Location: Great Harbor, Jost van Dyke
I woke up this morning to the sounds of some very distressed screams from the water. The Dive Masters had someone flailing around in the water at the bow of their boat, thrashing around. It took me a second to realize that it was just a rescue exercise that they were really getting into. About 15 minutes after they had finished the exercise, Gary blasts “Sandstorm” by Darude (which is known as the anthem of Rhone Dive Day) and runs around the boat, yelling at people to get hyped for the dive. As we had planned for yesterday, we all raced to the hardtop to chug our Redbull to the same song and start getting some energy. We then started to make our way over to where the Rhone sank, a place called Salt Island. (This island would soon become the highlight of a few people’s day, although not for the reason you might think.). Once we arrived at Salt Island, we got a riveting briefing on what the Rhone really was, an iron-hulled mailing ship that was deemed “unsinkable” by the British navy in 1760 something.
Of course, like all ships named similarly, it sank. The Rhone exploded due to a puncture from a nearby rock straight to the boiler room of the great ship, sending it down to the depths in a fiery blaze. We hopped into the water to crystal clear visibility. You could see for 100 feet before it got blurry. The Advanced Divers were being led by one of the dive masters around the bow of the boat, where we found a bell arch. On our way down the keel, we popped over the side and swam into a 3×3 foot hole that connected directly to the cavernous hull, where we hung out for a little bit before popping back out at the stern. At this point in time we were all pretty low on air, but back to that in a moment.
The Open Water Divers swam down to the stern of the ship and got to see the bronze propeller with 7 foot blades, and mostly hung around that area spotting fish and other sea creatures. Back to the advanced divers, we were all at around 700 PSI (which is pretty low), but Celeste took us all by surprise when she revealed she only had 400 left. We cut the dive a little bit short and surfaced back at Frenchie to more heavy music. Once we got out and finished our celebrations, we hung around the boat for a while, doing knot-tying assessments and taking naps. After a few hours, we got ferried to Salt Island to go on a hike that kinda fell apart after 20 mins. We had been hiking for about 10 minutes when Will looked over the edge to see our dinghy being dragged out to sea. He ran down the mountain with the rest of the boys to go save it. We did. Once we dragged the dinghy back up onto shore, we decided to take a shortcut up the side of the hill and completely missed the girls coming down. After we got all organized at the bottom, Houston took to climbing a palm tree for fun and Aidan, B, and I threw rocks at said tree to knock down a coconut we saw. Maren came to us with amazing news, apparently there was a tree with a bunch of big coconuts just a little ways down the beach. The boys all sprinted down the beach to look at this wonder and immediately began to throw rocks at it. After a while, we decided to get smart. I grabbed a piece of rebar, and Houston lifted me up against the tree to harvest the fruit. We got three down and broke them open on the rocks below, reveling in the sweetness of the fruits of our labor. Entranced by the refreshing taste of coconuts, we decided to get as many as we could to share with the boat. Houston and I took turns lifting each other up in order to shake down some coconuts. We only got one that way. Close to giving up, we were desperately searching for more efficient ways to knock down these coconuts, when we found a 7 foot piece of driftwood right under our very feet.
We were elated by this discovery and knocked down eight more coconuts from the coconut tree to share with everyone. After showing Will our prizes, he says we cant bring them back and that we were running out of island time, we go into a frenzy of cracking open and chugging all the coconuts we had gathered in order to make to most use of them. They were the most delicious coconuts we had ever tasted. Later that evening, we motored back to Great Harbor Peter and took our ocean showers, where Maren got to show off her water polo treading form. Once we were done with ocean showers, we moved to a quad raft with Alpenglow, Shamwari, and Odyssey. We had an impressive Mexican dinner and showed our patriotism by singing the national anthem many times over. We ended our day off by taking our sailing exams and mingling amongst the other boats we were attached to.