Location: The Feathers, BVI
We began our day with another dive! Today we stayed in shallower waters to immerse ourselves in some of the healthiest reefs we’ve seen in the past 11 days. Practicing fish identification, we brought slates and pencils down to the ocean floor with us as we each sketched five different fish we came across during our dive. After resurfacing, we cracked open brand new fish identification books for reefs in the Caribbean area and tirelessly flipped through what felt like every page, attempting to match our vague pencil sketches to the beautiful and vivid images in the book. As we were prepping for lunch, the smoke alarm in the galley went off (she’s very sensitive), and we all mustered in the cockpit to find out that we desperately needed a refresher on our fire drill procedures. After lunch, we broke into watch groups to run through every detail of each of the roles for every watch team. The alarm went off again before dinner, and we made a few improvements, but as it turns out, Calum was still very disappointed in our performance. ALWAYS room for improvement! We followed up lunch with our final dive for a few weeks, where we practiced peak performance buoyancy, filled with underwater limbo, diving through various shapes, and knocking over weights with our regulators, which Gabe demonstrated so elegantly for us!! Gabe also taught me that you actually have to remain very still in order to not float to the surface during our safety stops. Still working on that one… we ended our night with a gorgeous sunset and stir-fry, one of my favorite dinners so far (thank you, Celia and Claire!), and closed out with our nightly appreciations and squeeze and clap question: after this trip, which country would you like to visit next that you have not been to yet? It’s so incredible to me that it’s only been 11 days. I feel like I’ve been here for weeks, based on how close we all are :). Another amazing day in the books for the crew of Argo!