Exactly how it sounds, one of the sickest thing that has been done all semester. Meet at the boathouse at 7:30 and get on the boat. I was really excited and have been looking forward to this dive for a long time. When the sun was going down and we were on the water the adrenaline was kicking in. I buddied up with Whit for this dive and I could tell that he was real excited as well. As we sat on the boat anchored up over tunnel rock we waited for it to get real dark. Then we jumped in. When we started to descend there were jacks attracted to the light and would come inches away from running into us. When we got down there it was like nothing else, wherever I shined the light that’s all I could see, the rest was just pure darkness. We made our way down to the bottom and I saw this huge figure underneath some rock so I went a bit closer to take a closer look, it was a 5-6ft turtle sleeping underneath this coral. I immediately swam after Nick tapped him and did the awkward turtle and pointed to it and his eyes lit up along with everybody else who could actually see it. After looking at this turtle for 10 minutes we went out off the coral a bit. We shut off the all the lights and Nick took a handful of sand and threw it up but all I could see in this pitch black area was a bunch of these little green lights, it was something I had seen in movies and films on TV but I had never thought I would get the experience of actually seeing it with my own eyes and it was beautiful. I sat there throwing sand up in amazement looking at these bioluminescents. After this we went up for our safety stop and went up to the surface.

Once everybody surfaced everybody started freaking out cause they were so stoked off what they just experienced. Everybody was telling everybody what they had just seen. We got on the boat and got everybody else up and got ready to go back to campus. I sat there with my buds looking at the starts and looking at the bioluminescents lighting up the white water on the side of the boat. It was like something out of a movie and that is what The Island School is all about, experiences like those.

-JJ L’Archevesque