Caribbean Basin – Spring 2016

What a day! The Bahamas are obviously gorgeous, so what better way to spend our day than to go diving and spend some quality crew time on the beach? We had rockin' scrambled eggs and home fries for breakfast from the amazing chefs: Drew, Carly, and Steve. It made our early morning wake-up much more bearable. We then had to rush ourselves with cleanup because our SLD professor, Ian, had a special surprise for us waiting ashore on the island. We were driven to the beach in our dinghy to find Ian waiting for us. He had many team-building activities in store for us, including balancing on a fallen tree trunk while organizing ourselves in height order, pushing a giant tire roughly 100 meters and over two walls, a crazy fun competition of rock paper scissors, and a "sand is lava" race. It all took about 2 hours to complete, but boy did we have a good time. Then we returned to the boat just in time for some great grilled cheese sandwiches complemented by tomato soup. Towards the end of our meal, we noticed our two rescue diver instructors happened to simultaneously put themselves into a dangerous predicament. Steve acted as a tired diver, while Tina acted as if she had just got stung by a jellyfish. Now, keep in mind the first thing we wanted to do was applaud them for their amazing acting skills, but we remembered they specifically told us to take each and every drill seriously. So we treated it as a real-life situation, throwing out life rings, dragging them to the boat, pulling them up to the dinghies, treating their wounds, and so forth.

After we successfully completed the exercise, we continued on to clean up. Directly after clean up, we put our dive gear on and headed out into 6-meter deep water in order to go over more rescue diver training. We practiced subduing panicked divers (both passive and active) underwater. Tina and Steve did a great job of acting like actual panicked divers. As part of the drill, they would try to get at our masks and regulators while we attempted to suppress their flailing and thrashing. Don't worry. They're professionals, so they made sure it was safe and fun the whole time. It was good practice, too, since now we're all feeling confident that we can rescue ourselves and another diver, even in difficult circumstances.

We also learned how to safely treat an unconscious diver. Once all the training for the day was completed, we headed back to the boat with 2 hours to spare for chill time. We played chess, worked on our essays, watched movies, etc. Then for dinner, we had killer chicken, salad, and biscuits. After cleanup, we had a Marine Biology class, which was pretty fun. Towards the very end, you could notice the looks of exhaustion on all of our faces from the long and tiring day. When class was over, half of us passed out immediately while others tried their hardest to stay awake and work on school work. The stars were amazing last night, with bioluminescent creatures coming up from the 500m deep wall just behind our boat to hang out at the surface and light up in the dark. Sorry, but you just had to be there.