Location: Palau
To start the day off, Will and Arden went for a snorkel to the reefs surrounding our anchor point. Those of us who preferred to stay dry spent the morning doing some stretching and working out. In the background of our peaceful morning was the sound of the dive tanks being filled up to prepare for the day. The divers were all split into two groups: those who were getting their Advanced diver certification and those who were getting their Rescue diver certification. For the advanced group, which included Jackson A, Zoe, Jo, Marijke, Josh, Jack, our dive instructor Dan, and I went over the drills for the day and taught us underwater navigation techniques. The first drill was to navigate underwater, 30 meters out, and then turn 180 degrees and come back to the starting point. Once that was completed, things got a little bit more complicated with a drill where we had to navigate in a 30m by 30m square. With these two drills done, Dan led us towards a reef and distracted us with all the interesting sea cucumbers. As we swam further from our starting point, Dan gave us the signal to go find the boat in our buddy pairs. We had to put into practice those navigation skills we had just learnt in the previous two drills. The first couple of groups made it back successfully, while the last group, which consisted of Jackson and Jo, got a little bit lost. After the advanced group surfaced, we had some free time, which we used to distract the rescue divers by doing flips and dives off the boat. The rescue divers were busy searching for ‘Grandma,’ an imaginary 95-year-old who was lost while scuba diving in the area. After eating lunch, people completed homework and snorkeled. The rain rolled in as the rescue divers hopped back in the ocean for some more drills. The good mood on Vela wasn’t dampened by the rain because we were all excited for the shakchuka that Noa was cooking up in the galley. To end the night, Joshua got his hair cut by Brooke, and we had our first leadership class to introduce our syllabus for the next 35 days.