Location: Slipway, Antigua
4 am is the time my day officially started. As you can imagine, it’s not the most pleasant thing, especially when you’re already sunburned and sleep-deprived from the day prior. Once you roll out of bed, walk up to the deck, and find a comfortable enough spot to sit and watch the anchor, it is probably the most amazing experience. Between the moon reflecting off the water as the ocean naturally moves with the stars glimmering and the occasional shooting star, if you stargaze long enough, it is probably the only peace you get living on a boat with 20 people. The laughter begins at 7 am when the skipper is waking everyone up, and the same 3 or 4 people refuse to get out of bed, and we end up playing loud music to fully wake everyone. By breakfast, everyone is fully awake (mostly cause you have to be to do the post-breakfast clean up). I don’t think I have ever had the best time cleaning dishes and putting them away. Every day I feel I learn a new fact about everyone, which is so cool because I’ve only known these people for a week. Today we got to move the boat to fuel it, and it was so fun I got to work the lines and work with my new crew to do it. These are the things I Imagined I would be doing when I signed up to live on a boat for three months. Once we docked the boat, we were all ecstatic for so many reasons, a few of them being that we got to take real showers, use real toilets, and not have anchor watch tonight because the boat is docked. When you hear the list of things that we did today, it doesn’t sound like much, but I promise everything takes so long, especially with 20 people. You would think that because everyone is at least 80 feet apart, it would be so easy to gather everyone, but you would indeed be wrong if you thought that because it takes at least 10 minutes to gather people, which makes everything take way longer than it should. Through these experiences, you get to appreciate the little things like waking up and not dripping sweat, not having the pump the toilet 50 times after going to the bathroom and taking showers, and not getting seaweed in your hair while doing it. While I am deprived of these amenities, currently I get to do things like jump in the ocean before and after class, laugh until my ribs hurt at all hours of the day, talking until 12 pm, and then complaining that I am sleep deprived because I know I have a 4 am shift. I would never trade things for stupid amenities. I am slowly beginning to get closer to everyone on this boat which is the most amazing feeling one could ever have after knowing these strangers for seven days.