Location: Moorea
So according to me, our last day in Moorea was spent normally. We split into groups. Where some people went onto shore while others spent their time on the boat finishing the notecards that we were all writing for each other or did rescue diving, some people biked around the Island, and Ula describes it as being the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her entire life. Some of the girlies had a lovely picnic at the beach with Fargo, where the lake used an hour to open a coconut, and Toria yet again fell in love with a dog. The people who chose to finish rescue diving had a long day. We started after breakfast with a little recap since we hadn’t done rescue since San Blas. Then we did a briefing on the new exercises we needed to master to pass, which included giving rescue breaths to an unresponsive diver at the surface, taking all their gear off, and lifting them into the dingy.
We also did underwater rescue of missing diver and what to do in a situation where a diver is exhausted, among a lot of other exercises. It was difficult but really enjoyable, and I got to spend the whole day with Magdi. Ted and Miles were buddies, Gabby and Ben, and Kirby was with Lexi. When assessing an unresponsive diver at the surface, you are supposed to remove their weight belt, but Ted decided to simply say “weight belt release,” as Allie responded, “Dude, you have to remove the weight belt; you don’t have magical power.” When I where to get Magdi into the dingy (which is difficult enough to get into on your own, so you can image how hard it was), she was slipping out of my arms, so I decided to grab her wetsuit, which resulted in me giving her a bad wedgie, but she managed to repay me by dropping me on her sharp fins in the dingy, which left a bruise on my leg, so I think we are equal. We had an exclusive lunch since there weren’t many people for lunch, but just like any other day, was lunch hilarious. First, we congratulated Tom on his wife finally signing divorce papers and handing them to his dad to bring to Vela, where Smash afterward pointed out how Allie managed to be the only one looking like a drowned rat, which made sense cause she did play the person how drowned.
We did all manhandled her into the dingy. After lunch, we jumped into the dinghies and sailed around the corner to this beautiful light blue sea, where we jumped in to do the underwater rescue. While being down there, I saw an eagle ray and a sting ray and managed to put my knee down on a flounder, which scared me just as much as I think I scared it. We overall had a great dive, and even though the exercises were exhausting, we all had a lot of fun. We are not qualified yet; we are still missing some scenarios, which will be done tomorrow morning before departure, which means for the people who are doing rescue, it will be wake up at 05:30. I can imagine none of us are getting much sleep cause we all have cards to finish and I personally have anchor watch tonight with Ted. We had a lovely dinner: rice, curry and naan bread. The squeeze question for tonight was, “If you could know the absolute truth to any question, what question would you ask” and let me tell you, there were some interesting answers. My answer was, ” What would happen if people chose differently and took another path than the one they chose” but Miles wanted to know when Ted would lose his hair, and Ted wanted to know what the tattoos on Tom’s butt looked like. Others wanted to know what exists in the deep sea and what is the biggest animal in the ocean that we don’t know of already. It has overall been a great last day in Moorea, with high sun and a lot of sunkissed people and salty hair. We are all sad that tomorrow is our last day, but we are all enjoying every single moment we get together. This will be my last blog on Vela, so I just wanted to finish off by saying that I have had a once-in-a-lifetime experience over the past few months; I spent every day with the most amazing people in the world, and I’m so thankful for all the skills, friendships and memories I will be going home with.