Hairless

As some of you might know if you´ve read these blogs before, we had a bet with our first mate Leo. The challenge was to preform two tack-changes without any help from the crew. If we succeeded, we got to cut off his dreadlocks of eleven years.

Everyone took this assignment very seriously, whether the motivation being to see Leo hairless or just to prove him wrong. Either way we studied, practiced, and figured out who should do what and where, everything to succeed with our tack changing. To succeed you need more than skills and determination, you also need the right conditions such as good wind and today, all these conditions fell into place. It was decided, it was time to do a tack changing and make Leo hairless.

Everyone gathered on main deck, and we started allocating roles so that everyone was sure about what to do and when to do it. The younger Leo, who is a student onboard, took charge and handed out orders. With nervousness and excitement, we performed our first tack changing successfully. When the time came to do our second tack changing it unfortunately didn´t go quite as well. Halfway into the maneuver we lost our speed and therefor couldn´t complete the tack changing. This took everyone’s excitement down and our once smiling mouths turned into frowns. Fortunately for us, the sad moment only lasted a couple of minutes until we got the information that the rules didn´t say anything about the changes needing to be performed right after each other. The motivation was now stronger than ever, we didn´t want to fail again, Leo would be hairless. With some reflection over our past mistakes and a bunch of new hope we preformed our third tack changing flawlessly all by our self’s and the feeling was magical. Everyone walked around with smiles big as bananas and looked very satisfied with themselves and our teamwork. We couldn´t have made it if it wasn´t for everyone who gave their all and the teamwork we have. The single person who gave the most impact on our success was however Leo, the brain behind all of this. This reasoning had Leo the chief mate too and Leo the student therefor became the first one to cut off a dreadlock from chief mate Leo´s hair. He later put it in a plastic bag and wanted to hang it up on some wall, like a trophy. I personally think it´s a nice thought to save something that is connected to a memory but a dread on a wall seems a bit too gross, especially if the person who´s getting them cut off have had them for over eleven years.

Maja Aderby