Location: Vixen Point, Gorda Sound
Day 6 was another amazing adventure on our floating home Nomada Caribeña! Many of us started the day mildly disgruntled because it poured rain on us while we were sleeping, but our spirits were soon lifted by a lively breakfast. Kate, Lana, Stella, and Aubrey did water sports in the morning while Issy and Maude had a great time sailing Zests. Harry particularly enjoyed rafting with other boats. The DMs (me, Ned, and Lauren) did a practice DSD dive where Stich (one of our instructors) pretended to be a badly behaved new diver – we had to stop her from hitting regulators out of our mouths and swimming away from us. Afterward, the DMs got to lead everyone else on our boat on a snorkel around the mangroves! Lana and Avery spotted a sea turtle and lots of baby barracuda. We ate “girl dinner” for lunch – a delicious assortment of cheddar broccoli soup, peanut butter, granola, saltines, jam, and any other treasures we could find in the snack cabinet. After lunch, we split up for another rotation of activities. All of the open waters passed their RDP exams!!! (Aubrey would like to make sure everyone knows she got 100%). The DMs went on a sort of fun but also very jellyfish-filled dive. Thankfully no one was stung! We took freshwater showers and then headed to shore for a quick grocery run, where Lucas bought lots of delicious snacks. Tonight was the first AQ bbq of the session, so we got to hang out with all of the other shippies and dance to a very questionable DJ. I won the limbo contest and received a virgin piña colada as my prize. The DMs were surprised when we were asked to do a 10:45 pm tank run after the bbq, but Maude enthusiastically offered to help out and joined us! Our beloved dinghy, Moana, died earlier today, so we adopted a new dinghy named Paco. Paco, unfortunately, struggled quite a bit under the weight of 42 tanks but survived just long enough to complete our last run. Now we get to tow a tired Paco and the corpse of Moana. We are all exhausted but happy and excited for Boat Olympics tomorrow!