Location: Banda Sea
How can you tell the difference between a girl ant and a boy ant? If it floats, it’s (a) buoyant!!!! Ha. Ha. Ha.
How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh? Ten ticklessss
What’s a Ctenophore’s favorite time? 10:04!
Tonight’s squeeze question– what’s your best pun, ideally ocean themed — brought some of us (mostly me) a lot of laughs.
For the watch team 2 squad, the day started out at midnight on our 12-4 watch. Spirits were high, and we got in some great sailing and a fair bit of laughs, and a lot of snacking (cereal and granola and ramen, oh my). When it came time for the whole boot to wake up, we had a delicious lunch prepared by Kara and her chef team, homemade McMuffins, and got a bit of an unexpected surfing session in. Throughout our meal, the sea state picked up, and the waves were rocking and rolling Vela all around. Some of them even splashed their way onto the deck. This made for a slip-and-slide of a dishy pit and a hilarious cleanup, but all in all, more fun than frustration was had. After cleanup, the students headed down below for marine biology, followed by leadership class. Oddly enough, within less than 5 minutes of class starting, the sea state calmed to nearly flat. The wind slowed throughout the rest of the afternoon, and following several days of awesome sailing this evening, we turned the motor back on to continue making progress toward Komodo. Anticipation is building — especially amongst us animal planet nerds that grew up watching Steve Irwin and others talking about the dragon’s friends awaiting us.
Beyond a beautiful day of clear skies, everyone on board reached a pretty major accomplishment today — we hit 5,000 miles!!!! 5,000 miles since everyone first boarded Vela in Fiji. 5,000 miles bobbing around in the ocean together. Through sea sickness and sunshine and tiring night watch shifts and endless laughs and ocean swims and weird inside jokes, it’s been an amazing 64 days. I’ve seen this crew support each other and come together in such a special way. It takes a lot to choose to pass more than a month of your summer at sea with no connection to the outside world and only the company of 23 others that started out as strangers. It’s hard to believe that most of our passage days are behind us now, so we have to savor the night watches and sit under the milky way as much as we can. (we’ve also seen a lot of shooting stars and meteors in the past few weeks:)