The harmless buoy

It’s no longer just sea, it’s islands, dolphins and other boats aswell. We’re no longer alone, without life. It is nice to finally have something to look at while at watch.

My watch started at twelve o´clock midnight, and the first thing we did was taking a walk in the rig, and we climbed to the front of the boat, on the bowsprit. There’s always such a magical feeling climbing under calm nights with stars and moonlight. It’s times like these that you learn to really apreiciate our school and the Gunilla. Magical. After our climb we had a really chill nightwatch with some cleaning of the laundryroom and our watchleader read some pages from the book Loranga for us.

Later, during the daywatch we sailed through a small passage with a lot of buoys. I was on lifebuoy watch’. When your the lifebouy guard on lifebuoy duty for half an hour and then switch to lookout for half an hour, and lastly helmwatch for half an hour. You do that on repeat throughtout the whole watch. On this day there was a lot of things to look for as lookout, especially other boats and buoys. We had to stear away from buoys two times on our watch, one of the times we actually hit the buoy aswell. It could go very wrong when you hit a buoy if it entangles in the propeller. Luckily for us the buoy didn’t get tangled, and it just drifted away behind the boat. No harm done, to us nor the buoy.

Ella Göransson Emgård