A wild first day at sea!

Today was the day when we left Lübeck. I felt a little sad actually, I really liked that city (and to be honest, I like it better at port than at sea). We cast off the lines at 9 o’clock and we motored out through the beautiful canal. It was a great start of an exiting day!

Me and my dear friend Ellen was going to spend our day in the galley as galley rats. We, who have the 12-4 watch, are supposed to serve the last lunch, and fix the coffee break at 15.00. Because it was the first day at sea, we were going to have a student meeting with the captain and the crew at 15.40. This meant that we hade a little less time to finish our work in the gally. But we didn’t really think about this as a problem at the time.

Our captain decided that is was a wonderful idea to stop the boat to have a swim in the sea at 14.00. It was a really good idea, because it was about 25°C and sunshine. I came with the idea to serve ice cream at the coffee break, because like, is there a better combination than ice cream, sunshine and swimming in the ocean?

When me and Ellen was on our way to get the ice cream out of the big freezer, we soon realized that it was in the corner behind all the cheese, minced meat and frozen berries. It was a challenge to take all the food out of the freezer and then put it back, I’ll tell you that. But we made it, ran down to change into out bikinis and had an amazing swim in the sea!

Then, it was time for the ice cream serving, and it was a little stressful. We hade to scoop the ice cream directly when the people came to get it so it wouldn’t melt, we had to fix with the dishes, and we hade to boil the spaghetti, all at the same time. It didn’t get any easier when suddenly all the ice cream cups were gone! We panicked, just to realize that we hade some cups in the little freezer, how clumsy of us to forget about them!

When everyone had got their ice cream, we had to quickly put away the ice cream batches, clean up and take the pasta out of the boiling water, so we could make it to the meeting in time. We came exactly on time! And we got to eat some of that ice cream too, which felt like a nice reward for making it!

Julia (Jullstar) Hagberg, Midships