Sunrise during Circle of Life

With the sound of the classic intro of “Black Bird” my conscious slowly drifted back to reality. One of my fellow classmates was plucking the strings on a guitar to bring us all back to life after a heavenly sleep.

Leo, the first officer on watch between 4 and 8, has the routine of always making us do some sort of warmup to start the day off. So why would it be any different today? To follow the routine we took, what we call it, an ”evening walk”. In other words, we climbed the rig. I personally like it a lot, especially on days like this, when the sky is completely clear. As soon as we came down we were given a lesson about the starry sky. It was fascinating. I don’t think you can even imagen the amount of stars you can see when you’re out at sea. Meaning, if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes, it is absolutely stunning.

After this, we continued the work everyone onboard has been doing lately, the final and very precise cleaning of the entire ship.... We organized and dusted all the books and bookshelves in the big mess. At 7 am we all got called up on deck again, for an extremely important tradition we have during the 4-8 watch! It implies that we play the lion king song “circle of life” as we’re watching or rather dancing and singing with the sunrise. Today, as it might be the last one, we had planned something different. To be in the mainmast while the sun was rising. A very controversial idea right? OR NOT… I can agree that it doesn’t sound too exciting, but on this boat the smallest things truly are a mood lifter. It was definitely the best possible ending of the last morning watch.

Norah B