A day full of Fairy tale characters

Waking up, feeling like you crashed into the world like a meteorite, isn’t the best way to start a day. But I have only myself to blame for choosing to explore the harbors and cities that we get to instead of doing my essay’s (kind of). I started the watch like a Zombie and ended it just like Spiderman an hour after everyone else.

Today was a very nice day, except for the morning. The last few days have been pretty hectic on my end. And last night I sat until twelve o'clock to write on different essays that are due when we leave Bremerhaven. That meant that I got about 6 hours of sleep before it was time to wake up again. And getting little sleep for a couple of days in a row usually ends in disaster.

Today was our turn to keep an eye on the ship and take care of it. And I got to grease the running backstays that keep the mast standing in really rough conditions. This is really tricky to do since there is no way to grease them without using a little thing called a bosun’s chair. This nifty little thing is essentially a swing but made to handle much harder use. So I put on the harness, jumped into the overall and got a short briefing on how to use the safety brake that I had to take with me. And there I was on my way up the ladder with the chair on my back, a can of grease swinging by my side, a couple of cloths and a pace way faster than I was ready for. So I had to stop halfway and catch my breath. But eventually I got to the top of the mast where there was a rope ready to take me down again.

So me and Astrid, who is one of the watch leaders, made the chair ready and then I got straight to work. It is very tedious work and greasing the backstay isn't that funny in itself and after a couple of hours doing the same thing it gets kind of boring. But since the chair is hanging from the top of the mast you can swing it back and forth. This gave me some kind of Spider-man powers and so I hopped between the backstay. It must’ve looked pretty cool or funny because there were a lot of people that stopped to take a picture of me and my Spider-man abilities. So I made my way down the rig greasing where it had to be greased. And when I got down I thought that it was nice to be done but no, it became clear that I had to tar the last five meters of the backstay’s. So there was nothing to do but to unsecure myself from the bosun’s chair, climb down, change the cans and the cloths, climb back up and start taring the backstay. When I was finally done

Melker Ekberg

Nab2124