Location: Five Islands, Antigua
Hello, today’s blog is through the eyes of a staff member. I’m Nick, captain of Ocean Star, and this is how my day went. I woke up in the morning and began waking the students up. My go-to phrase for this is “wakie wakie eggs and bakie,” but this time, it wasn’t a lie because eggs and bacon were on the menu. After breakfast, I started the generator and began making water for the day, but I ran back into the issue I had been having. With all the wind we have been having, the sea water is very stirred up with sediment, that sediment then comes into the boat and into the watermaker, making the filter clog, it was so bad that I could only run the water maker for 15 minutes before the filter clogged again, deciding that it probably wasn’t too good to be clogging the filter and depriving the high-pressure pump of water every 15 minutes, I decided to shut down water making for the morning. But we were pretty low on water due to the fact that this was going on for a few days. But have no fear! We always have a plan! We went ashore and got 10 5-gallon jugs of water and put them in our tanks to hold us over until the sediment settled down. I also went in to get more filters from the chandlery because we were burning through them pretty quickly. Watermaker filters are reusable, but due to the sediment being extremely fine, it wasn’t very easy to get the filter clean, usually leading to me having to replace it every 3-4 cleanings.
As I was doing this, the students went to the beach with Heather for some beach games. Our extra shore trip also meant we got to bring back a crowd favorite – ice cream!! You never know how good ice cream is until you haven’t had anything cold in a week. Meanwhile, Ash was out provisioning and topping up the propane. It was pretty fun razzing the dinghy back and forth into Jolly harbor and back out into the anchorage. Later in the evening, the sediment finally settled down enough for the watermaker to make water. And now, the port tank is full, and the starboard is fillinganother great day on Ocean Star.