A Sunday at sea

The day started as always at 7 am. Even if we wish that we can sleep for many more hours before the day starts, we have to get up to eat some breakfast.

Today is a Sunday which means we got served some eggs and bacon. It is different from all our others breakfasts which makes the day more special than every other day here on the boat. After the tasteful breakfast we got ready for our watch that starts at 8 am and ends at 12am. The main thing we did today was cleaning the rigg from all the dirt. We filled a bucket with water and took a rag before we climbed up and started to clean by wiping down everything. I will tell you a secret, we only did one side because it was sails in the way and the inclined. Even if it was hard work and you became seasick after have been in the rigg for two hours, the work was totally worth it. Okay, maybe not totally worth it.. I would not recommend to vomit 20 meters up in the sky. Luckily the bucket with water existed, but that also meant I needed to carry down my vomit. Not going to lie, I vomited again just by seeing it…

The only good thing we got from the work is that you don’t get sand from Dakar all over you when you take one step up in the rigg. The rest of the watch flew by! After a well-deserved lunch and nap we started our lessons. On today’s schedule we evaluated our stop in Dakar and did some history. After every harbour we discuss what we have done, all the good and bad things, so the next class get some tips and tricks from the ones that have been there before. In history we wrote about how they used their history on the island Gorée. I would say that it was very interesting. After two hours of lessons, we had the long awaited “gofika”. Today we got blueberry pie and some fruits. It was very luxuries and tasted amazing!

Because it is a Sunday out at sea we have something called the big gathering. That means that everyone gathers on deck and everyone can take up things they believe everyone should hear. The biggest thing today was that we need to use less water so we can fill up our water tanks before we come to Mindelo. After the big meeting every watch has a smaller meeting where they share what they would want Anne-Li and our captain Bo to know about, the things that get taken up are very different. After all the meetings the lessons continued and then we ate some delicious dinner. Of course, we took another nap before our second and last watch of the day. I was extremely happy because I didn’t need to climb and we didn’t do anything too hard. We got a lesson about Norway from our Norwegian watch leader and sang some sailors song. I got to tell you; we are going to sing them all the time now. They are actually really catchy! Then, finally, we got to go to sleep.

Livia Benito, Starboard