Location: Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
This morning was a rare moment in our trip – we got to sleep in. A whole hour! After a wakeup at 8 o’clock, we had some wonderful scones made by our head chef of the day, Calum, along with some Nutella and homemade whipped cream. Next was a class in marine biology, which was quite fun because we got to watch a movie! It was a documentary about the bleaching of corals, which happens when the photosynthetic plankton living inside them leave due to excess heat, causing them to slowly die from starvation. In 2016, 29% of the Great Barrier Reef died this way.
After the movie, we started passage preparation for our voyage to Tenerife, although who knows when we will actually end up leaving. It’s always fun to set up the sails, though. We then left to explore on shore. Some of us headed to lunch and then the beach, and a couple of us went provisioning with Carolyn, but I don’t know much about the provisioning group. I think Ghost and Rachel may say a bit about their experience later. A couple of others and I went to lunch at a place by the beach, and they had some of the best strawberry smoothies I’ve ever had. After that, we rented some boogie boards from a local surf shop and hit the waves! The swell was pretty huge, and apparently, Hendo barfed up a bunch of seawater after accidentally breathing while a wave smacked him in the face.
Aside from some minor panic in having trouble finding a taxi to take us back to the boat, we all made it back alright, to see a Swedish naval vessel docked right next to us! On top of that, there was a whole truck full of food that others were unloading onto our boat! The Swedish boat was just a couple of meters longer and taller than Vela, and it seemed crazy to me that we were living on a boat almost as long as one from a country’s navy, even if we suspected it might just be a training/show vessel. For dinner, we had bangers and mash with a side of carrots, which was incredible. We ended the day with a new game brought to us by Ghost, in which three people tell a story based off of a prompt that only one of us has actually experienced, and the audience has to guess whose story is real.
Rachel and Ghost here: While everyone else had their beach day and laundry adventures, we spent 5 hours in a grocery store in the basement of a department store on an island in the middle of the ocean. Trippy. Highlights include: Rachel breaking down over toilet paper for fear of breaking the heads again, a child laughing at Ghost for putting dish soap into the already overflowing cart, and losing our minds over baking powder not being with sugar or flour (the aisles were not organized) and then Caro finding it in a random aisle none of us had gone down yet right as we were about to leave, watching two men run down the street in a fistfight after trying to steal our boxes getting into the taxi. Overall, wonderful day. We learned so much and have so much more appreciation for Carolyn and the provisioning process.