Location: West End, Tortola
This is it, guys. Today was our final day as Frenchies. Suddenly, all of our little annoyances from the past three weeks have become a source of sentiment; we’ll all miss the faulty heads, never having dry feet, and getting rained on in the middle of the night. Alright, I’m kidding. I’m sure we’re all excited to be dry and have (hopefully) normally functioning toilets back at home. But what we will actually miss is one another. It’s a good thing that we had a fantastic final day together to close off the session. Today was race day, and we started with a classic cereal breakfast. The skipper of the day—me, yours truly, Ella Gertner—had to leave at 7:30 am for a skippers’ meeting in which we were briefed about the details of the race. We also picked numbers out of a hat to determine our starting positions, and Iles et Ailes got to begin in second place. When we got to the hard top to raise the main sail before the race, we found all of our lines unraveled and tangled up. We have no idea how it happened, but we managed to fix it, and eventually, we got our main sail up.
During the race, we rotated through different positions. Claire, Celeste, Noah, and Aidan rocked it on the helm. Sadie, Houston, and Aidan worked hard to sweat the halyard. B worked the main sheet, traveler, and port-side jib sheet. It’s okay if you don’t know what any of that means; trust me, it’s cool. We tacked a lot, and so many different people had to take in the jib. If you’re wondering what that looks like, it’s just four people yanking a line as fast as they possibly can. Anyway, the race had its ups and downs, and although we went from cruising in third place to finishing in seventh, the boat maintained a positive attitude the entire time. Afterward, we dove right into boat appreciation day. This meant that we had to—sorry, got to clean the entire boat. We spent hours scrubbing every nook and cranny, packing, singing, sorting, and wiping surfaces down. And in the end, it was worth it, because even though we failed our first inspection and got a questionable “pass” on our second inspection, we finished the afternoon with a spotless boat. Special shoutout to Julia, who was on her hands and knees scrubbing can stains clean. In the middle of it all, Aidan managed to go buy ice cream, and we all marveled in jealousy as he waltzed back onto the dock, finishing it off. When boat appreciation was over, we had some phone time and then took the most unique showers of the trip so far. These consisted of standing on the dock in front of the entire fleet while washing all twelve of ourselves down with the same single hose. It was quite the experience, and we had a great time laughing and spraying one another, fully embracing the awkwardness of the moment. We then put on our best BBQ clothes and headed back to the hard top to take photos with our Action Quest flag. We sat down and did our final squeeze. The prompt for the day was to think back on the past three weeks and say something that you are proud of yourself for and something that you are proud of the person sitting next to you for.
Everybody gave heartwarming and genuine responses, showing remarkable levels of self-reflection and kindness. At the BBQ, Julia, Maren, Claire, and Celeste took photos together, and everyone enjoyed good food. B and I talked about linguistics and other random topics, and at the end, everyone listened to Mike give a final speech to the camp. As per tradition, he read us “Oh, The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss. Back at the boat, we cut up our Action Quest flag so that each person could get a piece to bring home. Everyone got their flag pieces signed, and as I’m writing this, people are sitting outside and chatting or going to the other boats to say goodbye to their friends. Tomorrow will be an early, hectic morning, and although none of us will be reporting on it in this blog, you will be able to have the day recounted to you in person as your shippie/soon-to-be-landie finally comes home