A Port watch filled with work

The day starts bright and early by getting woken by the current sitting gangway guard at 7:00. Since I was up late watching a movie in the big mess I decided to sleep the extra 45 minutes instead of eating breakfast. At the 7:55 lineup some of us were late. While we stand there, half dead, at 7:58 just looking down at the ground waiting for the final few to show up, you can feel the embarrassment. I don’t think we have all been on time for a single port-lineup with the new captain,
Anders.

After lineup, Tage, the Danish slave driver, which he calls himself,
comes and puts us to work. I am sent to deep clean under the backen. We
start by taking everything from the shelves etc. out. Doing this leaves
a huge mess on main deck, where we put everything, just in time for some
British officials to come and do a “port state control”. While they look
around I am out on the pontoon scrubbing the shelves from under the
backen.

While I am out on the pontoon scrubbing away ÖMC-William, who just got
back from Sweden the day before, comes and takes an ugly picture of me.
Before I have time to say anything he is gone like the wind, probably
already having a picture taken of his next victim.

We keep working the entire day, Tage in command, until at around 16:30
when it is time to clean both the interiors. Myself, being one of the
last to come into the student interior, have to choose either to clean
the toilets or scrub the showers. I make the easy decision to scrub the
toilets and then hold my breath while I scrub away. When I’m done we
just have to wait for the cleaning to be approved but unfortunately the
cleaning in the big mess wasn’t up to par. Because the people who
cleaned the big mess were gone, thinking we were done for the day, so I
had to take care of it.

After this we are done for the day so I just relax until dinner and then
relax and watch a movie in the evening.

Einar