Location: Cane Garden Bay, Tortola
As you can tell by the title, our adopted 13 shippie has left the fleet to go home. Although we are grieving him, we must move on. Anchor was up bright and early at seven this morning to get started for another rotation day. The DMCs split from the Vega’s this morning, so we could do a quick tank run before heading over to gap year. While the DMCs got ready for their last skills dive, the Vegas went to the Beso del Viento/ Meow or Never boat raft to have a chill hangout sesh during the chaos day. While they were chilling, the DMCs did their second swim test, which was an 800-meter snorkel fin swim that we all got 5/5 on!!! Then we had to get some snorkel skills out of the way before we performed rescue 7 for the 3rd time *sigh* which we finally got down!
After that was done, the Vegas headed over to Gap year to do their final open water dive before getting certified!!! Luckily for us, the DMCs got to lead it for them! I got to lead Annika and Kiki, Ty and Alexis got to lead Milo and August, and Scott got to lead Macy and Micah. After the now-diver pros were done and the equipment was put up, they went off home(Graytful). The DMCs still had one more dive to do before we headed home, which was our DSD (Discover Scuba Diving). It was…. interesting! We were all assigned instructors to act as our “students” which they embodied overzealously. As soon as we started to descend, the chaos began; multiple regulators were ripped out, masks were thrown 10 feet away, BCDs taken completely off, and fins switched multiple times throughout the “students.” Obviously, most of those things wouldn’t happen in an actual DSD scenario, but it was more to show that you should always be on the lookout for weird, unsafe things that new divers will do if they are panicked. During the Vega showers, the water was FREEZING, and everyone’s teeth were chattering. Unfortunately, our water pump was not doing its job, so we got our shampoo and whatnot to go back to Beso and shower. We got clean, rapid-fire, and finally went back to our boat to get ready for dinner. We motored to Cane Garden Bay and then got dinner ready while Mike was fixing our water pump (it’s all good now). After dinner, Ruby had the great idea to play a game of hide and seek where the staff hid the dinghy under the boat, and Annika won the game by hiding behind the seats on the top of the boat. After dinner, we chilled for a bit before we decided to make celebratory brookies for the newly certified open water divers!
P.S. missing you guys soooooo much