Location: Palau, Sardinia
Our morning started with some rain, meaning we had a delicious breakfast of eggs, bacon, and potatoes in the salon. After breakfast, everyone donned their foulies and had to face the weather, either for the uncertified divers to get their kits ready to complete open water dive three or for the certified to learn how to set up the jibs for our passage tomorrow. On our dive, Bryson, Oscar, and I saw a really cute orange starfish and absolutely crushed our full mask removal task and our practice emergency CESA. Not to brag, but I was told that my CESA was one of the best of the day, although when I surfaced, my nose was covered in bloody boogers. It’s safe to say that diving has been one of my favorite things about the voyage so far, and I can’t wait to see more cool things. The rain had ended by the time everyone got out of the water, and everyone got to have some downtime before we learned how to make our meal menus for the rest of the voyage. Tomorrow, we officially graduate to the mega job wheel and have to cook for ourselves (sending good luck to our first head chef, Sabrina, for tomorrow). More importantly, we also learned from our fearless head regional provisioner, Aidan, that spoonfuls of peanut butter or Nutella are okay, so Alexa and I munched on some apples and peanut butter. Hailey impressed us all by eating all but the seeds and stem of her apple. We all had some downtime before having couscous salad and freshly baked focaccia for lunch (freshly baked bread just hits different on a boat in Italy). After lunch, we had a bit of downtime before our first real oceanography lecture.
The salon got a little hot having all 22 of us down there at once, but we all learned a lot about the history of oceanography and about the layers of the Earth. After oceanography, we had a seamanship class where we studied all the emergency procedures on Argo in preparation for our first test of the voyage. After class, we worked together to prep Argo for our passage tomorrow. A bunch of us then went swimming and took our ocean showers together. Matthew showed everyone up with his double backflips, while Bryson, Alexa, and I could only do one. We then had another amazing dinner. After dinner, my squeeze’s question was What fictional world would you most like to live in, and Jem’s answer was by far the best, saying, “Well, I’m on a boat in the Med with all of you gorgeous people, so I’m in one right now.” I think I can speak for everyone when I say that there is no other place in the world I would rather be than right here on this boat with all of these gorgeous people!
Hoping everyone’s family is doing well!
Teagan B.