Location: Gustavia, St Barths
After a full night of sleep aboard the Ocean Star, some decided to venture over to Seashell Beach at 6:05 AM for a morning workout and swim. The rest of us decided to savor the extra hour of sleep before we all woke up for a breakfast of eggs and bacon, served on deck in the middle of a rainstorm.
Following clean-up, we headed down under deck for a lecture about VHF, the phonetic alphabet, and whether to call Pan Pan or MayDay when the mast of your Hobie cat collapses when you’re a kilometer from shore. You have to drift for 36 minutes before Melvin comes to rescue you in a dingy (refer to Day 13 blog post for more info).
Our crew then split into two groups, one heading to do their Advanced Navigation dive first, while the rest of us had a couple of hours of free time. We hopped into some stores to purchase souvenirs and eco-friendly t-shirts before heading back to the creperie for the third time in a day and a half.
After a quick lunch of lentil stew and sweet potatoes, the groups switched, and we headed out of the port of Gustavia to do our navigation dives. We used our compass to travel in lines, squares, and triangles to get back in the same spot. The seafloor was littered with conch shells, sea urchins, and seagrass.
When we completed our dives, we had a little more free time in town. After looking for more trinkets to take back home with us and exploring Gustavia’s Halloween costume store, we all met at the dock for EFR class, where we learned how to administer secondary care and how to wrap broken bones properly.
We ended the day with a night out in Gustavia filled with live music, dancing, and a lot of fun.
-Skipper of the Day Madeleine