Location: Vixen Point, Gorda Sound
We arose this morning to a beautiful sunrise and began to happily munch on some very underripe melon and cereal, finding a frosted mini wheat that could’ve broken records (measuring about 8 inches across). The open water diving group headed off to snorkel the nearby mangroves and saw many a creature, such as a baby turtle, baby barracudas, some very rotund sea cucumbers, and jellyfish. The advanced diving crew headed up to the hard top and had a chat about perfecting our buoyancy so we could float without damaging reefs and other wildlife. As a crew, our rotation before lunch was paddle boarding, where we split into teams and raced around our boat from the shore. Unfortunately, our counselor, Megan, had a “twin sister” who loved to interfere with our races and capsized us all on multiple occasions. Team Garrett, which consisted of Houston, B, Aiden, Claire, Ella, and Maren, lost to Team Will: Noah, Sadie, Nadia, Sariah, Celeste, and Julia. After the races, we mostly hung around the beach, eventually getting stuck at sea, where we enlisted the help of a zest to tow us into shore. The zest couldn’t quite handle the weight of 7 people distributed among three paddle boards, so we flagged down a dinghy that was passing by. Soon, we boarded a different dinghy to get back to the French boat and were able to sit down and enjoy a nice warm bowl of Mac n cheese with an unholy amount of margarine in it. After lunch, we all went out to sail on zests for around 2 hours, and the only person to capsize was our captain himself, who blamed it on his passenger instead. Once we were all tired of sailing our little boats, we went back to Frenchie and got ready to go do some watersports where Houston killed it, getting towed on the kneeboard, hitting spin after spin flawlessly. I (Noah), on the other hand, managed to surprise the speedboat driver by skipping along the ocean for 300 feet, trying to wakeboard. Not everyone is made for watersports. For dinner, we had garden burgers with a side of mashed potatoes and baked beans, although the sides eventually made their way onto many of the burgers made tonight. At the tail end of dinner, a swell of waves snuck up a few of the boats, and one of them suffered a major dish loss because of it. To top it all off, as we were watching the sunset, a lone flamingo came soaring across the sky, leaving all of us amazed, albeit slightly confused about why it was there.