Location: Raja Ampat, Indonesia
Today we woke up to a bit of rain, which was nice for cooling things off. The morning started off with a whole bunch of diving – Ben took the group doing their advanced open water course (Jackson, Imogen, Zoe, Josh, and Marijke) on a deep dive underneath the boat, while I started doing some scenarios with our rescue group (Arden, Lawrence, Seb, Luna, Josh, and Kat). This entails a few victims sneaking into the water, then beginning to panic over some pretend emergency that the rescue divers must then respond to. We did two different scenarios so that the rescue group could get some practice coming together as a team to use the techniques and skills that theyve been learning throughout the course. While all of this was going on, Daniel took another group around the corner to dive on a beautiful reef.
The afternoon was also super busy – all of the students participated in a challenge course. The challenge course is a classic Seamester activity where students are split up into teams to compete in an array of challenges. Today, they had to make it through five stations where, as a team, they worked together to raise a sail, demonstrate knots, set up a dive kit while blindfolded, identify fish, and answer riddles in order to throw coconuts into targets on the sand. It was definitely the highlight of the day as we all got to explore the island a bit more and run/swim around.
Right now weve just finished dinner, and a group is kitting up for a highly anticipated night dive on the nearby reef!