Öckerö gymnasium

Our eight to twelve watch

When I woke up this morning, it was with hope that my sea sickness would’ve passed. Unfortunately, my hopes were shattered as I ate my usual morning porridge with cinnamon and sugar.

It was not as good as all the other mornings. Thirty minutes later, after quickly getting dressed and applying some sunscreen, we stood on half deck ready to go on watch.

First thing we do on our eight to twelve watch is to take a walk on deck to check that there’s nothing you can trip on. After that we played a few rounds of a game called “Hi ha ho” and then we got an order from the captain to go up in the rigg to redo a packaging for one of the raw sails. My guess is that the midshits, sorry midships watch, were the ones who’d done a terrible job. When we were done with that we sat on half deck until the ten o’clock fika, talking about diving and trying to name countries beginning with the letter D.

For fika I ate one plain cracker and one with cheese, tomato and pepper. After that I had enough energy to make it through the rest of the watch without falling asleep. After lunch and before class, I took a forty-five-minute nap and it was the most wonderful nap ever. Then I tried to do some schoolwork, but I got distracted by candy. For dinner we got some sort of stew with mushrooms and I ate one portion of it in the little mess hall and then another portion in the kitchen, because I got hungry again when I hung out there with the “backisar”.

At eight o’clock I was actually quite excited to go on watch again and I got even more excited when I remembered that we would get our usual scones later on the watch. At the watch we practiced a couple of sail maneuvers and taught our watch leader Stine, who’s Norwegian, about Sweden. Finally, we sung a few songs that are used for pulling the ropes in the same rhythm. Now I think they’re engraved in my brain and I will probably never stop humming them. When our watch had come to an end I was not yet tired enough to go to sleep, so I sat in the grand mess hall and wrote in my diary. That was a pretty common day in my life here on the T/S Gunilla, tomorrow I look forward to arriving outside of Cape Verde and being able to see land again!

Lovisa Ljunggren Agné, Starboard

Publicerad:

Öckerö seglande gymnasieskola
Björnhuvudsvägen 45
475 31 Öckerö

Telefon: 031-97 62 00
e-post: kommun@ockero.se