Location: Admiralty Bay, Bequia, St Vincent and the Grenadines
I would like to start by apologizing for the lack of daytime photos… I forgot my skipperly duties and did not take a single picture until about 8 minutes ago. I’ll try to make up for it with a great blog.
Ela actually woke ME up this morning at around 630 by climbing into my bunk with me for a nice morning chat. Around 7, I woke up the salon with my Jack Johnson playlist (classic) and half fell/half climbed into the focsle to wake up Sunny and Rae. Kelly, Ela, and Savannah killed the timing with their zucchini bread breakfast by having it up just before 730. Unfortunately, the rest of us were at the bow dealing with anchor stuff and not ready to dig into the bread. Turns out we drifted a ton last night and had to re-anchor closer to our pals over on Vela (but you guys wouldn’t know about them because you’re here reading the cool blog, not over on theirs). As we did donuts around them (again), there was lots of waving and doing the wave back and forth. We’re all very excited to have the Seamester crossover of the millennium dinner on Vela tomorrow night. After finally getting to eat breakfast, we headed into the salon for our quite controversial seamanship class. Do we add west when converting from true to magnetic north? Are we sure?? We got some practice on the charts, which will probably be very helpful for our super tough nav master exam later this semester. I’d like to say we’ve mastered compass conversions, but that would be a lie. After seamanship, we got started on our mini BA, mostly putting the boat to bed plus a deck scrub in the afternoon.
Okay, now for the cool part of the blog… DIVIN!!!! We broke into three groups (Brett was by himself, but we’ll still call it a group). Today’s training dive was on Peak Performance Butts (just kidding… buoyancy). While completing our 60-second hover, I looked around at my graceful dive group as they floated around quite peacefully. I, on the other hand, was quite ungraceful and kept hitting the ground and losing my balance. I almost got the hang of things when we went upsidedown to knock a small weight over with our regulator (the thing that’s in our mouth while diving). I watched Kelly, Savannah, and Ela glide slowly towards the sand and tap the weight over and thought I could easily do the same. Turns out, I was still far less graceful than my friends and absolutely face planted into the ground 🙂 Our final show of buoyancy was an epic moon-walk backflip. Each buddy group took their fins off and stood on the seafloor (a very, very weird feeling), then proceeded to sprint at each other, run up each other’s feet, and backflip. The sprinting was more like a slo-mo dance, and my backflip was more of a side rotationeither way, HILARIOUS. I’m pretty sure all of our masks flooded from laughing so hard.
We wrapped up the day with pad thai and a gorgeous sunset.
Hi everyone at home!!! I miss you and love you and can’t wait to tell you about everything in person. Also, happy belated birthday to grandma Linda, love you!!
pic 1: the quadrat dropper herself (Ela) and her sidekick Kelly
pic 2: Brett Mia and Alex posing for me at the top of the companionway when I sprinted down to get my phone for pictures
pic 3: sunset 🙂
pic 4: me Ela and Kelly trying to be cool surfer girls in our wetsuits
pic 5: Rae, Isaac, and Sarah filling the freshie pit (obvi a three-person job)
pic 6: Sarah + the goph hole = true love
pic 7: Gandalf, O star dishie pit version