Location: Mountain Point, Virgin Gorda
Hey, everyone! Today was an awesome day that was very much packed until I’ve been sitting here writing with music and dishy pit going on in the background. We were treated with a (slightly) earlier wakeup at 7:00 AM to get underway to our first dive site and have an energizing breakfast of scrambled eggs accompanied by toast. Later, around 8:30 AM, we arrived at a dive site called The Chimneys. This was the first fun dive of our trip, so everyone was super excited and brought their underwater cameras. On the dive, we swam through some beautiful rock formations and coral. We also swam through some really tight rocky passages, which are actually what give The Chimneys its name. Outside of some cool squirrelfish, I didn’t see any super crazy aquatic life.
Nevertheless, the lack of eye-catching marine animals was totally made up for by taking pictures of Gene lying on a towel on the ocean floor. Once we surfaced and got back on the boat, we were greeted by some muffins that Ri cooked up, and we had a little while to chill as we moved across the corner of the island to get to our (highly anticipated) next dive spot: The Sharkplanes. This dive actually hit two birds with one stone because we started it off by practicing some navigational skills with our buddies before going off and exploring the sunken shark-shaped airplanes. Between pretending to bull-ride each other underwater and dancing during our safety stop, this dive was really eventful. Also, we managed to see a decently-sized stingray and a nurse shark, which a couple of people had on their fish wishlists. After the dive, we munched on some chicken salad wraps, but Liam and River inevitably went rogue and snuck some peanut butter, onions, and cheese into their chicken salad wraps. Next, while sailing back to Mountain Point, we had a brief knot workshop, where Lindsay and Gene walked us through the knots we needed to know how to tie for our search-and-recovery dives. Upon blazing arrival back at Mountain Point, we broke into four intense rescue scenarios where half of the boat would be in the water, acting as a tired, unconscious, or panicked diver.
While the other half would have to properly respond and get everyone safely back on the boat, tiring and initially questionable in quality, as a boat, we all greatly improved our abilities as a majestic, heroic, and well-oiled rescuing machine. As a well-deserved reward, we were all treated to freshwater showers, where we all came out feeling nice and squeaky clean. Afterward, Gene took Charli, Aria, Lila, Logan, and I on Rango for some zoomies which was the perfect way to excitingly end our long day before our delectible cheddar broccoli pasta.