Location: Sardinia
This morning, after last night’s eventful Bazzar, people were a bit slow. The wake-ups went well, but I am not sure anyone really enjoyed them. However, after a nutritious breakfast served to us by Mallory, Annie, and Max, people began to feel more rejuvenated. We then had our LAST oceanography class taught by the amazing Amanda. It was a sad class not only because it was our last but because it was about pollution and climate change. While we were all balling our eyes out in the salon, the boat was moving to a new anchorage destination. Once we arrived at our new anchorage Zoe, Gigi, and Mallory, who are in the midst of receiving their advanced certifications, went on a morning dive. This was a PPB (peak performance buoyancy) training dive, which they all slayed. While they were diving under the boat, the rest of us were either reading outside or working on our oceanography finals downstairs. Not a very eventful few hours. However, I believe everyone really appreciated what they picked to do in said hours. These few hours were also amazing because we were all recharging for the beach day we were looking forward to. At around 12:30, we began going to the beach; the beach was very interesting. Some restaurants seemed very posh and fancy, like a five-star resort, but then there were also little beach huts full of loud carefree people. Many people took this time on the beach to learn windsurfing, some of our first-time learners (Sage, Sydney, Tia, Heather, Annie, Max, Abi, Calum) had a bit of trouble, but I was told they eventually got the hang of it even if they did have to be boated back to shore a few times… between you and me, everyone was in the water more than on their board 🙂 On the other side of the beach, a few of us chose to simply read and drink cold beverages while lounging on the sand. Laura and I sat in the same spot for about 2 hours simply because we fell asleep or were reading and found no reason to move. I assume many of you got phone calls from those who managed to find wifi! We hear about all of you all the time. Later, we congregated in front of a cafe and were brought back to the boat, where we mostly got our scuba tanks ready. We had a wonderful meal prepared by our chefs once more and then cleaned up. We had three groups go out onto a night dive. The first group was the people getting their advanced certification (Gigi, Mallory, Zoe, and Sarah, led by Heather). The second group was (Duncan, Tia, Nat, and I, led by Caro), and the final group was (Max, Annie, Abi, Daniel, and Sage, led by Amanda). The first group and the advanced group had a bit more of a dusk-to-night dive; this was super cool because you got to see some of the animals start to fall asleep.
Also, I have never dove before at dusk, so for me, this was a lot of fun. Today the water was not too cold, which is something we were all nervous about. On our dive, we saw a bunch of shrimp, schools of fish, and (at the end) bioluminescence. The third group saw THREE octopuses, octopodes? octopi? You know what I mean. Overall everyone had a superb diving experience. We came back, and there was hot cocoa waiting for us, too, which was great. We all took our deck showers, disassembled our gear, and brought the dinghies back into the boat. Today was super relaxing and fun. I can’t wait to see what the rest of this trip holds. We’ll see you soon.
Kayla
*First photo from left to right Mallory Zoe Sarah Gigi
*Second Photo from left to right is Caro Heather Sydney Sage Abi
*Third Photo left to right is Caro Duncan Me Tia Nat
*Fourth photo left to right on deck is Calu Daniel Abi, under the dingy left to right is Zoe, then Gigi
*Fifth photo left to right is Gigi Mallory and Amanda