Location: Statia
Today was an extremely long day for everyone aboard Ocean Star. Our plans were changed the night before due to a tropical storm forming that could affect our day-to-day if we did not change our route, so we had to change our route and go to a different island after Statia. The day never truly ended from the day prior as we had an overnight passage, which meant that watch teams stood watch to ensure the ship reached its destination safely, helming the boat and performing hourly boat checks. Once we arrived at the island of Statia, we continued to cycle people for anchor watch to safeguard the boat lest there be any dangers.
Our morning began at 6:30 am. We woke up with a 7 am breakfast, which consisted of cereal and bananas. Once that was out of the way, everyone was boated over to the port in two groups: one group who was diving in the morning (the open water divers) and another group who were going to dive in the afternoon (the people getting their advanced certifications) of which I was part of the afternoon dive group. Statia is a relatively small island, so after looking around the port for a while, the group and I started looking for the beginning of the trail to hike up the dormant volcano located on the island. The journey up to the ridge was long and treacherous but the whole group, who was running on 3-6 hours of sleep, made it to the top! After taking a little rest and a photo break, we split into two groups again: those who wanted to explore the town and those who wanted to hike into the crater. I was part of the town group. We explored the small town of Statia all while trying to find a nice place to sit down and eat, and after coming up short many times, we finally found a place called Super Burger where we got, guess what, burgers. It was now nearing 1 pm, which was our designated meet-up time to swap the group of people that were diving, so we headed down to the port road, where we met up with the rest of the people in our dive group and got onto the boats to go to our Fish Identification dive and our Wreck diver. In these dives, we had to identify different species of fish and dive into a wreck site. Both of these dives were incredibly cool, and we saw many colorful fish, turtles, and stingrays. The wreck we got to dive was this giant Taiwanese vessel that was purposely sunk to create an artificial reef for fish and a dive site. After our dives, we met back up at the port to get shipping back onto Ocean Star for dinner, which was Chili, Rice, and Cornbread. After dinner, we were met with some more weather news that a second storm that could threaten our plans was forming close to this other storm. Because of this, we now have to change our plans to go to this different island tonight, and instead, tonight, we are leaving for our final destination, Antigua.
It was such a rollercoaster of a day with many highs and lows (the hike was brutal for me), but we made it through the day, and everyone is staying optimistic about the upcoming 20-ish-hour voyage ahead of us to Antigua.
Skipper Ethan signing off,
Hey family 🙂 I know you are reading this. I love you guys and miss you all so much, but I miss Birch more than you. Love you!