Beautiful morning, beautiful evening

Imagine being woken up at 7 am because you have watch at 8 am and when you open the door ready to get some work done, the sun was shining, the ocean was flat and wind in the sails. Can it get any better?

Besides the good weather, the day was quite ordinary with the same routines as the previous four days. Work, eat, sleep and repeat. My watch has been really busy on our work hours therefore we have been furling sails but also unfurled them. But today almost every sail was sat when we got on deck except some staysails that we later unfurled. After setting sails we climbed in the rig and did some work there.

When the clock turned 12 pm it was time for my watch, starboard, to eat lunch and portside to take over the sailing. Maybe now you are thinking “when do these kids have lessons?”. You don’t have to worry; we have lessons although we eat candy and talk a lot. Today’s lessons however were religion, social science and a port presentation about Plymouth, our next port. We did work that will benefit us when we are coming ashore the next day like for example write questions for interviews. Surprisingly very few have been sea sick over these couple of days which means that almost everyone has been able to study which did not occur on our last sailing trip last semester.

Thoughts of school work and Plymouth soon leaves my mind when I step out in the evening air to get to work once again at 8 pm. We began our shift with climbing up to furl a sail. Once we started to work, we saw dolphins swimming besides T/S Gunilla. Fascinated by the beautiful night sky full of stars we soon would hear our captain below us singing and playing his guitar. I got back on deck with a smile on my face and a singing starboard watch. What a lovely way to spend an evening on. Can a beautiful evening top a beautiful morning? I would say so.

Victoria Hansen, Starboard