May 20 - Catalina

No blog last night because today was the midterm for the class associated with this trip – Environmental Studies 499. We all stayed up late to study. We just took the exam, and it took about two and a half hours.
And now that that is over, we can start having fun. Yesterday was our last dive in Catalina, and the visibility was less than a foot. The instructors thought that this would be a good time to have us do a navigation exercise, something that I’ve always been less than enthusiastic about. They laid a transect down, and we were given starting marks (my buddy and I were told to start from the 15 m mark) and navigate a triangle around the cove. Surprisingly, we actually managed to navigate to exactly the same spot we started from! The navigation part turned out to be easy; it was finding the transect tape that was hard. We literally had our noses to the bottom of the ocean floor looking for the tape. My buddy Emily was carrying and underwater camera, so we managed to take some cool pictures despite the green-milk appearance of the water.
The second dive for the day was called due to poor conditions, and that’s when we started to review for the test. Not much is going on in these next few hours. We will be going back to LA tonight, then leave for Guam tomorrow at 5am! The rest of the afternoon will be spent packing and then back on the boat. On the way from LA to Catalina, we were allowed to sit on the top of the boat because of cargo restrictions, and most of us were green by the end. Hopefully today we won’t be stuck down below.