Location: Portsmouth, Dominica
What’s up, people back home? I hope your day was as good as the one I just experienced.
Today started with me waking up at around 5:36, thinking I was late to wake the rest of the boat up, but I only noticed that was untrue when I checked my phone to see what time it was. Only a couple of minutes after I woke up, I fell back asleep. Later at around 7:50, I woke up to the sound of my alarm and hurriedly got out of bed to find a speaker so that I could play music to wake people up. The queue of music I chose to play started with a song called Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder, which is a song from the 80s. It takes us all around 30 minutes to get out of bed and up on deck, which seemed an eternity to me because it’s stressful to try to corral 26 people even though all of us live within such close proximity.
Breakfast was a delicious hotel pan full of chocolate chip muffins prepared by Jimmy. To complement the chocolate muffins were a fruit cocktail that comes from large cans, but despite it being canned, it is delicious. Then after breakfast, we had a marine bio ID quiz which was extra fun because it included species we saw on the last passage, like flying fish, yellowfin tuna, and a wild Bonsey. After the quiz, we reviewed for the final marine bio exam, so I decided to take pictures of the class time we were having, but it turned into me taking really zoomed-in pictures of people on my phone. Then we had study time which I didn’t utilize because Maya took like 2 hours to hype herself up to do a backflip which used up the whole study time. It was still really fun because some of us would occasionally just huck one while Maya took her sweet old time. It was worth the wicked sunburn I got because Julia did her first backie as well, and I attempted a gainer, which spectacularly failed because I landed on my neck, my second attempt went slightly better but not by much.
Then we had lunch which was a full English breakfast which was good but not as good as the breakfast, but it was still very good, which is a trait about almost every meal. When we were doing cleanup, our leadership teacher, Calum, was prepping our leadership challenge course. The leadership challenge course is kind of like a scavenger hunt but on a larger scale, and you have to complete specific tasks like raising the forward staysail, paddling one of the dinghies to shore, finding half-buried “treasure,” finding a bay on the other side of a spit of land to the north of us than picking up some trash and giving it to another instructor to get our next task which was flipping over a towel while our whole group was standing on it than we went back to where we started onshore and did a human knot than we had to swim back to the boat and to finish we took a picture on the bowsprit. My group was the last to go, so we had around 2 hours, so we started watching the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. While we were raising the forward staysail, we believed that our group was sabotaged by a previous group or by the instructor supervising that task because the mermaid line was fully pulled out, which is not how it’s supposed to be but other than that, it went fairly smoothly. Then we paddled on one of the dinghies to shore with anything we had or was already in the dinghy, which was fairly difficult, but we handled it well. After that, we were to find half-buried treasure, which was 60 paces to the south of the dock we ended up at. Flipping over a towel while our whole group was standing on it was very difficult for my group. We failed two times because it was hard to balance on the uneven ground within a very small ground space with eight or nine people. The human knot task was easy enough; then, after that, we answered a question about oceanography which we answered correctly. After answering the question, we got our next clue which required us to swim back to the boat and find something on the anchor chain, which was the next clue that told us to get up on the bowsprit for a picture. After the picture, we had another backie sesh where Emy did her first backflipfollowed by a dinner of delicious chilly(Owen’s mom’s recipe) and some scrumptious white bread rolls. Before the squeeze, we had a little conversation about the challenge we faced during the afternoon. Then it was time for the squeeze. The question I asked was what is the first thing people would eat when they got home. Some answers were snack food, some were local restaurants or fast food places, and a few were their own cooking.
Signing off for the last time, Asa B