Alpha 4 & Charlie 3 2018 Adventures Day 5 – Nailing Down Our Points Of Sail
written by Social Media Coordinator, Ryan Smith
August 10, 2018
With the scene of gorgeous Little Harbour, Peter Island enveloping us, our student crews awoke and broke into our habitual grind of double checking our individual duties for the day on our boat’s roster. Two designated students started whipping up a breakfast of champions that we enjoyed together while still slowly waking ourselves up. Our Open Water divers left to join the Sail Caribbean Divers’ dive boat, in anticipation of returning later in the afternoon as certified divers!
The rest of the students stayed behind to rotate through a plethora of watersporting activities, the highlight being a turn on our 26 ft training Colgate keelboat, Opal. It was awesome for our students to try their hand maneuvering a much smaller vessel than their liveaboard 50′ monohulls, feeling firsthand the difference of handling and response rate of the tiller versus their helms on the big boats.
Back to our boats for lunchtime, we all regrouped and ate a celebratory meal with our newly certified OW divers! Around 1:30p.m., our monohulls up-anchored from Little Harbour and set our sails for Trellis Bay on Beef Island. Underway, the students learned a more in depth lesson on points of sail. This in turn would help prepare them for a competitive Race Day sail that may or may not be in their near future 😉 Recreational and Discover Scuba diving students were not present as they had been swooped off on the dive boat for some underwater exploring of their own!
Once we entered into the Trellis Bay mooring field, each monohull confidently picked up a mooring ball as if it was second nature to them at this point! We received an enthusiastic delivery of more provisioning to our boats which we aided in storing the proper way on our sailboats.
After some time relaxing after a fun-filled day, two students cooked up a dinner of barbeque chicken which we enjoyed after also taking turns for our nightly boat showers and dancing to a few beats from the DJ of the day. The divers were welcomed back for our family meal and we all shared each other’s adventures giddily from the cockpit of our boats.
Boat meeting ensued as usual, where we filled out our Full Value Contract, which is a cherished document that each crew crafts together as a team to decide what elements will be kept on and off the boat for the remainder of program, such as respect and boogie-like-nobody’s-watching dancing is kept on the boat, and bullying and sand is most definitely kept off the boat. After all John Hancock’s were imprinted, we also received the news that tomorrow would be RACE DAY, so it wasn’t long before we started to gently clean up our quarters and power down for the day so that we could all be well-rested to bring the HEAT on tomorrow’s sail!
