Location: West End, Tortola
With the trip coming to an end tomorrow, the crew has been quite busy and has fallen a little behind on writing the blogs. Not to worry, because I will fill you in on yesterday and today as they were both quite exciting. We started the day off quite early yesterday, around 6:45. Katie came up into the saloon peppy and ready for the day. I, however, had a different view. I asked Katie, “Why are we getting up early?” Her response was, “It’s a great day to have a great day!” And that it was! After eating a yummy oatmeal breakfast, we began clean up. As we were cleaning, we began to spin around, almost knocking all of the dishes overboard. We then realized what was happening. Matt (our skipper) was doing donuts around the mooring balls! About five minutes in, someone put on the song from the 3rd Fast and Furious movie, “Tokyo Drift.” After listening to the song three times through while continuing to do donuts, we finally moored. We then had our second to last dive, a fun dive. Dylan, JT, and I buddied up, and when we got down to the bottom, we immediately ate an orange.
After finally learning how to eat underwater, I have become a pro. After surfacing from our dive, we headed over to Road Town for a chill lunch. We said hi to our friends from other boats and (hopefully) said hi to family and friends while having our phones. It always feels so weird getting our phones here because I never really know what to do with them. After I call my family and a couple of friends, it very quickly feels useless; it’s honestly such a refreshing feeling. After lunch, we came back to the boat and had a nice sail to The Bite. While sailing we went over our Rescue and EFR tests. Upon arrival, we had some lovely fresh water showers and then began packing our backs. A bitter-sweet moment I had been trying to put off for a while now. After showering and packing, the counselors headed to Tantalizer (Mike’s mono) with all of the staff to have an end-of-session staff meeting. We made dinner and jammed out to music, all content with the moment.
One of my favorite moments was when we had all finished dinner and were sitting in the cockpit, and the song “Country Roads take me Home” played. We all sang, and everyone couldn’t help but smile because we knew this would be one of the last times all of us were together, just hanging out. After the staff returned, we began our talk about the notecards. Writing the notecards is, without a doubt, my favorite part of the Action Quest experience. Everyone must write a card to each of their other shipmates, themselves, their counselors, and Mike/staff. It’s a very long task but reading the cards everyone writes to you always makes the process completely worth it. We finished around 11-11:30, which was way past all of our bedtimes, so everyone was exhausted.
Now to today. This morning was also a very early morning as we woke up and immediately sailed over to the Indians. It’s a very popular dive site that I’ve heard of many times, but this was my first time actually diving. The counselors stayed on the boat while we all dove. It was a super quick dive, but so so pretty, so it was well worth it. After surfacing, we finally got to the part of the trip I dreaded the most. It was time for boat appreciation! Boat appreciation is a long and intense full boat cleaning, so the students in the next session have a new and clean-looking boat. However, Round Two is going back to its owner tomorrow right after we leave for the ferry in the morning, so it has to be even cleaner than normal. So as we motored over to Sopper’s Hole (West End), where we began the trip, we did a huge cleaning of everything. We cleaned and swept everywhere imaginable (especially the heads, which needed a lot of work). We then docked and continued to work on the boat, and after what felt like an eternity, the pizza Matt ordered for us was ready. We all sat in silence as we munched on the delicious pizza.