Date: 27th December 2019
Author: Ruben
Position: In the Carribean sea
Geographical Position:12° 52.9N / 071°06.1W
Etmal:138 nm
Days with diarrhea on board: 2

Not every day can be a good day. Today I had quite a tiring, hard and annoying day without a lot of sleep. But sometimes you need such a day to start appreciating the other, nicer days. It went like this:

My day already started at 23:30 when I was awoken for my 00:00 – 04:00 watch. We started out already two short as Mara had galley duty and Johannes didn’t feel well. So it was just Phil, Joana and me – Paul was there too, but he was shadowing Simon, our watch officer. It was a nice warm night and you could stay on the bridge without having to put a sweater or anything like it on.

At the beginning of the 00:00 to 04:00 watch you always feel extremely tired, that’s why I always try to do some kind of sport – if it’s a couple of push-ups or just dancing to some music. After about an hour Phil started having a headache and after it was obvious his situation wasn’t going to improve, he left us for bed.

As we were only two people, we needed at least a third person as there a three positions that constantly have to be occupied (helmsman, starboard look-out and port look-out). So Simon started helping us with our helming and lookout jobs. This was an unprecedented event as he normally has other more important things to do.

The last two hours of watch we just chilled around listening and dancing to music – Joana taught me some sort of town dance. After my entertaining but tiring watch, the only thing I wanted to do was have a nice long sleep. So I went to bed anticipating a nice six hours of undisturbed sleep – just to be accidentally woken up for breakfast by someone at 6:45 am in the morning. Normally the night watches get woken up at 10:00 am.

Then at 8:00 o’clock one of my cabin mates just randomly turned the light on when getting his school stuff – the joys of sharing my cabin with three other people. An hour later Anson came into our cabin to repair our blocked toilet– so at 9:30 am I went up to grab some breakfast, and joined seamanship at 10:30 am. We revoked our knowledge of how to properly belay a rope with a lot of weight on it.

I hoped I was going to have a couple minutes of break afterwards, but as Anson had finished fixing our toilet and a diarrhea virus is going around, we cleaned the whole toilet with E-pine, so as not to be infected. Then we had lunch, a little bit of free time and our daily meeting. After the meeting it was announced that white watch B had to do heads and showers and that we should help (we are white watch A) them, as the diarrhea had taken two of their watch members out as well and they weren’t enough people.

After cleaning I went to school. Well, school was school. It takes from 14:00-18:00 and the spanish class with Mascha was fun. Directly after school, approximately at 18:10, we had dinner. Today it was a nice steak with noodles – quite a weird combo but it tasted lovely. Finally, at the end of the  day, I had some free time, which I thourougly enjoyed by playing some card games and watching the second half of a movie, until, at ten o’clock, it was bedtime for me.

P.S. Von Miriam:  Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, lieber Helmut! Schade, dass ich schon wieder nicht mit euch alten Leuten feiern kann! 😉