You are more alive when you are sailing

Onboard the T/S Gunilla nothing is as you are used to.

Your sleeping schedule is completly out of wack, and as the days go by the thin line that separates night from day slowly fades away and turns into a pulp mush of meaningless strokes. Sometimes your day starts at 3 p.m, sometimes at 3 a.m. To alot of people this might seem strange and annoying, but I absolutely love it. As opposed to an otherwise dull and boring society were you wake up at 8, go to work, come home, make food and go to sleep, only to do it all over again the next day, life at sea really gives you a feeling of being alive. You work in the pooring rain and blazing winds until your hands bleed and your body feels like it has been ran trough a washingmachine at full power. But that's what life is all about, right? If you don't push your limits, how do you know that you are even alive?

Yesterday I woke up feeling confused, there was loud music, voices everywere and the lights were on in our little room on the boat. Soon I realised that the music was coming from DOS Annas speaker, and the voices belonged to my friends that were speaking about how we might get freshly baked bread for breakfast. I got up, ate a big bowl of porrage and went outside. As soon as I exit the door I froze. I took a deep breath and looked around me, all I could see was 1000-meter peaks coverd with snow, the blue ocean and a couple of sheep eating peacefully at the foot of the mountains. I stood there for a while admiring the view and wondering to my self, how could there exist such a beutiful place on earth? And whats even more bizarr is that we are sailing here! Seeing the white sails hanging there, 35 meters over my head, slowly but surely pushing the boat closer to reykjavik is a special feeling that words can't describe. I specificly remember one morning a couple of days ago. The sun was just about to rise out of the sea, and it looked like the entire sky was on fire. If I didn't know better I would have ran away in fear of the colorful wall of fire coming towards me, but instead I stood there, baffled over what mother nature had created.

Moments like these are what makes life worth living for me, and I think that Gunilla offers an incredible opportunity to experience something that alot of people never even heard of, life.

Benjamin Rodin NAS 1821.