Location: Great Harbor Peter, BVI
“Today was a good day.” We all woke up to another morning of wondrous smells from Ed’s creations in the galley. Crepes with jam, Nutella, peanut butter, honey, whatever you like. We had just finished our OCE final the night before and were anxious to get going on our presentations for our group projects. Right after breakfast and clean up, we jumped into it, presenting our findings and research over the past 75 days on parrotfish, sand composition, or coral bleaching. The presentations were great, and our hard work really shined through. When those were finished, we got right into Marine Biology review with Matty, going over all kinds of taxonomic names and getting our study guides together for the test that we had in a few hours.
Rehearsing the Mammalia genomes like Odontacae, Carnivora, and Pinnipeds, to the sharks in Chondrichthyes like Carcharhindae and Sphyrinidae. If you’re a little lost here, just ask your kids/friends what they all mean when we get back, and I’m sure they’ll be happy to tell you. We had an awesome review session and crammed in the time being before and after our lunch. We ate a delicious cucumber salad lunch with deli sandwiches and had a 2-hour study sesh afterward. Next came our final at 3 o’clock sharp, and I think we were all more than ready for it from our awesome classes and teachers. Finishing our final was a great relief; it was weird to think we were done with classes at our schooner school. Later in the afternoon, we got our final grades for projects and our grades for the classes in general.
Everyone smiled while walking around the boat afterward, and you could tell how hard everyone had worked. We reminisced about our favorite times as a crew during our squeeze and were reminded of our epic hikes, island adventures, dancing up at Shirley Heights, and howling at the moon while we sailed away from Saba in the dark of the night. Our dinner menu was an interestingly delicious chili sandwich with some leftovers that we happily polished off. After one of our last dinners on board, we had another timely cleanup and got our gear ready for our LAST night dive! We took the dinghy out past a barge in the bay of GHP and got to our mooring, which we had marked with glow sticks earlier so we could find it in the dark. The dive was so sweet! There were tons of reefs followed by a steep embankment that dropped down 20 or so feet to another sandy bottom. We kept swimming, and all of a sudden, a huge wreck popped out of the darkness. It was old and kind of mangled on the inside with fish and sponges all over it. On the deck that we swam up to, there was a toilet just sitting there! It was one of our cooler dives, and wreck dives are always better at night. We finally got back to the boat after a day of non-stop action and stuffed our faces with “Brown-ookies,” a cookie brownie fusion that Albert made for us. We all practiced our posture for eating cake or brownies overboard so as to not dirty up the deck, but we still got some crumbs on board, which is usually impossible to avoid. It was another epic day on OStar, and the reality of going home was creeping up on all of us by the hour. We’re going to soak up the last few days to the fullest, and I’m sure we’re all looking forward to our turtle tagging in the morning!! set date: 2012-12-04