Location: Les Saintes
This morning, most of us were woken up by the fire alarm. We had been on passage to Les Saintes since about 5:30 am, so we all had to gather on deck with our PFDs. It turns out we need to do more drills because we were told we would all have died. Luckily, there was no fire; our lovely cooks smoked up the kitchen a little. Breakfast was french toast and fruit salad which was delicious, all thanks to the chefs – Evan, Ripley, and Cameron. After breakfast, we headed down to the salon to do our oceanography presentations before the passage got too rough. It started out well, but about halfway through the second one, we began rocking quite a bit. We lost a good chunk of people to nausea, most of us taking turns heading up to get some air. Lots of us slept away the rest of the passage, and we arrived in Les Saintes right before lunch at noon.
Lunch was cowboy caviar, a yummy mix between salsa and Mexican nachos. Once we were finished cleaning up, we headed back down to the salon to do the final knowledge review for our advanced diving certification. We got that over with pretty quickly because next, we got to go for a swim! We were shuttled out in the dinghies to a reef near shore, and we snorkeled for about an hour. We saw lots of cool things – some baby squid, trumpet fish, eels, puffer fish, parrot fish, cowfish, big angel fish, and other pretty reef fish. When we got back on the boat, we had free time until dinner, and most of us worked on our oceanography group projects, caught up on journaling, and played cards. Dinner was early tonight, 5 pm, and we had spicy chicken with potatoes and salad. It was delicious!
Tonight’s squeeze question was “What is one of your favorite simple pleasures?” (Gavin is watching me write this and very much judging how I spelled favourite with a u, but that’s the Canadian way, eh). The reason for the early dinner was very exciting; two-thirds of us got to go on our first-night dive! The rest had a seamanship class with Drew and will dive tomorrow night. I was in the dive group, so we got geared up, wetsuits and all, and got shuttled out to the reef once again. The dive was out of this world! Kacy led my group, and we saw an octopus (Elling is very jealous), lots of eels and crabs, a puffer fish, some box fish, and a big angel fish. While we were underwater, we did a navigation skill, and we also got to play in the bioluminescence! It was beautiful. We swam back to the boat and had a little ramen snack party up on deck, which was perfect after the dive. While we were eating, we saw something big in the water. We grabbed lights and were kinda freaking out because we thought it was a shark, but Steph and Amanda informed us that it was only a tarpon. We ended up seeing quite a lot of them. The whole ordeal was only half cool; according to Aidan, we would all love to see a shark. Most of us have a verrrrryyyyy early wake-up tomorrow for a sunrise hike, so I’m gonna wrap it up here. Big hugs to the people back home!
Photos featuring: The beautiful sunset, oceanography presentations underway, group research, snorkel time, and of course, wetsuit yoga.