Location: Fortaleza, Brazil
Argo made it through the first night here in Fortaleza, but she needed some love from us after our short passage. With an early sunrise this morning, somewhere between 56 am, many of the students were up and ready to go by the 7:10 wake-ups. After our quick breakfast, we all geared up for boat appreciation. We were all ready to give back to Argo since she got us to Fortaleza so quickly. BA started out as it normally would with a few students cleaning their bunks, a few downstairs cleaning, and the majority on deck getting the deck and haul all clean again. We had just broken into our teams when we saw the first rainstorm creeping upon us. Sure enough, it hit us with a strong force. Five to ten minutes later, when all of us were drenched, it rolled past us, and we were able to resume BA. Not more than an hour later, as the deck wash was finishing up, a black sky was above us again. This storm took Argo for a bit of a ride. Her anchor began dragging slowly backward as the winds increased. Luckily the staff sprung into action, and the rest of us were quickly able to follow. We were able to successfully pull up the anchor and reset it before anything terrible happened. The rest of the BA went a little more smoothly, with only one more storm that came through.
We finished BA in the early afternoon and were able to enjoy some free time to practice our knots before our MTE knots test. Around 3 pm, we all gathered to watch a great movie on Irving Johnson and complete our knots. We finished our movie just in time to hear that we would be getting shore showers while in Fortaleza. There were so many cheers throughout the boat as we hadn’t had a two-handed shower since we left Cape Town. Shore had a nice pool and wifi, which everyone enjoyed. Everyone enjoyed a relaxing dinner before our SLD class and a How-To presentation by Tom. I know that everyone will sleep well tonight after such an exciting day.