Student Update November 12, 2012

On Saturday morning, we woke up to get to circle a half hour early, at six, for our long exercise.  Most of the kids on run track ran around 10 miles into deep creek, and swim track rode our bikes to the other side of the cape to swim the last part of our super swim.  We jumped off the rock and into the water, and were greeted by a wall of  jellyfish, albeit a harmless species.  It reminded me of the scene in Finding Nemo, where Dori and Marlin have to bounce across the field of jellyfish.  We were able to get through the jellyfish with minimal stinging, and swim back and forth between High Rock, and Chub Point a couple times.  Now that we have swum all of the parts of the course, I am feeling a more confident about the super-swim.  We got back to campus for classes, and everyone was bundled up in jackets and sweatshirts for the morning, complaining about how cold it was.  When we got to our literature class, we checked the temperature, and it was 71 degrees.  It was amazing to see how we had all acclimated to the heat here, which is going to make arriving home to winter difficult.  It will also be hard to go home and not have the same daily routine as we do here, as we will still be used to living with 45 other students, having structured meal times at everyday, and study hours every night.  For our Saturday night activity, everyone was exhausted from long exercise, so we had a fort building contest in the Pres. Room, and then watched Harry Potter, but a lot of students went to sleep early because we could barely keep our eyes open.

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Yesterday, on our day off, a group of students went with Maxey back to High Rock, where we moved rocks under water to get them to form IS F ’12. I struggled at the beginning lifting the rocks, but then Hannah came over to help me lift them so we could swim together making it easier to get air while still swimming with the rocks.  It was great to see how the large group of us we were able to work together as a team to assemble something so cool that not one of us could have done alone.  After we finished assembling the rocks, we continued to swim down a ways to see some caves.  We went inside one of the caves, but it was really murky, and smelled so bad that we could smell it through our masks.  Even though we weren’t able to explore the caves as much as we would have liked, I am looking forward to being able to explore them more in the future.