Location: Portsmouth, Dominica
Today we finally set foot on Dominica (not counting Covid tests)! To make up for 7ish (to be honest, I lost count) days in quarantine, we had an extra fun-filled day. After a breakfast of boatmeal laboriously prepared by Steve, we shuttled over to the entrance of the Indian River. While we waited for everyone to be ferried over, we speculated on which boat would be the one taking us on our tour. Would it be the pink one with spaghetti written on the side? Or maybe the rasta-colored one with “more fire” painted on. Unfortunately, none of these boasts looked big enough to hold all 17 of us. We were then informed we would be splitting up into two groups, and, yes, one group did get to ride in the more fireboat guided by Fire himself. My group was guided by Albert, who was a much slower rower and enjoyed repeating himself occasionally in a Fiona-esq way. Fun fact from Steve: this was the river that they row down to get to Calypso’s hut in the 2nd Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and our guide pointed out where the hut used to be before it was washed away in a hurricane (they rebuilt a replica which you can see in one of the pictures). When we had seen plenty of the river, we headed back to the boat where we had a lunch of sandwiches waiting for us courtesy of Chef Steve, who stayed behind from the river tour and fixed things on the boat that we didn’t know were broken.
We all ate lunch quickly, in anticipation of what was to come later in the afternoon: beach games. We grilled Ash about what games we would be playing, and the only thing he told us is some game called “eyes, body, mouth.” Intrigued, we quickly cleaned up and shuttled back over to the beach. We began with a relatively tame game of the human knot, where my capture the flag team got to redeem ourselves from our previous two losses, and them a game called Poison. Poison involves a ring of water bottles, lots of hand-holding, and vicious semi-wrestling tactics and resulted in Keaton and I sharing a joint victory after wrestling on the ground. Then it was time for the main event: eyes body mouth, a game played in teams of three with all but one player blindfolded (the eyes) the eyes and the body are silent, only the moth can talk, and only the body can move to collect water bottles from the playing field. M team of Chris Liam and Me came in a stunning last place despite our best efforts and much to Liam’s displeasure. In a face-off to the death, Grady brought the final water bottle home for the team to mess with us to secure the victory. Good thing Ash got footage of all the rounds and said we would be watching it on the TV later.
As a surprise, we got shore time after our leadership beach games. We quickly dispersed onto the island in search of various goods like a really sandy, kind of odd version of the wizard of oz. Addisen really just wanted to go swimming (Noah eventually went with her). Celia wanted a smoothie. Julian wanted wifi, and Keaton wanted manicures, so they compromised and got wifi. Liam wanted lots and lots of ice cream. Henry and Meg went on a search for Tings (Brahm says they’re Caribbean sunshine in a bottle) and ended up at the river, bringing Katie along with them. Johnny wanted (and got!) a flag of Dominica, which has some bird on it. Topher probably wanted some type of snack. And Max and Grady followed the yellow brick road into town to see the wizard. Mostly
Anyway, today marks the last time we will be going around the job wheel in a full rotation seeing as there are 18 jobs and, now, 17 days left, so this will be my last blog to you.
Signing off as Skipper,
Erin
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Pic 1: a cat
Pic 2: Chef Steve and his eggs
Pic 3: Walking after our river tour
Pic 4: Getting ready for the Indian River
pic 5: River tour boat 1
Pic 6: River tour boat 2
Pic 7: River tour
Pic 8: The hut from Pirates of the Caribbean
Pic 9+10: Selfies from Ash
Pic 11: Julian getting ready for Eyes body mouth
Pic 12: a flower
Pic 13: Team Mess with us (the champions)
Pic 14: a Group picture