Day 14! It’s our last day before we can walk freely down the pontoon. All of us are sitting on Quest with itchy feet. Well, Jack and I are.

Delph is in her cabin, quite happy as usual, with her ‘no drugs here, but plenty of devices’ attitude.

Lu is on the saloon sofa, doing trigonometry review questions from her maths book. I have to blink to believe it. I didn’t even make her do it. Nope, she had a session with her tutor, Joe this morning and is doing the questions of her own accord. I’m scared to say anything in case she’s in a trance, realises and stops. Just walk past her slowly…

We did our dive exams on Sunday too. It was midday and the girls were still in bed – so I thought I’d do the Rescue Diver exam first. This meant that when Lu got up, I could help her with the questions I’d already seen. Ha. She got a higher mark than me – without a single piece of feedback. I watched her flick through the multiple-choice questions like she was ticking off a list. I wasn’t even sure she’d been listening to the course, not really, when we did it together. It was kind of like, yeah that’s interesting, can I do your nails?

When it came to the exam, I got up early to revise. Different types of oxygen delivery, decompression illness types, search and recovery procedures.

When it was Lulu’s turn to do the exam, she did the fifty questions like she was waiting for a bus and was like, cool, what’s next? Brains are amazing things. Delph did her exam with Jack and also got a higher mark than me. Of course she went back to her cabin.

I guess the question is now: what is next? With this in mind, I’ve put out some feelers on the FB Bonaire groups. I started by joining the Bonaire cruiser’s group for boat kids. So far, it seems that the majority of boat kids here are like the majority of boat kids: young. Oh well.

I also asked a local group if there were any teenage dive clubs on the island. Since this island is populated by about 20,000 people and I think mostly everyone is into diving. I got a recommendation for a junior rangers programme – run by the long-standing Bonaire Marine Park. It looks really good too, and the lady who recommended it on FB was the lady who replied to me from the marine park. Ohh, I thought, she works for the marine park! Detective work..

The education lady responded a bit later. The programme is full at the moment. Only 35 teenagers at a time. Oh, ok. The lady was nice though and said she’d put our girls on the waiting list.

In the meantime, just leaving the boat at this point will be a start. We have to start somewhere.