Location: Les Saintes
Hello everyone, back at home. Although today’s blog will be more of a day in the life of living on Ocean Star since we didn’t have any excursions today, today was still another awesome day in the Caribbean, as always. I woke up around 6:15, just in time to catch Kacy, Amanda, Steph, and Drew before their early morning dive. I then went down to the salon and started journaling with Kat while Rohan started cutting up the last of our local fruits–mangos, passion fruits, starfruit, and some apples–to make a fruit salad for breakfast this morning. At 7 am, I started playing some music in hopes of waking the rest of the crew. We were all somewhat slow to wake up and warm up to being in close quarters with 13 other people for another day. My working theory is that our bodies were all recovering from our packed day yesterday in the town of Les Saintes (go check out Ripley’s blog if you have no idea what I’m talking about). Breakfast was cereal and warm milk, and the local fruit salad. After cleaning up from breakfast, we headed back down to the salon to bang out two of the three classes we had planned for today. First up was oceanography with Steph, and we learned about how air and oceans move and work together to create the world we live in. Immediately after that class, we had our EFR class with Amanda and learned about secondary care. That class was a lot of fun as we got to practice bandaging each other up from imaginary wounds and working through physical checks. Q and I were the dummies for the checkups and quickly learned that there were apparently A LOT of things wrong with us. For both of us, according to our groups, our esophagus wasn’t in the right place. After EFR class, Drew arrived with our provisions for the next few days, so we helped get all the food organized and packed away. Rohan, Smash, and Aidan quickly took the freshly arrived ingredients and started making our grilled cheeses, or cheese toasties as we’ve started calling them, thanks to Drew’s Britishness. The food was delicious; however, it definitely started putting us into food comas. I only say this because some of us started crashing at the end of our seamanship class with Smash. We reviewed things–as well as learned some new things–that we had been learning throughout this trip in a more official setting in order to be ready for our crewmate exam coming up. Once we were done with seamanship class, we had free time until dinner time. All of us chose to take that time to collect data and finish our introductions for our group research projects that we’re all working on for oceanography. My group (Kacy, Aidan, Lauren, and I) went out for a dive so that we could do our fish surveys. We definitely have to thank Q for letting us borrow his GoPro so we could enhance the data we were taking. After completing our data collection and working on our introduction, I went up on deck for a literature party with Lauren, Kat, and Q. I only say literature party because Q decided to do sudoku while the rest of us read our books. For dinner, we had pesto pasta with chickpeas, sun-dried tomatoes, repurposed leftover chicken, and a salad with cucumbers and carrots. I asked my squeeze question for the day, which was, “What is the first thing you’re going to eat when you get back home?” Everyone gave a wide variety of answers–from avocado toast to Costco pizza–which was really fun to see. With a beautiful sunset as our view, we cleaned up from dinner and headed back down to the salon for a little morale-boosting activity that we all did as a crew to cure our sluggishness from this morning. We were given a bunch of black and white photos and a series of prompts. The prompts were: something you’re proud of about yourself, something you want to improve about yourself, and something you bring to a group. I loved the activity and loved learning so much more about this awesome crew. Tomorrow will mark being halfway through this experience, and I am really not looking forward to that marker. Being on this voyage has been a once-in-a-lifetime journey and has really opened my eyes, and I’m sure that it will continue to be until the very last day. For instance, as I am writing this blog, I get to listen to Steph, Drew, Amanda, and Smash joke around as they put on face masks. It is a room filled with genuine laughter and, in my case, extremely enjoyable and therapeutic. I’m going to sign off now because they’re starting the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and I am NOT going to miss that. I just want to say hi to mom and dad and everyone back home. I miss you all but don’t worry, I am having the time of my life, and I can’t wait to tell you more about it when I get back. This is Gavin signing off from yet another memorable day. Since today’s blog was more of a day in the life, here were everyone’s jobs/responsibilities for the day.
Elling: deckie
Smash: sous chef
Ripley: salty
Kat: headmaster
Toby: bosun
Rohan: head chef
Kacy: steward
Evan: trash master
Taylor: gopher
Steph: salty
Allistaire: dryer
Aidan: sous chef
Drew: headmaster
Cameron: deckie
Lauren: dryer
Q: gopher
Amanda: salty