We had our first midterm today in theriogenology - my favorite. It was a mess, a real disaster really. This man is ridiculous, I can't believe he is really allowed to teach here! His thoughts are barely coherent, he is rambling at best! Grr. When asked for guidelines for the midterm, he told us (and then backed it up with the barest study guide outline ever) one set of things, and then gave something completely different today. We asked if it was cumulative, he said no, his exam said yes. We asked for the question breakdown, he told us mostly VPs, he gave us mostly his questions. It was a great time and there was a log of grumping amongst my classmates for sure. Honestly at this point I just don't care. It's not like I wish I had studied differently, I did exactly what he told us to do and I knew that material very well (and got those questions correct!). Can't fault myself for not being a mind reader! My grade once again came out higher than I expected, so I really can't complain that much.
Next up is small animal medicine on Monday. I'm most looking forward to this exam because medicine is my forte. I "speak" the medicine language haha. After that is small animal surgery on Tuesday, followed by large animal surgery on Thursday and Diagnostic Imaging on Friday. The last two are going to be terrifying! I am very scared for both - I definitely need to do well on these two exams and they aren't really subjects I'm all that good with (DI might be better if it wasn't mostly statement based true/false questions, I could handle looking at 100 radiograph questions!). Should be an interesting and stressful week for sure.
After my exam this morning, I decided I needed a dive to clear my mind for the weekend. I ended up with a little more than I bargained for! We ended up going out to the Bianca C, the deepest ship wreck in Grenada! The boat lies in 165 ft of water, but the top of the boat (where divers explore) is in 100-130 ft of water. That's just at the edge of recreational dive limits. It's a several minute descent down in dark blue water to this ship. I don't know if it's really the case, but any time I'm really deep, I really hear myself breathing in and out. The bubbles breathed out just sound different - louder, more tinkly, bubbly. It's hard to describe. Sucking air in sounds louder too. It might just be that I know I need to pay extra special attention to my air consumption since the increased density of the air at that depth means it goes a lot faster.
Either way, it was a beautiful dive. The wreck is gorgeous and I really enjoyed spending time peeking at all of the bits and pieces. Plenty of lurking fish and I'm sure if I'd looked a little closer, I would have seen lots of invertebrates. The visibility wasn't good enough for me to kind of crawl along and look closely, and the ship is really too long for that with the very limited amount of bottom time you have anyway. Multiple visits will need to be made to take away the most from this beautiful treasure.
One thing that really struck me on the boat was just how colorless a lot of it really was. You lose read and orange light waves at those depths, and yellow is certainly not far behind (I'm pretty sure I remember seeing some yellow sponges though). The wreck was dark and shadowy with an ominous feeling to it, despite the fact that only two people died in association with it's sinking (and one was a week after the fact). A lot of the infrastructure has collapsed over time and the wreck lays partially on its left side. It is a massive structure underwater and took us nearly 20 minutes to swim it end to end.
After we left the wreck, we slowly made our ascent in a sloping fashion off the ship towards a reef. We swam for several minutes until we hit the reef and then just gently climbed upwards with the reef from there. My computer mandated a 2 minute decompression stop at 58 feet which was easily achieved while we were coasting over the reef and then a 3 minute decompression stop at 10 feet (which gets made between 20 and 10 ft) before a 3 minute 10 foot safety stop. It was cranky! Over all it was not very fond of me going so deep - it definitely had my best interests in safety in mind as it calculated the residual nitrogen buildup in my blood stream! Amazingly enough, my dive instructor's computer was the most liberal of all and didn't care if we did more than a 3 minute safety stop (she did two dives this morning which is what makes it surprising!). Another guy's computer mandated even more deco time at 10 feet! It's really neat to see these things in action. They can be integrated into you hose/tank system and attached to your gauges or on your wrist like a watch. I wear mine on my wrist and I really appreciate knowing what my dive profile is each time and as we go (max depth, time, air mixture vs nitrox, no decompression allowances, safety stop time, decompression stop time, etc). Just adds extra safety to recreational diving for me!
A couple of notes:
-I didn't flood my mask today :(
-My computer got on my nerves a lot for being grouchy about depth and particularly when we had to hang at 20-10ft for 10 minutes!! I was annoyed with it by the end haha.
-These pictures are terrible - the visibility wasn't great and there was a lot of large brown particulates floating in the water. It was also pretty dark. And cold. Did I mention how quickly and easily I get cold in this beautiful tropical water?? It's ridiculous!!
-None of these pictures was taken from inside the ship. I have no desire to do that. Ever. The window one was taken looking through an open section of the hull. I don't have a death wish, particularly not a claustrophobic-trapped-in-a-box-of-sharp-metal death wish!
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