A common day at sea

Hello everyone, I hope that you all are having a really good time back home! While writing this I realized that the journey really has begun to approach its end and that we only have 10 days left onboard. The days have been flying past and it feels like it was just a week since we spent the night on Öckerö, wating for our corona test results to arrive. I remember how I sat down in my corner of the classroom and counted the hours remaining to departure.

Back then I was almost sure that something would go wrong, because traveling in a pandemic can’t go without any trouble. But it turned out I was wrong, not one of us have been infected by the corona virus, even though we have travelled to 4 different countries.

The trip has been really exciting, and I have seen a lot of cool places. Although the ports haven´t been as magnificent as the last trip, I´ve had a really good time. Also, the sailing has been really fun. I’m not one who loves to sail, but this trip has changed my mind about that. I think it´s because of the good mood here onboard and that I have had so much fun with the people in my watch. In short, I am having a good time and it would not bother me at all to stay for another month or even more. I remember how we, during our last days at sea, to Miami, we were laying down on the deck under the night sky and talked about all the things that we missed back home. But I haven’t felt much homesickness this trip. I am having a really good time here on the boat and I would love to stay a little bit longer. Off course I look forward to coming home to my family and I´m excited to start school again, but at the same time I know that I will miss Gunilla a lot. Especially since we won’t be back onboard in one and a half year.

Today has been a good day, like most of the days here on the boat. I was woken up at 7 o’clock in the morning. I was tired and had to force myself to climb out of my bed so I wouldn’t fall back to sleep again. We have recently changed our watch times and i´m not used to only getting 6 hours sleep per day. Nell, my classmate, who had woken me up told me to wear warm clothes, so I took her advice and put on two pairs of work pants and went upstairs to have a warm cup of coffee with the rest of my watch. Outside waited a newly risen sun and a fresh new day. The sea was calm and we were crossing the Gibraltar strait. It´s my second time sailing through the strait and it was so much more beautiful to see it in daylight than during the night, which was how I saw it last time.

We started the watch with trimming the sail to achieve maximum speed. Though there´s still a few days left we have started with the “final cleaning” of the boat. Me and Agnes got the assignment to clean the guest cabin. We had to take all the books out from the shelves and clean every inch of the cabin. We worked on that for the whole watch and still, we didn´t manage to finish in time.

I was so tired after the watch that I fell asleep immediately. I then slept through dinner which resulted in me being really hungry when I woke up just in time for the second watch of the day. We continued our cleaning job. On the cleaning schedule it said it was time to clean under the floor hatch in the cabin so me and Arvid spent the four hours of the watch cleaning under the floor in my cabin. Hedvig and Villemo served a delicious apple pie for the snack break that gave us energy to continue thorough out the whole watch.

Ellen blixt sas1922