Location: Buccament Bay, St Vincent
Sophie woke me up this morning at 4:00 am for my watch. She gave me the rundown of what happened up until her watch. With me still being half asleep, the only thing I vividly remember was her casually saying something along the lines of “…be sure that no other boats come up to us…” and I spent the rest of my watch eyeballing the small boat parked maybe 20 meters from us as if it would somehow paddle over to us and take over Ocean Star. Obviously, the probability of that was extremely slim, but It was pitch black and far too early in the morning for me to function properly.
I woke up at 6:50 to the morning hustle that was the early risers making their coffee, taking a morning shower, coming back from a yoga sesh, or whatever else there is to do during a beautiful Caribbean island morning. My previous day being skipper (day 2), I wrote in the blog that we had no stereo to play from, but thankfully Tate (who joined us a little late) brought one! So I got to wake the rest of the crew up to some morning tunes. Sam, Asta, and Lucia (Chefs of the day) prepared us some delicious oatmeal for breakfast, and after our plates were empty, I wrapped up the meal with the schedule for the day. My group got to go on our first “open water” dive since we finished confined water and got to see some insane-looking creatures like fireworms, arrow crabs, and tons of the fish we had been learning about in marine bio. We got down to about 9 meters below sea level, which surprisingly didn’t feel that deep. After that, we had yet another successful lunch prepared by our chefs, and my group was ready to study for our fish ID quiz before we took it. Everyone passed, thankfully! We had a couple of extra hours of study time before the other two groups came back from their confined water diving lesson, so I decided to work on my essay while some decided to relax. I was about to start reading the last research article I had to, and then Eamon hit me with a “Yo Eulalie, wanna go check out that giant shipwreck???” and we all know how the rest of my study time went. We snorkeled for almost two hours. The ship was definitely over 100ft long. We saw swarms of different kinds of colorful fish.
After dinner, we had a marine bio class, and soon all of us were in bed.
Im writing this super late because I was sleepy last night and couldn’t finish the blog, and Kris is telling me to get to the salon so we can start our seamanship class… Apparently, we are doing a survival at sea lesson…so I’ll leave the rest of the day yesterday up to the reader’s interpretation. Yesterday was an insanely fun day. Hopefully, we can dive the wreck sight after we are all certified so we can explore more.
Photo 1 and 4: fish.
Photo 2: corals growing on the ship
Photo 3: me swimming through the shipwrecks rudder