Early Alpha Day 11: Challenge Day & 2 Awesome Dives

written by Early Alpha mate, Erika Florian
June 19, 2017

Today was Challenge day! Here at Sail Caribbean, it is our goal to make sure each student is self sufficient on a boat. So on Challenge day, we hand over control of the boat to the students! The students woke up their own staff onboard, and spearheaded breakfast as well as making sure everyone was ready for the 8:30a.m. dive boat arrival. The Skippers of the day from each boat got to go to the staff boat for a Captains meeting. This was to coordinate a plan for the day and how to go about the mooring field.

Our divers had two awesome dives today at Great Dog and The Chimneys. The Chimneys are a series of cracks to venture through that spread all the way to the top of the water line. We saw a sting ray and a school of squid!

After the dive, we headed back to boats for a wonderful meal of avocado and egg bagels for lunch, loaded with everyone’s favorite toppings and additions. Lunch was cleaned up, and the crew set in motion up-anchoring to head to Trellis Bay on Tortola for the afternoon. Our sail today had a bit of a rough start without any of the staff helping or giving any sort of direction, but all crew members were able to truly put forth all that they’d learned over the last 10 days and confidence and coordination eventually hit an all time high. We navigated around the Dog’s and down into Trellis Bay. We picked up the mooring on our first try! Very exciting day for the whole fleet.

We all showered up and cooked some baked penne with garlic bread for dinner. After the day started to power down, our boat discussed specifically needing to work on the diverse sailing techniques, each student feeling a little more comfortable in one over the other. The crew were complete rock stars today as they took over their boats!