Location: Bequia
I decided this morning to wake everyone up on a more classic note. After borrowing a speaker from Josh, I proceeded to play Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and walk around the room, letting Billy do the wake-ups for me. After everyone managed to make it out of their cabins and into the cockpit for some breakfast, nice granola and yogurt breakfast, we were all going into the saloon for a three-class-wide lab. We were given our dinghy certifications by Bryant after getting tested with a man overboard and steering around the Tobago Cays. We only had a few casualties, but mostly, every fender we used as an MOB was successfully retrieved. We then obtained plankton samples by dragging a net behind the dinghy; each one of the three groups did a different depth. Using these samples, we would then go into the saloon and see what we could see underneath the microscope. I found numerous tiny creatures, along with a thing that kept moving and sort of resembled the evil creature from the movie Alien. After that awesome experience, we headed back on deck with Kimi and obtained water samples at different depths to test salinity. We also used a Secchi disk to test the visibility and salinity of the water.
After we wrapped that up, we all took a minute or two to enjoy some coffee and the immaculate feeling of amazingness that is AC. After that, I led the plunge into passage prep. Motivated by the tantalizing smells of crispy bacon sauteing down below, everyone worked really fast and efficiently to get things done right and fast. The “got swole” award of the day goes out to Katie, who hauled up the stern (really heavy part) of our zodiac called Smoke by herself, not once, but twice. Hats off to you, Katie! After passage prep, we destroyed some ABCLTs (avocado, bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato) and then brought up the anchor. We were off.
After putting a good amount of distance between the Tobago Cays and us, we all took a moment to admire the beauty of the sea around us. I can never get past it; I feel that even if I lived in the Caribbean every day of my life and saw the sea as beautiful as it is today, I would never be able to just simply say, “Eh…” After that brief moment, it was on, the stopwatch had started, and all the watch teams had a sail to raise. I was sweating the mainsail halyard with Jay and Smudge. After eight and a half minutes, we had it up. It only took a few more minutes after that, and we had the four more sails up. Everyone pushed through the pain, and we raised the flying jib in what seemed like no time at all. By the time we were finished with that, we had realized that the boat was tilting at about a 20-degree angle and that we were pushing around 7 to 8 knots.
We all cheered and enjoyed the wind, constantly blowing against us. We then all went down for a quick OCE, and then I came back up to enjoy the sail and jam out to some tunes while others were catching a well-earned nap. Later, we all rushed up on deck in full shower gear and tacked the boat. Then we showered and got fresh and kept on working and tacking the boat whenever Captain Kris wanted us to. Today was overall one of the best days on this trip so far because I really got to see the whole crew click together and work hard and fast to accomplish anything. We could have gone on tacking the boat all night, but eventually, we made it to Bequia, and within an hour and 40 minutes, we cleaned up dinner, took down all the sails, flaked them all, put all the sail covers on, anchored, and did a full deck wash. After all that, we learned how to make some delicious fondant for cake and enjoyed some chocolate cake we personally designed. Now, everyone is settling down, resting their tired heads after arriving at a new island we are to explore and enjoy tomorrow, but for now, it’s time for us all to rest and enjoy a nice, quiet night anchored outside another beautiful Caribbean island.