It’s been a busy week down on Eleuthera, and with our Down Island Trip right around the corner, us gappers are excited about all we have experienced and accomplished in the last seven days.
SCUBA
After grinding away for hours on the elearning, we all passed our final assessments and were able to get out on the water for some real SCUBA training. We started with some confined dives at The Saddle where we learned and practiced skills to get our Open Water Diver certification. After 4 confined dives over the course of the week, and practicing a bunch of skills both under and above the water, we all received our Open Water Diver certifications on Thursday and began advanced work Sunday.
Pig Slaughter
We awoke on Wednesday morning to a beautiful sunrise and headed over to the farm where Joseph had a fire going to make hot water for the pig cleaning. After Caleb shot the pig, it was brought over to the cleaning table, where knives were handed out and people began removing the hair from the pig using the hot water to loosen it up. After the pig was all cleaned up, we hung it up across a wooden beam, and Jai and Joseph began gutting and cleaning it. The whole process was a great way to see where your food comes from. Although the majority of pork we eat in the states isn’t raised as well as this pig was, it was really cool to see the process of turning an animal into food.
Beach Plastic
One of our last activities of the week was on beach plastics with Kristal. We started in the presentation room, watching Kristal’s presentation on her experience researching the Pacific Ocean gyres. We then went out to a beach in Wemyss Bight to do some surveying. The results we got were pretty surprising – we found a ton of micro plastic pieces in each of the quadrants we surveyed in. The microplastics came from larger pieces of plastic in the ocean breaking up, a current environmental issue that researchers at CEI are hoping to learn more about in order to effect change both locally and globally.
Well, that’s a wrap. Until soon,
Will Fox