Location: Pigeon Island, Guadeloupe
The crew began the day with a lovely bit of music. As the sleepy eyes emerged from their dens, I made sure to have some great tunes on the go consisting of U2, Taylor Swift, and Macklemore. Owen and his cheffing co. managed to whip up a lovely pile of pancakes for everyone, which were consumed under the beautiful morning sun. Stomachs full and faces smiling, we dinghied over to Pigeon Island to dive into the Jacque Cousteau dive site. This dive was the students who came as uncertified divers first ‘fun dive’. A time they can use their cameras, begin to learn about who they are as divers and explore the area. We split into two groups; I led the first and Meg the second. Annika went snorkeling with Zoe, who managed to sign off a section of her Dive Master course while these two had a blast at the surface. In my opinion, this site was the best we have been to on this trip so far. We had 15m+ visibility, a reef that extended down to ~30m, many different fish, and a lovely statue of Jacque Cousteau to top it off.
Arriving back at Ocean Star, we had a quick turnaround. Everyone got into the water for their ocean showers before having lunch, which consisted of sandwiches and crisps (a British word for ‘chips’). A quick clean-up was followed by some shore time, where the students had the opportunity to have a look around Guadeloupe and purchase any snacks they wanted for the ~24-hour passage we had ahead of us to St Barts. One point of interest that acted as a converging point for the whole group was this awesome dive shop called Kanumera. The place had everything from beautiful t-shirts to top-of-the-range dive gear, allowing a large majority of people to add to their souvenir pile. Rhianna managed to find some Lychee-esque fruit on a tree, which, in my opinion, is the biggest score of the day, even though Owen splashed out on a lush new BCD.
Back to the boat to begin our journey to St Bart’s. We finished passage prep, topped the sails, and prepared to get underway. After hoisting the sails under the setting sun and Pigeon Island as our backdrop, we said our final goodbyes to these islands south of Antigua that we have called home for the last 20 days and set our sites on the horizon for all the excitement that is to come in the second half of this trip. We are back into the same three watch teams we have worked in for the other passages, continuing the 3 hours on and 6 hours off until we arrive. After a nice bowl of pasta and red sauce, we settled down for the nightly squeeze, talking about our appreciations of the day and the answer to todays question which was: ‘what’s at the top of your bucket list and how are you going to make it happen?’.
Enjoy the lovely pictures of the dive! Shout out to Will for the underwater photos!
Ciao.