Location: Salt Island, BVI
What’s up, everybody? I’m back for my third and, sadly, the final blog for this voyage. We are currently anchored on a BVI island and enjoying life to the fullest. I started everyone’s day with “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley. It was definitely a much happier wake-up compared to when I was the last skipper. I now know that music choice is essential for waking people up. Kacy was our head chef for today, so she went with an extravagant breakfast of yogurt and granola. Immediately after cleaning up from breakfast, dive group one–consisting of me, Kat, Evan, Aidan, Kacy, Taylor, Elling, and Steph–headed out for our first dive of the day. It was a wreck dive fairly close to where we’re anchored and was surrounded by ActionQuest people. Our first dive was a little cramped with the extra people, but we still saw some amazing things. We saw lots of reef fish and some barracuda, and Steph even saw an Eagle ray (which I’m so jealous of because I’ve been trying to see one all day). Once we were done, we switched out with group two–which was Toby, Rohan, Ripley, Lauren, Q, Cameron, Joey, Drew, and Amanda. While they were out having fun in the water, as we had just previously been doing, my group headed down below with Steph to take our Marine Management quiz and review for our final exam. Even though that may sound boring, we still made it fun in our own way. By the time the second dive group was back to Ocean Star, it was time for lunch. Lunch was a delicious vegetable risotto that Smash helped Kacy prepare. When we finished lunch, we quickly cleaned up because we had a second dive planned. Although we were diving in the same spot, there were a lot fewer people than the first time because they had gotten out to eat lunch. According to Ripley, she saw a reef shark on her dive. Apparently, my group didn’t take that very well because the first thing we saw when we descended on the mooring line was, believe it or not, a REEF SHARK. It was such a cool thing to see, especially on our final dive of the trip. We also saw some ridiculously huge lobsters, even more reef fish, and a monstrous puffer fish. All in all, not a bad day of diving, if I do say so myself. Once again, we headed back to Ocean Star and switched out so the other group could go. While they were out getting their time in the out-of-the-world place that is our ocean, my group started finishing up our journals or starting on the note cards that we wrote for everyone at the end of the trip. Because of this, we all started reminiscing on all the amazing things we’ve done within the past 37 days. It’s all just started dawning on us that this wonderful experience is quickly coming to an end, and I don’t think any of us are truly prepared for that. We’ve all grown to become family to each other as well as grown accustomed to the bizarre life that is living on a sailboat. Though, I do know that some of us are excited not to have to pump the toilet 50 times in order to flush. Luckily, the staff didn’t let us wallow in these sad thoughts for too long because it was time for something that all of us onboard had been looking forward to since the beginning of this trip. The Boom Swing. For those of you that don’t know, the boom swing is when we take the boom and turn it into a rope swing. It was awesome! It took some trial and error to set it up and more trial and error to figure out how to properly swing on it, but once we got it, man, was it a lot of fun. As we slowly got down how to swing, we started performing more and more daring swings. We went from one person swinging at a time to two people swinging at a time, and we finished off with Elling, Q, and I, all swinging off the boom at the same time! Oh, I almost forgot to mention that I was able to master backflipping off the rope swing. We also took this time to take yet another ocean shower, which is another thing that has become the new normal for all of us. Q, Elling, and I can all say from experience, do not try to swing three at a time with soapy hands. Just don’t. It does not work. After we got the boom swing disassembled and our two dinghies, Exy and Irv, back on board, it was time for dinner. Kacy prepared for us some vegetable poke bowls, which were very yummy. My squeeze question for the day was: what is a common assumption people make about you that isn’t true (thanks, Kat, for your help with coming up with this question with me last night). It was very eye-opening to still be able to learn something about someone you’ve been living with in extremely close quarters for over a month. As I am finishing up this blog, it is almost time for our oceanography final. After this, we will be completely done with all classwork required for this voyage. This means that we’ll be able to focus fully on enjoying our last two full days of this trip which I really appreciate. If it sounds like today was a crammed day, it’s because it was. We all unanimously decided that we wanted to take our final today instead of tomorrow for the sole reason of being able to fully enjoy our last days. Then we decided to make our singular dives into two dives because they would be our last ones, and we wanted to get as much dive time as possible. We also last minute, decided to do the Boom Swing because we were all dying to give it a whirl. As always on Ocean Star, it has been an amazing day and one that I think we will all cherish for the majority of our lives. To all of my people back home, I’m excited to see you all soon, but I’m loving being in the Caribbean. I can’t wait to fill you in on everything that we have been doing and the amazing life we’ve all been living for this trip.
Signing off one last time,
Gavin D.