Departure day

Today I was woken up by my friend at 06:55 to sit at gangway watch until the morning line up at eight. I was surprised when I stepped outside in the morning because the night before when I sat gangway watch for four hours it was very cold. But today was the warmest day yet on our journey.

At the line up I rang the bell eight times, then the captain, Anders, told us the plan for today. Before we departed we had to prepare. My watch was supposed to take out all the trash before we left, but someone else had already done that so there were only two bags left. We also had to empty the bilge pump in our cabin. A bilge pump is a hole where water gathers. The bilge pump was in my wardrobe so we had to take out all my shoes and lift the floor board to reveal it. It was full of water so we had to get a little hand pump to get it out. We got a flashlight, the pump and some buckets. We pumped out all the water and used something like a vacuum cleaner to get up the last water at the bottom. Then we left the beautiful Shetland islands and started our journey towards Iceland.

I was then free to do as pleased for 7 hours. So I decided to sleep until lunch. When I woke up I took a shower and got all of yesterday's salt out of my hair. We swam on one of the world's most beautiful beaches. Today was departure day so we didn’t have any lessons, but after lunch I decided to study some swedish. I wrote about a Swedish book called the “ Ålevangeliet” which is a book about eels and the author's life. I wrote about the book's genre, which was fun. Then I went down in the boat and watched my friends play a game called codenames. At 15:20 it was fika time and we ate some sandwiches and fruit.

Later I took out all my clothes for my watch at four. This watch I was lookout so I needed warm clothes. So I stood in the front of the boat. After ten minutes I went to the officer on watch to report a boat I saw and get the binoculars to see better. I didn’t see many boats or anything like that. But there were a lot of birds and we sailed by a little island called Faula. I hoped to see puffins but they where no were to be find. At 18:35 someone came to take over so I could eat dinner. It was macaroni pudding, it was really good. Then I only had one hour left of my watch. After watch I almost immediately went to bed because we were woken up at 03:30 to have watch again.

//Vera Ringner Starboard