the hurricane except for the roads. There were boats pushed into the sides of the shore and completely torn up. Underwater when we were snorkeling and measuring seagrass you would see ropes, and anchors, and boats that had been sunken. Seeing this bay made me completely aware of how bad the British Virgin Islands was impacted and still recovering from Hurricane Irma. We worked on the seagrass measurements with the students and swam around in the midst of it looking for little fish. Working with the students who were not too much younger than us was cool because we were able to share our stories with them as they shared their stories with us from two different lives. We ended our night celebrating our shipmate, Darius fifteenth birthday with some brownies, which everybody was excited about!