Location: Underway to Coco's Keeling!
The day started at 3:30 AM, getting woken by Allie J.’s face as she told me it was time for watch, and then again at 4:00 AM to Jackson’s face saying that I had slept through wake up. On watch, in the pitch black moonless sky, we embraced the October spirit and spooked ourselves with some ghost stories. Finn tried to scare us by crawling up the high side (while we were all sitting on the low side — safety never stops) on all fours, growling and saying “Mama” in a high-pitched voice, although everyone was more concerned than frightened. All this didn’t make mine and Zoe’s boat check very fun as we thought we were going to get jumped by a s***-w****** (apparently, I can’t write the name, or else I will summon it and it will live in my body) in the engine room. But we survived (barely), and after the sunrise and instant Ramen, everything felt a bit safer. Well, maybe not for Ava, Kasey, and Ruby, who woke up to a face full of peanut butter as victims of a vicious counterattack in a brewing prank war. Still feeling awake, Jake shared some of his chocolate milk with us. I went to read “The Name of the Wind,” a book I found aboard left behind by a past student (shout out to Trey and Paige for rebinding it), while Lina and Cristian played a heated game of backgammon — let’s just say they have different rules. I took a nap and woke up to Allie J. making delicious ceasar wraps (which were 15 minutes early, unheard of so far in the history of Vela cheffing). Then, we had a Marine Bio review in the form of a heads-up. Everyone has memorized every single bio fact in existence. We all have our PhDs now (JK, everyone looked at their notes). Then we had a very informative Leadership presentation brought to us by Nico and Kasey, who set the world record for the number of times community can be said in 30 minutes. They gave us the skills to work better as a community because we are a community.
After, we had another presentation about [insert Australian accent] Cocos Keeling by Margaret, Ruby, and Jackson. They had some fire transitions (literally) and up close POVs and taught us about the culture, activities, and non-existent mushrooms on the island (or that can be foraged for; we might be proved wrong later). After class, watch team 3 had was on again from 2-6, but it was pretty cloudy and windy, so we were chilling (another pun, yay!). We practiced some zoomed-in helming and had a daytime rave (shout out to Cristan’s insane dance moves) … to be continued tonight. Then Audrey and Ava gophered up the dinner — chicken parmesan — which was 15 minutes early (ALLIE J. DOES THE IMPOSSIBLE AGAIN, FOLKS!!). We had a very accepting dinner conversation about certain animalistic lifestyle choices, had squeeze (the question was “What’s one thing you are trying to do to better yourself?”), and ended it with a group squeeze and scream chain (you should try it sometime). Now I’m writing the blog as Jake and Tom are playing a very intense game of high-stress MarioKart (spoiler: Jake is losing on his own switch, yikes). Anyway, I think that is all for today.
Talk to you in 25 days 🙂
Lucia