Melon Over Board

The days in Setúbal has been fantastic, spending time in the heat and getting rosy cheeks. The city Setúbal was very calm and welcoming with a beach close to the harbor with surprisingly cold water, but refreshing. The streets were cosy and colorful, every house having its own color and design, which I really appreciated. When we spent the day walking around in Lisboa I must have taken at least 30 photos of different walls with different colors and patterns on the tiled walls. Allround I really enjoyed the city, the people, the weather and the pretty houses.

Departure time was 9 am so we let all the lines go and set course south toward Sevilla. Unfortunately the winds have something against us, so we did not set any sails. Today we switched watches, starboard used to have the 8-12 watch and now we have 12-4. We did not only switch the hours we are on watch, we also have a new watch leader and a new officer.

On our day watch today we greased the blocks, and 2 pm the MOB alarm shouted out, it was time for a practice. The officers in command had thrown a water melon overboard, everyone went up on deck and started pointing at the floating watermelon. We launched the rescue runner (a jetski) in the water and Sara and Jens tock their places in dressed in neon orange overalls and headed to the melon which became smaller and smaller for every second that went, until it became invisible. Unfortunately we ended up not finding the watermelon so the rescue runners came back empty-handed, we were just lucky there was a watermelon in the water this time and not a person.

Now when we weren’t going very fast because of the MOB practice the captain let us stop for a quick swim in the ocean, which was very nice of him. Those who were on watch put the ladder in the water and threw out some lines to hold on too while in the water. I didn’t take a swim because I want not feeling that warm, but I took some nice pictures of my friends and enjoyed the sun. I also got some fun videos of my classmates doing flips into the sea.

After the swim it was coffee brake and our lovely chef Wågis had made some lovely cardamom rolls, that we got fresh out of the oven. She is an amazing chef and her buns are just fantastic, the other day when we had Portuguese students onboard she had made Swedish cinnamon rolls that were very appreciated.

After the coffee brake, we had our weekly meeting onboard were everyone has the chance to bring up whatever they want. And today I had something to share, a game for everyone onboard that’s kalled ”killer game”. Everyone are given tree notes with a place, an object and one person onboards name written on it. The game is about ”killing” the person on the note you received with the object you were given by that certain place. To kill the other person they have to accept the given object from your hands to theirs. It's a very fun game that we played on our last voyage, but the whole crew gets very paranoid.

The day ended with classes until 8 pm, but I’m staying up a while in the big mess writing this blog, trying to remember what else we did this lovely day onboard. But I think that what you just read was everything you need to know about the 10th of October onboard on T/S Gunilla.

Lilja Alm, Starboard ;)