March 9

The day began 11:00 when the watch, Portside, ate breakfast. Today was our fourth day at sea and routines started to set in.

Im currently in the 12 to 4 watch which is my favourite except for one reason. Usually you only get 4 hours of free-time without counting the 8 hour sleep. Our free time is after our lessons that end 20:00 until we go on watch again 24:00. This means that we only have free time while its dark outside and the majority of people in my watch sleeps during that time. Today we didn’t have that problem because it’s Sunday and we don’t have any lessons or safety practice as we already did them on Thursday instead. This meant that we would get 12 hours of free-time without any disturbances.

Before our free time we still had our day watch ahead of us. The plan was to do one thing, smear wood tar all over the rig. This was to protect the steel wire from rusting. People say wood tar smells nice and I agree to an extent. The pain to wash it away and the pungent smell says otherwise. I still smell it from my hands while writing this a day after.

After the watch I had a navigations lessons with our captain Anders with contained information on how to read nautical paper charts and lay a course.

Later in the middle of our dinner we were abruptly stopped by people saying the could see whales in the distance. We went up and looked for them on our starboard side. Far in the distance you could see whales jumping and splashing in the water.

The rest of the day was spent watching the sunset, watching movies and getting some extra sleep in before our night watch.

Fjodor Johansson