Location: The Bight, Norman Island
There’s nothing in our world quite as special as waking up from a sweaty, rain-filled, yet much-needed night of sleep! It’s a universal AQ experience that’s new to all our first-year shippies but comforting and familiar to our returning shippies. The weather quickly cleared up in the morning while we ate breakfast in anticipation of Mike’s start-of-trip “chat” with us. While the speech felt long, Lila, Jaden, and I recorded his impressively quick time of 1 hour and 7 minutes — his shortest speech in 3 years (yes, I always time him).
Shortly after, we were underway to the Norman Island Caves. This was an eventful sail, to say the least. At the start of the sail, Jaden, Wylie, Alex, Lila, Hayden, Tyler, and I were all having a blast hanging out on the trampoline out front, getting absolutely drenched by the choppy waters. Meanwhile, Aggie, Lily, Alli, and Juliette were learning the ropes of sailing up in the power tower. Out of nowhere, though, the boat went into a (slight) panic when Lily realized that one of our dinghies had slipped out of the knot attaching it to the stern of our boat. Thankfully, we were able to get eyes on the dinghy way back in the distance and go back to pick it up. Not an ideal situation, but at least it made for a good preview of what man overboard drills will be like for our Vega shippies.
Eventually, we made our way to Norman Island and saw some huge sea turtles popping their heads out of the water as we were mooring up! This was especially exciting because we were all getting in the water for the first time after our delicious lunch of deli sandwiches. Right after lunch, we all powered through our swim test, and then all our Vega Shippies went off to snorkel while the DMs had a quick check-out dive to go over some basic skills.
To round off the day, we set off to The Bight to start our coursework and chow down on some sloppy joes. I’m now currently sitting in the power tower, about to hop into a dive chat and then relax for the night. All in all, I’m really glad to be back at AQ, and day 2 was definitely a pretty good one!