A typical port watch

When you are signed on a sailing ship, it’s quite obvious that there will be some sort of sailing involved. But when you are in port, you can forget all the fun sailing manoeuvres and focus on the not so fun maintenance work.

With the speed of a sloth I got out the bunk and dragged my legs to the mess to have some breakfast. After my second cup of black coffee my body came back to life, so I changed to my working clothes and went up on deck.

It was a clear but chilly morning but we expected some rain later on. After the morning attention we were briefed by our watch leader and our bosun about today’s work, which was rust removal. Gunilla’s hull is made out of steel and was constructed in 1940, even though the ship was almost completely renovated in 1991, some parts of the hull are over 80 years old. This means that there is some rust here and there, and when I say some rust, I mean a lot of rust. To remove the rust, we use a wide range of tools. We primarily use a good ol’ rust hammer, but if there is a larger area suffering by rust, we use some air powered tools. We also have steel brushes, angle grinders and regular sandpaper. This sort of maintenance work is usually weirdly satisfying unlike wood maintenance, so it wasn’t that awful to be on port watch.

After a lot of rust removal, metal treatment and new paint coats our port watch was concluded a couple of hours earlier. This was thanks to the midships watch who arranged a very entertaining quiz competition onboard. So, thank you midships for making my watch shorter and for a fun evening.

Simon, starboard