Goodbye Poole!

Over 120 Children from the British School in the Netherlands Make a Splash at Rockley!

The beginning of July saw 122 kids and 14 teachers from The British School in the Netherlands (BSN) take to the water at their flagship centre , Rockley Point in Poole.

BSN have been bringing over 100 children aged 14 years to Rockley annually for the past 30 years to enjoy a week of activities on and off the water. The school provides a British education for approximately 1500 students of different nationalities from ages 3-19 years.

The children enjoyed four days of RYA sailing and the final day was spent canoeing and powerboating. During the evenings a variety of activities were planned including an offshore fishing trip, a trip to the local waterflume park at Splashdown, an evening of bowling and a trip to the cinema.

The children and teachers were enthusiastic as ever and Rockley are already looking forward to next year's trip! 

Thank you Rockley! I had a lot of fun!

Disco!

We all hurried back to the caravan so we could get ready to go to the disco. Guess where it was? In a church. That just seems like a strange place to have a disco. With the graves outside.....and all that. But it was really fun all the same. In fact, it was too short. Kelly and I did a karaoke of I will Survive. Good times, good times. :)

Me and Ellie in the caravan 

About to leave. From L-R: Amelia, Me, Emilie, Lizzy, Fiona, Ellie

Crazy, amazingly, awesome friends! Emilie, Ziyoda and Amelia!

Team Building Activities

It was still too windy to sail after lunch on Friday, but the instructors decided that we should all go outside and do sailboat recovery, just in case you fall in the water because your boat's tipped. Lucky me, it never actually happened while I was out on the water, but a lot of other people got tipped over on Wednesday. So we waded into the water and the teacher tipped a boat over while we were sitting in it. Turns out it was actually pretty fun! After that we went power boating (and we got to drive the power boat!) and then we did some team building activities. 

Emilie, my oddly shaped fruit. Get it? My pear! Hahahahaha! 

Rainy Day Activities

 On Friday, it was too windy for us to go sailing. So we did some indoor activities. We started off with sailing theory, but when we started getting bored (that means the teachers as well as the students!) we changed to playing games like Pictionary. 

Doing theory on the right side of the board : Pictionary scores on the left!

Emilie with the box in her mouth

We played a really funny game where there was a cereal box on the ground and you had to pick it up with your mouth without letting your hands or your knees touch the ground. Lizzy was the winner! She could pick up a little piece of the box from on the ground with no sides. 

Lizzy using her technique to get the box

More Sailing

Tuesday I was in a wayfarer with Emilie, Adelina, Lizzy and an instructor called Olly. He was really nice and he was only 17 years old! Wednesday was back to pikoing, except this time I was stuck with Tom (one of the boys in my form class). The weather was pretty terrible and it was REALLY windy, so we didn't do as much sailing. On Thursday I did power boating and kayaking. It was really fun, other than that my white socks turned to black by the end of the kayaking. :)
As the week went on it took longer to get everyone out of bed! I have to say, sailing is VERY tiring! 

A wayfarer

Fishing :p

Personally I hated the fishing, along with Amelia and Nora, but every one else seemed to have a good time. I didn't think that they would kill the fish, so I caught 9 fish, then felt guilty and started crying. Oh, one other thing. The weather was terrible. Raining windy and generally not nice. Oh, and another thing. All of the adults on board were male, so they didn't get why Amelia, Nora and I were feeling so bad. 

From L-R: Nora, Emilie, Adelina, Mayu, Ziyoda, Amelia

Adelina holding a fish that she caught

From L-R: Adelina, Ziyoda, Emilie

The shark that Ziyoda caught

Big fish!

Sharkie - luckily they threw him back in the water

From L-R: Mayu, Emilie, Ziyoda, Adelina

From L-R: Amelia, Nora, Mayu

Adelina feeding the seagulls fish from her hand....she didn't just feed them whole fish, when the captain of the boat started gutting the fish, she started chucking fish heads and guts for the seagulls to eat. 

3 fish on one line!

Ziyoda and a fish. 

Evening Activities

Each night we had an activity to do after sailing. 

Night 1: Water slide park & Buger King. The water slide park was really fun, but the food wasn't so great. (****)

Night 2: Fishing & Fish and Chips. HATED the fishing. And after killing a bunch of fish, eating fish and chips didn't sound totally appetizing.  (*)

Night 3: Cinema & Pizza Hut. Didn't really like the film - Transformers 3 - but the pizza wasn't bad and I loved the all you can eat Ice Cream machine! (***)

Night 4: Bowling & All you Can Eat Buffet. Bowling was fun and the food that night was AMAZING. Buffet with foods from all around the world. Yum Yum Yum!(*****)

Night 5: Disco & Buffet! The food was pretty good, and who can not have fun at a disco? I did a karaoke with Kelly. We sang I Will Survive. Really fun!(*****)

At the bowling center

Bowling: From L-R: Fiona, Lizzy, Hannah, Stephen

Sailing the Picos

On Monday, we managed to get out of bed straight after the alarm went off, and by 9 o'clock we had met up with the rest of the group and walked down to the beach where we were put into groups, given life vests and assigned a type of boat. I went with Emilie. There were two different types of sail boats for the beginners: the Picos (small 2 people boats) and the wayfarers (4 people boats + an instructor) and on the first day we were on the Picos. 

The Pikos

Me at the tiller, Emilie manning the sails

Rockley Watersports

This is the venue where we stayed and where we did our sailing lessons. The instructors were all really nice and everything was relatively close (10 minutes walk to the beach where we sailed). We had to get up at 7:00 for breakfast at 7:30. Breakfast was simple; toast, fruit, and cereal. After breakfast we had an hour before we had to meet up with the teachers at 9:05. We spent that time watching toddler shows on TV, shopping at the SPAR or writing postcards. 

The Breakfast venue

Our Caravan

My caravan buddies - From L-R: Lizzy, Amelia, Ellie, Emilie, and Fiona

Our group was very lucky. We were one out of two girl groups that got to stay in a caravan. All of the other girls had to stay in a not so nice hostel. Our caravan was AMAZING!

The outside of our caravan

The living room, where Emilie and I slept on the couches. 

The eating area (which we never used to eat on, more like dump stuff on). The corridor going to the back lead to the 2 bedrooms and bathroom.

Amelia and Ellie's room with 2 single beds. Lizzy and Fiona shared a double bed. In this photo Amelia is trying to stuff her suitcase underneath her bed. 

Poole, England

On the 3rd of July, the Sunday after The Bye Bye Blue, Year 9 set off at 8:45 in the morning, in 3 school busses to Poole. Poole is a costal city in England, famous for its sailing. And that's what we were going to do. Have a week of sailing. The photo below is a view from the inside of the bus as we went into the Euro Tunnel, which is a tunnel that goes under the English Channel, connecting England to France. 

p.s. Happy first day of High School to me and Happy first day of Middle School to Ashlynn

Goodbye Middle School, Hello High School!

There were many hugs and goodbyes at the end of the Bye Bye Blue. It had been an amazing night and I will remember it my whole life. Thanks so much to Madame Chantal who organised the whole thing and to all the volunteers who helped out. 

 Goodbye Middle School, Hello High School!  

Squish Pics

From L-R: Me, Ellie, Hannah, Lizzy, Adelina, Emilie, Ziyoda, Nora, Amelia

Daddy was amazing. He took beautiful photos and everyone thought that he should become a professional photographer. Throughout the next week people told me to thank him and tell him that he was brilliant. 

He put the best photos together onto a video which you can see if you click here, and I put them onto a blog so that people could print them off if they wanted - www.byebyebluepics2011.blogspot.com. 

Lucky me, I had a sleepover with a friend so I didn't have to help stay and clear up. Mommy, Daddy, Ashlynn and Buddy were at the school till midnight packing up the backdrop!

Ashlynn and me

Ellie and me

9JN class photo