Öckerö gymnasium

A Wednesday on the North Atlantic

It’s the 10th of August and we’ve been at sea for 4 days in a row, heading for Iceland. The day started with with wake up call at 11 am, I then had lunch right before my watch, today we were served pasta with some leftover curry from yesterday’s dinner. 

I got on my watch at 12 am and was prepared for four cold hours on deck. To my surprise the weather was actually on our side, it was windy and the sun was up in the sky shining. Though it’s still worth remembering that this is the North Atlantic, which means big waves and a ship that rolls and heaves like crazy. This makes even the simplest of tasks way more difficult, it’s nearly impossible to stand still on deck without flying all over the place.

Despite the ship trying to throw us overboard our watch was calm and nice. We contuinued sailing towards Iceland’s coast at a stable pace of 5-6 knots. Altough we were expecting worse weather later on so we made some preparations by taking down one of our topsails in advance. During the rest of the watch we didn’t really have much to do, so we all sat on half-deck and practiced splicing. Splicing is something that had never really gone my way, all of my previous attempts had usually ended in mishaped creations. But this time, after a lot of confusion and a few swearwords, I ended up with something that somewhat resemled a splice.

After the splicing it was time for a fika break in the small crew’s mess. The galley had prepared a fantastic raspberry and blueberry pie, that went down slightly too fast together with some ice cream. When we were done with our fika and had no more pie left to eat, it was time to handover the watch.

We are currantly about 80 nautical miles away from Iceland’s coastline, and if the weather stays on our side we expect to be there in less than a day. From there we will continue on our plan to sail around north of Iceland towards Reykjavik.

Jonathan

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Öckerö seglande gymnasieskola
Björnhuvudsvägen 45
475 31 Öckerö

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