Whales, Whales, Whales and some coral
On Saturday morning (February 16th) Vale and I participated in a TCI Department of Environment and Coastal Resources (DECR) reef restoration project on Grand Turk. We, along with 26 other volunteers, helped to transplant stressed coral to two new artificial reefs. It was a great experience; feeling part of a community giving back and working to protect the sea and it's inhabitants. The reef project is headed up by Lucy Wells of the DECR. The Biorock® reefs have a positively charged cathode and a negatively charged anode running a low voltage electric current through underwater structures of construction steel. 
Biorock® underwater photo ©Lucy Wells
This causes minerals to crystallize from seawater onto structures. I can vouch for this mineral crystallization, because our job on Saturday was to dive down to 30 feet and scrap off the minerals deposited on the steel so that corals could be attached to the exposed and charged metal.
From Lucy, I have learned the immense benefits of Biorock® reefs. For starters because the coral on the Biorock® gets help from the structure in building it’s calcium carbonate bases it doesn’t have to spend as much energy creating it’s own limestone and have been shown to grow 3-5 times faster then natural coral. They also heal up to 20 times faster and the corals can survive higher temperatures, 16-50 times higher, a very important benefit in light of global warming and increases in sea temperature.
The project is funded by the DECR, and supported Carnival Cruise Line, Oasis Divers and Grand Turk Diving. The project was a huge success thanks to: Oasis Divers and Grand Turk Diving who provided boat, staff, and diving equipment and of course all the volunteers who volunteered their Saturday. A few of the volunteers worked so long we had to pick them up off the dive boat on our way out to go whale watching in the afternoon. The rest of the coral volunteers who stayed on the boat and didn’t go whale watching with us were able to do a bit of whale watching right off Grand Turk with a pair of humpbacks that we started our whale watching trip with and then turned over to them.
We went on to see 3 different mother and calf pairs around Salt Cay. So plus the pair of adults off Grand Turk, 8 whales total. Pretty good day by anyone's standards, but a great job of finding whales considering how the seas had built up and made spotting blows even more challenging then normal.
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But kudos to the people who did their best to save him.