Vacation was a blast and quite the learning experience. In short it was a sailing and diving trip to the British Virgin Islands for 9 days.
And by learning experience I mean I learned that 9 days is about as long as I want to stay on a boat! We slept on the boat all 9 days and ate most of our meals on it as well. We did go ashore for the beach, dinner/drinks in the evening about every other day though, so we didn’t get too stir crazy. There were 5 of us (myself, Nafisa, and three friends) on a 47 foot sail boat named “La Bonne Vie” aka The Good Life.
The kitchen/dining and area above deck were big enough that I never felt crowded even though those were the only common areas. The bedroom was as big as a full size bed plus a 2 feet in front, just enough room for the door to open. The bathroom was about 4 square feet half of which was taken up by the toilet, with a detachable sink head that doubled as a shower head. Size constraints were really the only not so great part about living on the boat most of which I got use to pretty quick. When the wind stopped it tended to get a little hot in the bedroom but with the windows open it wasn’t too bad. The almost nightly thundershowers, however, which caused me to jump out of bed and shut the windows were not so great. I felt like I was living back in my fraternity with fire alarms going off randomly, except it was warm enough that I didn’t have to pile on clothes like I did for my fraternity in Boston.
Meals were great and I probably ate better than I did at home. There was a grill on the back of the boat so we had shish ka bobs, grilled chicken, and even hamburgers one night. Food was pricier than the US because they have to ship everything in on a container boat.
Scuba diving was the main daily activity quite the enjoyable one. This trip was my first time doing it in the ocean. I took a course before I went on the trip but had only mucked about the pool a little bit. It was pretty crazy how much color I saw along with the different types of big creatures (fish, moray eels, and even a shark!)
I wasn’t nearly as scared as I thought I was going to be, probably because I could see all around me, as opposed to swimming in the ocean and not being sure what’s underneath you. The flip side to that being on the way up from diving you have to worry about other boats zooming around up top. About halfway through we saw some kids zipping around in inflatable motor boats which initially made me think “Wow they really shouldn’t be doing that, it’s dangerous!” until I realized that if I was a kid and had an inflatable motor boat to zip around in I would have too =). Flight back was a little longer than anticipated as our plane was overweight leaving the BVIs but our friends volunteered to catch the next flight and saved the day. That was the vacation in a nut shell and hopefully everyone enjoyed the read.
