Training, training and a bit more training

My day began at 12 AM with a night watch, and since we are still getting familiar with sailing the ship we did some training with setting the sails. We kept on doing this until our fika break at 1:30 AM. After the fika me and the other maritime students in the watch were going to try to mount the emergency steering. It wasn’t too difficult to mount, but we had to be careful to not drop it on ourselves or make too much noise.

The emergency steering basically works like a normal tiller, but instead of someone steering with the tiller in the aft of the ship we put up some lines that go to each side of the ship, and then we put two people on each side who will haul the line to make the rudder move. We do it this way to ease the communication between those steering the tiller and the one who stands at the wheel keeping an eye on the course of the ship.

Putting away the emergency steering gear was more of a hassle. To loosen the tiller we used two people with crowbars to push the tiller up from it’s place. While we did this we also had one person trying to wiggle the tiller by it’s end to loosen it up.
After the excersice there wasn’t much more to the watch and I really just wanted to get some sleep.

Me and the others in the watch went off at 4 AM and I could finally go to bed, but after a couple of hours of sleep I woke up to some loud banging which I quickly realised were the sound of waves bangning against the ship. I tried getting some more sleep after that but im not entirely sure of how much more sleep I got, if any.
At 11 PM my cabin got woken up and told that lunch will soon be served and we have watch in an hour. It was far windier than the day before, but the wind wont stop us from practicing setting sails and actually trimming them for a better sailing experience. The watch came to an end at 4 PM and today was our cleaning day, so after the watch we have been cleaning our cabins and washing our clothes.

Ludvig Fritz Oijens