Date: 17 November 2019
Author: Elena
Position: 16° 53.108 N, 24°59.913 W
Geographical Position: Mindelo, Cape Verde
Etmal: 24 miles

Happy Hour

After being at sea, almost a whole week from Tenerife on, we arrived at our first stop on the Cape Verdes and anchored right in front the capital city Mindelo this morning.

Because it was Sunday there was a warm English breakfast at 7.00 am.

Afterwards-if you weren’t on duty watch- you were allowed to go back to bed again until 10.00 am…wohoo.

At around 10.30 am we had quick morning meeting and then it was when the fun started because it was time for the weekly celebrated “Happy Hour”.

Music was put on the ship’s speakers and each watch got assigned their areas to clean. Red watch was doing the mess, white watch heads and showers and blue watch was in charge for scrubbing the deck.

Furthermore, the dry store down below had to be cleaned as well this week which was what little Ben and me were doing. So we wiped all surfaces, vacuumed and mopped the floor and rearranged boxes of onions and tins of tomato sauce until it was almost lunchtime again.

Egg-Challenge

During the 1 o’clock meeting Captain Ben announced a challenge for this Sunday afternoon: the eggstraodinary eggciting Egg-Challenge!

Every watch was given a raw egg, that they had to build a protecting capsule for. Later on, the capsules had to be thrown by one member of each watch from the first platform aloft down to Poop-deck.

Three eggcelent Egg-Eggxaminers aka Captain Ben, Pete and Simon would then use the following assessment criteria to determine the winner:

firstly, the grade of protection, so whether the egg was broken or not; secondly, the aesthetics and thirdly, how far it was thrown on the Poop-deck.

We had three very creative designs. A colourful painted present by white watch, a stuffed pineapple by red watch and the Chicken Express delivery box by blue watch.

When all three eggs had been thrown on the Poop-deck in their gear, each had to be unwrapped and then tested whether they really were still raw (and not secretly cooked and like this made harder to break).

That happened in a very traditional manner… the member that had unwrapped the egg, had it broken on his head by Captain Ben himself.

After the winner of the Egg-Challenge was announced…drum roll…: blue watch!; we were free to spend the afternoon and evening just as we wanted to: lying on deck enjoying the sun, reading a book or catching up with your Klarheit diary.