Birthdays on Pelican

Date: 16th December 2023
Position: Santa Cruz De Tenerife
Nautical Position: 28°27.9‘N 016°14.5‘W
Etmal: 74 nm
Total: 2015 nm
Ship: Pelican of London

We already had some birthdays on our Pelican, so now I will introduce you to all our rituals and what we do when someone has their birthday.

Until today, we already had six people who had their birthday on board: Marie 19, Sophie 17, Samuel 16, Karoline 16, Paulina 18 and today Anna B 16.

Birthday songs

One thing we always do is, of course, sing birthday songs. Most of the time, it already starts at 00:00 in the morning with the first „Happy Birthday“ because people are often staying awake until midnight or they have night watch.

After that, it goes on the rest of the day. Sometimes, we sang as many birthday songs as the age the person is turning. For example, on Paulina’s birthday in Morocco, we sang „Happy Birthday“ 18 times.

Birthday badge

On board, we have a badge that we give to the birthday girl/boy and he/she needs to wear it the entire day. It’s quite funny, as one always remembers it is a persons birthday when you look at them.

The one and only birthday speech

Every time a person has their birthday, they need to give a speech. Most of the time, the speech is more or less without any real content, but it is always funny to see people struggling to find any words because we don’t give them time to prepare.

Additionally, they often forget about it, but you can always be sure that there is at least one person out of 36 that still remembers that the person needs to give a speech.

Birthday decoration

Every time it is someone’s birthday, we try to decorate the ship accordingly. On board, we have glitter and occasionally balloons. In Morocco, it was pretty hard to decorate because, first of all, we had no room to decorate and secondly, we had nothing to decorate with.

A little recap of our day

Today we finally arrived in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, around 15:30. Until then, we had normal watches and took down all our sails, which meant a lot of climbing and a lot of fun.

There were so many sails to store that everybody who wanted to climb could have a go. When we finally arrived in the harbor, we got a spontaneous tour of the Tall-Ship Roald Amundsen, which was really nice.

At 19:00, we got a Pathway Presentation from Philipp and the announcement was made that we will get our phones tomorrow. We are excited to hopefully speak with you all tomorrow!

We are looking forward to all our upcoming birthdays on Pelican, with all of our little rituals!

P.S.: Danke für die lieben Briefe. Ich hatte nen sehr schönen Geburtstag, den jeder hier ein bisschen mehr besonders gemacht hat. Ich bin sehr froh, dass der Tag heute so unvergesslich war. Hab‘ euch alle dolle lieb, Anna Boom <3