By M. Giant
Only the second leg and we're already bunching. Leaders Jessica and John begin their leg in the wee hours of the morning, only to learn that everybody's going to have to wait for the water taxis to their clue until 7:30 AM. While waiting, Dave and Connor talk to Jessica and John about the second Express Pass that, according to an arrangement agreed upon during the course of the leg, Team JJ (TM Meghan, grr) owes the father-son team. John only cares about keeping it quiet so all the other teams will still suck up to him for a while first.
When the leg begins, they take motorboats across the water to a wedding chapel at a nearby resort, where a priest gives them a blessing, some snorkel gear, and their clue. In the Detour, racers will have to either dive for oysters until they find two with red pearls inside, or don diving helmets to set up a picnic table on the ocean floor. Almost all of the teams opt to look for pearls, but Dave and Connor blow their early lead when they get all the way to the oyster field before realizing they didn't pick up their snorkel gear and have to go back to get it. Joey and Meghan end up finishing the task first, but the hockey brothers and Jessica and John and even Dave and Connor are breathing down their neck. The four of them end up pretty close together all the way to the Roadblock. Where, on a tiny island, one racer from each team has to kick a coconut down the beach on stilts. Hockey dude Anthony finishes first, with Connor right behind. A footrace to the Pit Stop ensues, which Bates and Anthony win. Connor's dad Dave seems to blow out his Achilles tendon on the final sprint, so he may be out of the race for good. Which of course is all about John and who he's going to give that second Express Pass to now.
After Joey and Meghan narrowly beat Chuck and a physically overtaxed Wynona to the mat to check in as teams four and five, there's still drama at the back half of the pack. Idries and Jamil, whose fear of water was pretty well established during the first leg, prove completely stymied by this Detour and its total lack of a dry-feet option. So much so that Jamil wants to quit and take the penalty almost on sight. Idries holds out, though, and the patheticness of their attempts to pearl-dive are overshadowed only by the self-destructiveness of their method. Meanwhile, roller derby moms Mona and Beth find success with the underwater picnic Detour option and end up as team number six, Pam and Winnie get lost trying to jet-ski to the Roadblock, and Max and Katie and Jennifer and Caroline start their leg an hour and forty-five minutes behind everyone else, thanks to the penalty those two teams took in the leg.
But the penalized teams rally, starting the leg with their hair on fire despite some lip service about working together, Beekman Boys/Team Grabbie-style. They also do the undersea picnic, then catch up to Pam and Winnie at the Roadblock. Former gymnast Caroline smokes both Max and Pam at this task, so she and Jennifer end up as team number seven, and Max and Katie are team number eight. Pam is running out of patience with the stilts by the time Idries and Jamil decide to belatedly switch Detours, find the diving helmets much more conducive to breathing, and finally get their clue. But the time the twins spent in the water proves insurmountable, as Pam and Winnie are the penultimate team and Idries and Jamil are Philiminated. So now they can go back to their OB/GYN practice and look forward to years of their patients teasingly asking them to do water births.