Location: Marigot Bay, St Lucia
Judging by the amount of exploded balloon remnants in Ocean Star’s salon this morning, Tyler’s birthday celebration was a massive success! This morning began with a fun and highly anticipated science project: preparing a few multilingual messages to be sent astray in the ocean in glass bottles. The idea behind this is that once the bottles and the messages are released at different waypoints along our passage tomorrow, we can hopefully use their landing points (fingers are crossed that we hear back from any treasure hunters/pirates/beachcombers/trash mongers that find one!) to observe the ocean’s currents… and revel in the excitement of how romantic and cool it will be if somebody in a faraway land (like Florida!) finds our messages! After that, we mustered at a cute cafe onshore for the second breakfast and Leadership class, discussing values and gender roles. Since this is -unbelievably- the halfway point of our voyage, we also used this time to review and reflect on the goals we set for ourselves at the beginning of the trip… we’ve accomplished a lot in the last 39 days, individually and as a team and we’ve still got a lot to look forward to. The rest of the afternoon, most people spent some time grabbing snacks onshore, reviewing and studying course material, talking to home, or monkeying around the boat. We’ve got everything all prepped for our passage to Martinique tomorrow (oui oui!), we’re looking forward to getting the sails up, and we’re hoping the beautiful weather we’ve had today sticks around for the journey! Cheers, and stay warm!