Location: Young Island, St. Vincent
This morning started a little bit earlier than usual when I woke everyone up at 6:15 with some great music to get ready for a morning snorkel. Once everyone had their fins, masks, and snorkels on and we had inflated the safety sausages (some more inflated than others), we hopped in the water. During the snorkel, a few of us saw an eel, and on the way back to the boat, Andrea and I saw bright blue specks in the water, which we later found out from Leoni were a type of bioluminescent plankton. We also saw a bunch of jellyfish, which many of us tried to avoid for fear of being stung.
After our snorkel, we had a delicious breakfast made by Mackenzie, our amazing head chef today, of bagels, homemade hummus, and cucumbers. After breakfast, we got ready for classes this morning. Our first-class of the day was marine biology with Adelaide, where we learned about jellyfish…turns out the ones we were terrified of a few hours earlier were innocent comb jellies that weren’t going to sting us. In seamanship, we learned more about VHF radios and how to send and respond to mayday calls. We also reviewed proper radio etiquette and continued to practice the phonetic alphabet.
Following classes, we had another amazing meal from our chefs Mackenzie, Calum, and Valentina, and those of us that needed to do our nav dive then got ready to go diving. After going over our navigation dive knowledge reviews, we practiced using a compass on deck and went over how we were going to navigate with a buddy underwater. Sonnet was my dive buddy today, and our dive started out great. Sonnet even mentioned at squeeze tonight that her highlight of the day was when we found a treasure (a fork) while diving and showed it to Adelaide, who started laughing underwater. After some more exploring of the underwater world, we started to ascend to end our dive. During our safety stop, Sonnet and I got swept away from the boat by a current. Once we surfaced, we started to kick back towards the boat but weren’t moving anywhere. Andrea and Valentina were cheering us on at the boat, but eventually, after kicking hard for about 10 minutes, Smash came to our rescue and sent out a line to pull us in.
After our eventful dive, we all got ready to go hike up 255 stairs on Rock Fort. The views were gorgeous, and we saw hermit crabs on the rock. We ended the day by putting away provisions after the hike and an amazing dinner and squeeze. My squeeze question today was, “What is one of your favorite inspirational quotes or piece of advice?” All in all, today was amazing, and my face hurts from smiling so much today.
Photo 1: Views from the top of the Rock Fort
Photo 2: Katelyn, Katie, Charlie, and Max during Marine Biology class
Photo 3: Charlie entertaining us with some music between classes
Photo 4: Sonnet wearing everyone else’s watches
Photo 5: Everyone enjoying a delicious lunch