To read part eight of day three, click here.

I went to check out the platforms and decided that the girls wanted the middle one. Then Jen said that she and Katie got that one. Then some of the other girls said that we got the one on the right. But Luke came up to us and said that the guys had already called that one.

So we walked over to our platform. There was a big hole in it! Half of a plank was just gone! I went up to get my pack and ran into Luke. He grinned at me and asked how our platform was. I glared at him and told him he did that on purpose. He told me that of course he had, didn’t I know that all he ever did was try to annoy the girls? He grinned at me and took his pack back to his (not broken!) platform.

I brought my pack over to our platform where the girls were trying to decide the best way to avoid the hole and get six girls onto that platform. We decided that it was not happening and Tullia volunteered to sleep with the instructors again. (She had slept with them the night before too.)

I set my stuff on the edge of the platform. No one else ever wanted the edge and I did not mind it, so I always took it. There were a couple of nights I wished I was on the inside (when it rained), but most of the time I did not care. It was also nice to be on the edge because I am claustrophobic, and the sleeping bag was bad enough without being sandwiched between two other girls. I actually don’t know why that sleeping bag did not give me a panic attack – it was so tight! I didn’t even zip it up all the way. I only had it about zipped about half of the way up.

I was always prepared to freak out – every night I told the person next to me what to do if I woke them up because I was freaking out. 😀 And every night I would pray that I would not freak out. I REALLY did not want to have a panic attack because of my sleeping bag. And I did not have one!! Granted, I came really close the last night, but I never actually had a panic attack!

We set our tarp up as well as we could. And then Jen came over and we completely redid it. LOL

Putting up the tarp.

Then I went around to start collecting water bottles. The guys were still working on their tarp – we had set it up, taken it down and set it up again, and they were still working on theirs. 😀 And ours looked good! Jen had not even done that much, just showed us how to tie the knots and pound the stakes in well.

The girls won the unofficial tarp competition that night. 😀

So after I had grabbed all of the girls water bottles I dropped them by the baby seals and went over to the guys tarp to ask them for their water bottles. We had to have every thing that could hold water filled to the brim – no more water until we were down the mountain the next afternoon. I told the guys about that and told them to drink any water left in their bottles so I could get them full. They told me that I was mean and I just looked at them.

Luke pulled out his water bottles out, drank what was left in one of them, and tossed them at me from the other side of the platform. Bruce told me that his were empty, and I needed to pull them out of his pack. I asked which one was his and he told me it was the one right behind me. I went to turn around and almost tripped over his pack. 😀 I felt kinda awkward going in his pack, even if it was just the water bottle pockets, but he had his hands full of tarp strings. So I pulled his bottles out, took a couple of others that were being tossed at me and went back up to the main clearing.

Maggie and I filled up as many of the water bottles as we could from the baby seals and loaded up the five or six left over into the water filter bag.

Jen asked who wanted to come with us. I think Jordan came, and I know Ben and Kayce came. We grabbed the empty baby seals, the water filter bag and a couple extra water bottles that people pulled out as we were leaving.

We started back up the trail that we had come from. As we started hiking up the familiar trail we were commenting on how easy this was since we did not have our packs on.

Ha. What we were about to do next was going to be the one of the hardest things I had done so far.

Click here to read the next part of Day Three.

*Everything here is from my own memory and may not be correct. Outward Bound is not responsible for anything I post here.*