A normal day?

Today was a very normal day at sea. If I can call a day onboard normal… I mean normal for us. We woke up at 03.30 and prepared ourselves for watch. It is always a fight against yourself getting up in the morning, but when you have woken up it gets easier and easier throughout the day.

On our watch I was post, so I steered the boat and looked for other boats for four hours. we have also started to steer without the compass to practise before the pilot are coming to get us in the canal. I thought that it was fun to steer that way. The people who were in the working force however had an interesting working task. They got to splice ropes, witch kind of is a sort of braiding. You “braid” the rope together with itself so you get a loop in the end. When they were done with that, they got to do something very special. It´s called “Atlantic talk” and the point basically is to get to know each other better. And to get a better view of the other people in our watch. It is a very beautiful thing, and I feel like we understood each other better after our talks.

Something else about night watch is that we often se different animals, this watch we saw flying fish, they are very cool but also very common, so we don´t react as much anymore. BUT we also saw a bird and after thirteen days at sea a bird is cooler than a fish. The sad truth about birds that lands on boats this far from shore is though that they often land to die. They have lost their way and land to rest but then they get seasick and dies. (Spoiler alert, the bird survived!!! It flew away the day after)

When the clock turned 05AM it was time for coffee break, and the people who worked in the kitchen served scones. They were as good as always and after being awake for a while in the middle of the night you get hungry. However, when we came out on deck again after the coffee break it had started to rain, and the wind blow up. Our first officer said that a squall was on its way. But we were lucky that it didn’t rain too much. we have also started to steer without the compass to practise before the pilot are coming to get us in the canal. I thought that it was fun to steer that way.

After our watch we went to sleep again, and we slept until it was time for lunch. After lunch we had lessons where we of course worked very hard with our schoolwork. And since we slept on our free time, it was time to work again directly after our lessons. On this watch I was a part of the working force. We did some maintenance work, me for example worked with some bottlescrews, I was hanging them up because they needed to dry. Then we tried to get rid of some paint of the deck that couldn’t
be there. We also did some games when we were done with the maintenance work. We played ninja and hi-ha-ho. Then we went to sleep again because that is all we do, work, study and sleep.

😊 It is a simple life here on the boat.

/Kajsa