Location: St Lucia
Wow, we just had a crazy packed last 24 hours.
Last night was filled with passage prep for our student-led passage. Unlike usual passage, students are in charge of every decision-making processfrom plotting, planning our fuel usage, leading all sail handling, and anything else that staff would typically lead.
My job was the navigator. I was in charge of plotting, but without the use of any digital tools. This meant that we needed to make use of paper charts, estimating our position without the use of any GPS coordinates.
The other leadership roles were Erin as our skipper (different from the job wheel skipper), in charge of planning and overseeing the entire passage plan, Grant as our chief mate, leading all deck and sail-handling operations, and Nashota as our engineer, responsible for all things engines and generators.
We left our anchorage in St. Vincent, departing for St. Lucia at 21:26, or 9:26 pm last night, after a long afternoon full of passage prep, absorbing as much knowledge as possible from all our staff mentors.
The student-led passage definitely started off slightly chaotic. We switched around the watch schedule post-briefing. We had some kind of oil-related incident in the engine room. Everyone was feeling sleep-deprived. My chart deviation calculations were off by 15, veering us off-course. But after some corrections and important learnings, we set sail, and could see St. Lucia in the distance, straight ahead!
We anchored in Rodney Bay at around 9:30 am the next morning. I think we all were hitting a wall, so we had a slow, restful morning, taking our time to get out of bed, eat, and get ready to head to shore. Emma and Zoe cooked up a tasty egg, sausage, and broccoli breakfast.
Emma took Kyler, Vittoria, Nashota, and Erin to shore for a day of provisioning at the local grocery store, while the rest of us took our time to get ready and motor into shore to check out the town.
Once provisioning was done, we all came back together to the dock to help load groceries into the dinghies and off to Vela.
We also had a special guest join us for dinner! Adama previous staff member on Velaand his wife and two kids came aboard Vela right after we finished stowing away all of our new food. While Mac and Sam finished cheffing it up in the galley, Adam took his kids for a tour around the boat. Dinner was a delicious jerk pork, rice, beans, and slaw.
After sharing our appreciations and answers to the question of the day, our squeeze was a hilarious game of “Follow the Leader,” where Macthe guessersomehow managed to wrongly guess every single person in the cockpit but the actual leader, Kyler.
While student-led passage was challenging, I know we all had a super fun time, and learned so much, so I’m really hoping we get to give it another go before the end of the program, giving all our new learnings.
Anyways, I’m running on a total of around 8-10 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours, so I’m going to call it here and get some rest. Goodnight!