Location: Antigua
On our second-to-last day of Offshore, the Williams Mystic Team worked hard and played hard. I feel incredibly lucky to be Skipper today in order to capture it all! Without further ado, I present the blog for our penultimate day, which I argue was still ultimate (in the positive adjective sense ).
I began my morning at 6 am on watch with Gautham. While I started off groggy (retainer still in three cheers for maintaining dental hygiene on board!), hot chai from Dimitri helped that evaporate almost as quickly as the sun zapped the morning fog from the surface of Antiguas English Harbor, where wed docked after our voyage yesterday.
An hour later, I was scampering about below deck to complete my wake-up call duties, gently asking if my crewmates would pretty please wake up. A kind look of disbelief at my method from Ned inspired me to up the ante, and I proceeded to knock on doorframes along with the pleading, and that seemed to do the trick.
We launched into breakfast from there (fruit salad, scrambled eggs, and bagels with all the fixins, accompanied by only minimal grumbling from snooty New Yorkers, yes, including me). Then came boat appreciation! Thats boating lingo for scrubbing every inch of this ship. It sounds grueling, but it felt good to show some care for the vessel that buoyed us from point A to point B and back to point A again. We put sweat and tears into those passages. An endearing idiom but gross in reality! Today, we cleaned up all those sweat, tears, and countless other substances of bodily origin or otherwise. Hurrah!
Cue the cleaning montage: To the sweet sounds of Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Swift, and an altogether eclectic queue of songs, we sprayed and wiped down the galley, sanitized the heads until they sparkled, and generally tried our best to undo the thick veneer of grime we seem to have left in our wake.
Before we knew it, lunchtime had arrived, and as always during these past nine days, our appetite with it. We feasted, chowed down, and gobbled up with enthusiasm the scrumptious lunch prepared by Sam, Jenna, and Lauren: a gigantic three-bean salad, which, I hate to be a stickler, definitely had more than three beans in it, along with veggie burgers, hummus, pickles, and every condiment our 26 little hearts could desire.
After wed rested and, if we were lucky, digested, it was time for the coup de grce of boat appreciation: top sides. This involved racing around Velas perimeter in dingeys and soaping down the ships outside. Claire drove a dinghy with a team of scrubbers composed of myself, Henry, and Aidan, and I only dramatically screamed a little bit when the suds fell on my head during the rinse. We all balanced in precarious positions to get the job done, but only Richey, in true Richey fashion, took a tumble into the water from the second dinghy. In the aftermath, he patiently dried the contents of his fanny pack, gingerly hanging dollar bills one by one in his bunk to air out, and with that, boat appreciation came to a lively close with all in good spirits.
Next on the agenda was a sunset hike to Mermaid Pools. We set off, winding through the lush hillside vegetation and dodging the occasional car, which, of course, was driving on the other side of the road than we were used to, a fact that we obviously quickly adapted to without a doubt in a reasonable time frame (for sure).
We lost a few stragglers along the way, so the rest of us popped a brief squat at a beach tucked alongside the trail. We marveled at limpets, hermit crabs, and washed-up bits of coral before setting off again to our final destination: the aforementioned Mermaid Pools. I spotted zero mermaids, but it was still fun, I guess.
I jest! All our huffing and puffing was rewarded with a breathtaking vista: rocky outcroppings, cactus branches reaching for the sky, and a setting sun with heavenly beams illuminating Monserrat across the frothy waters. We reveled in the scenery, but the promise of individual pizzas (an arrangement that may have merely been quid pro quo to coax us toward finishing boat appreciation, but one I was still beyond pleased about) beckoned us back to Vela like pizza-loving moths to a flame (made of pizza).
After a quick shower, I set to rounding up everyone at midship so we could get started on this whole pizza business. The task proved more like herding cats, but once all the cats, I mean shipmates, were present, we gathered in the cockpit to relish our last dinner on board together.
Happy and satiated, we did our last squeeze, where we closed out the day with some reflections while holding hands in a circle. Its like a floating summer camp for adults! It was frankly a lot of pressure to conjure up our very last prompt for this activity, but I asked the group members to share what they admire about the person to their left, and the results were certainly fruitful, if sappy. My evil plan was to identify any ugly criers but to no avail.
At 8 pm, I took down the ensign and kinda folded it into triangles under Captain Macs tutelage. Five minutes(ish, sorry, Ben!) later, the group embarked upon Swizzle, a talent show (of sorts) that involved acts of physical improv, soulful ballade singing, a hearty rendition of The Cup Song from Pitch Perfect, an in-depth coffee-brewing tutorial, and a worm dance demonstration atop the Chart House, to name a few segments that I will remember for a long time coming (for better or worse). Also notable is that Ned wore a neon orange squid hat while facilitating a game of Ports v. Stars charades. But I digress.
Im genuinely sad to leave tomorrow, and not just because of what is sure to be the production that is transporting my overpacked duffel from my top bunk to the floor. I will miss the beautiful sensory overload of these islands: the soft breadfruit, the squirmy anoles, the glittery flying fish. Even dogging the hatches can be charming from time to time!
However, like the first poem in our course reader (which I definitely absolutely read in full because I am a responsible student), Blessing the Boats by Lucille Clifton says, and may you in your innocence sail through this to that. I can go home knowing that we can. And we did.