Today was our first day on our own and the introduction to final. During final we had to do everything ourselves. This included sailing, making our own food, washing dishes, getting the navigation plans ready, checking the tide charts, looking for all the safety hazards, location or place in the map exactly, getting to our location on time, deciding what the best time to catch the wind and a whole list of other things. That's where the concept of The Safety game came in. The Safety game is a way to find what is wrong and finding the problem within 10 seconds. If safety was called and with in 10 seconds no one found out what was wrong, 1 coke was taken away (the group started with 10 cokes). In other words the group had no room for mistakes, and since we hadn't had a coke in about two weeks everyone was alert every time safety was called. The Tijger crew was scheduled to wake up at 4:30 a.m. to begin doing the dishes from the night. Jesus' alarm went off exactly at 4:30 a.m. and no one woke. Minutes later Matthew wakes and tries to reach over to the Tijger and suddenly Matthew fell into the water and all of his cloths got wet. No one woke up to help him, but to laugh.

At 5:00 a.m. everyone woke up and got the boat ship shape again ready to leave. And off we went, on our way (By the way we were headed to Nyack). When finally our sore arms reached Nyack, everyone got off the boats and on to the dock and relaxed for about 3-4 minutes, which of course was not long enough to rest. The whole group got together to decide about whether to let Juan and Dwight come back and be part of our group. This was a time for us to express our feelings and at the end all came to a collective idea that the decision was made: NO. There were many reasons, but no need for details. After the meeting the group was invited to a scheduled meeting with the famous John Cronin. John Cronin is known as the grandfather on River Keeper, which is the reason why the Hudson today is not a waste river for chemicals and other nasty nitrogenous human waste. Thanks to John Cronin and his helpers the river now is much better from the condition it used to have. After the groups got their questions answered we left John Cronin's studio and went back down to the docks. Soon later the instructors called the group's captains separately. The deal was that we could not just sit around doing nothing or relaxing, so the instructors told the captains of the day that we had to come up with a productive and creative project which was to be the last of many. The entire groups started to get frustrated because that day the temperature was 100 degrees and no one felt like doing anything at all.

After a while the group started walking in search of the nearest park so that we could put our ideas together in the shade. On our way there everyone was scattered around and everyone was tired of walking and anyways it was too hot to walk in the first place. Trevor invited everyone to eat ice cream because he saw that we weren't in the mood to walk anymore. After the refreshing ice cream, on our quest for the park we went and moments later we arrived. After minutes of hard thinking it was decided that the project was to be a news-report- like project. One person had to act as a news reporter, and another person had to act like someone they had interviewed in the previous towns giving their expressions toward the Hudson River, how the river affected them and simple questions like name and what kind of jobs did they have. We started the project but the camera ran out of power so we had to go back to the boats to charge back up again. Soon after we were sent to do another job, and this made us more frustrated, but oh well, we had to do it. The instructors told us to take everything out of the boat and clean. Once we got started the whole group found a way to do it as quick as possible. Some people started joking around and some started to sing. Cleaning the boats took a while and dealt with having to do more projects. When we finished, diner was ready and everyone started getting the information needed for the next day. During diner we had our traditional ANCHOR meeting, which by far was the fastest yet. Everyone was so tired from all the work that was done during that day that once we hit those oars there was nothing that could wake us up.