Midway day 1

So yesterday was incredible! We arrived at Midway atoll early in the morning and started the day off like usual. Get up at 6am. Get our gear ready, eat, get on the boat, and go diving. Midway atoll is a special place for those of us on this ship because it is the only place that we can touch land. Our first dive of the morning was on a wreck called the "Carolton." This ship was carrying coal from Australia to California and wrecked here in 1906. This was a really pretty dive. It was really shallow and in only 10 feet of water (and therefore SUPER surgey), but there were thousands of beautiful fish and awesome looking rock formations. The great thing about this dive is that I just got to go along for the ride! The archeology team was just checking it out to see if the pieces have moved around at all in the surf. Next we went and snorkeled around near shore looking for a landing vessel that crashed during WWII. We were looking around for over an hour and couldn't find it which was really weird because we were in clear, shallow water looking for a 35 foot plank. The chief scientist called in and asked for GPS points and found out that the park service over here actually removed it from the water... whoopsies! Finally, we motored over to a spot called the "Corsair" which as of now was the most amazing dive I have EVER been on. This is a plane the crashed here at Midway during WWII (remember the battle of Midway?). This plane crashed in 120 feet of water and therefore this was a very deep dive. When you dive to this depth you need to be very careful because you breath your air 4x faster than you would at the surface and you are at much higher risk for getting bent if you are not careful. Lucky for me, I was diving with 2 dive instructors and 2 other amazingly competent divers and I have a lot of experience working at deeper depths. We dropped down to this plane wreck which was gorgeous. It was in a sand patch with nothing around it, but it was filled with hundreds and hundreds of fish. My job was to write down everything that I saw again. I saw a lot of new species because all our other sites were really shallow. Anyways, at the end of the dive we had to come up very very slowly because of the depth. As we start coming up the first thing we saw was a school of about 20 Galapagos sharks. They were so beautiful. They were pretty small (only 3-4 feet) and just peacefully swimming around in the water column (the galapagos shark is the first picture). We were all enjoying our ride up, taking pictures of all the sharks and hanging out in the middle of the water column. After about 5 minutes or so we got up to about 40 feet. I kept my eye on my dive computer because I wanted to make sure that I was not coming up too fast. As I look up from my computer, I looked over at all my buddies (there were 5 of us) and they were all staring at me with huge eyes. I thought that was kind of weird because none of them were signally anything to me, but they were just stunned. So I turned around and saw this MASSIVE female tiger shark inches from me (literally) just checking me out. Totally calm and non-aggressive, but ridiculously close! I think I said some expletives through my regulator and then realized that I had a camera and had to take a picture (picture number two). It was so cool. People spend their entire life diving and don't get experiences like this. After our safety stop we all came to the surface and were in total shock just laughing about what had just happened. Now don't get me wrong I never want to see one of those guys while I am floating around on the surface of the water, but while diving it was a totally amazing experience. After the dive we pulled into the dock and touched land for the first time in 13 days . And since we were on land we were allowed to have a beer (woohoo!)! Needless to say I definitely toasted with my dive team to that crazy experience. Today I have a day off and I am going to tour around the island. Will post pictures later!

Until tomorrow,
Nyssa