Öckerö gymnasium

180

With fair winds and following seas we leave Palma de Mallorca behind while at the same time new problems and new challenges appear.

At 07:15 I was woken with the rest of my guard, Port-Guard… 15 minutes later from when we should have been woken. Is not the first time a guard has failed to wake the guard which will work after itself. Hypocritically I myself did actually fail to wake the guard after my own. I think that the students here on Gunilla are generally pretty terrible at waking each other up when it is time to. Either way…

After I was woken I put especially much clothes on because the last days have been pretty cold and today on our 4-hour watch it was my time beeing post, which means that I was mostly going to stand still. When you are post it means that you rotate between being outlook, the driver of the boat and being lifeguard. I was actually pretty surprised when I got on deck after I ate breakfast and felt that it was actually warmer than the days that had been.

I think that being post is actually pretty boring, and today was no exception. You just stand there for hours, looking forward at all time while you are not allowed to talk to anybody, and most of the times nothing happens. Most of times when you are outlook and we are at open sea, as we were today, you don’t see anything, when your lifeguard none ever needs help, and when you’re the driver you just stand there looking at that got damn compass and you try to adjust to one specific course. The only time when being post is fun, in my opinion, is when it’s windy, wavy, and stormy. While I was post the rest of my guard was cleaning, which is what we usually do now when we have the 8 to 12 guard. They also hade to suffer the consequences from the day before. Yesterday the washing machine broke so the rest of my guard had to wash the dishes by hand today. Overall I think that my guard that we had from 8-12 was pretty boring. The only really interesting thing that happened was that we for the first time on this voyage had all the sails set! Even though I didn't have the best time from 8 to 12 the rest of the day was actually pretty interesting…


After I had ate lunch and I was studying in the common room, Oskar, the officer on Gunilla, came in and told us that everybody had to go on deck and help with a maneuver, including those who weren’t on guard, thus me as well. We had to do a so called “tack” maneuver which is a maneuver that is performed when someone wants to sail against the wind with a boat like Gunilla, which was exactly what captain Anders wanted to do with Gunilla today. The form of sailing when sail against the wind is called “beat to windward”. “Beat to windward” means that you sick-sacking through the wind and a “tack” is one of these sick-ack turns that you can perform. The “tack” itself is performed by turning all the square sails, on every mast, at the same time, very fast, so they meet the wind straight head. If you perform it well and fast it will make the boat do a 180 O degrees turn. The reason that everybody had to participate is because of the fact that to perform a “tack” you have to turn every square sail at the same time, and to turn one square sail you have to at least be 3 people.

For me this was very exciting, it was the first time I had participated in such a big manuvver. It was also fun because it was the first time I did a maneuver with the two other guards at the same time. This was clearly the highpoint of the day.

Erik Arizala

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Öckerö seglande gymnasieskola
Björnhuvudsvägen 45
475 31 Öckerö

Telefon: 031-97 62 00
e-post: kommun@ockero.se