How life changes when moving on to a sailing boat

Date: 09.11.2023
Position: Roscoff; Harbour
Etmal: 94nm
Total: 463nm
Ship: Regina Maris

Mess in the Messroom

I bet you can’t imagine how the galley and the messroom looked after this night of sailing. At one point everything and by that I mean every single thing that wasn’t somehow secured, started flying around. From the messroom into the galley, the other way around or just rolling across the floor. And with this, we already have the first aspect of todays topic: Things that here on the ship work differently than we’re used to at home.

I don’t know about you, but at least at my home I don’t have any cups or shoes randomly flying around my room while the floor is being flooded with water. So here we really have to get used to tying everything on to somewhere or store things properly so they can’t fall out when the ship is rolling. We basically try to hang anything possible on to hooks or lines, or if that doesn’t work we just store our stuff in our beds and hope it stays there.

Fire alarms instead of alarm clocks

Talking about beds there’s another big aspect: Sleep schedule. As you may have read in yesterdays daily report we have a watch system which is also active during the night. That means almost everyone has to get up somewhere during the night to be on watch. This can also mean that you have to wake up some hours earlier than everyone else or go to bed very late. And with that comes another thing that at least I didn’t know about before attending this trip and that is alarm clocks. Because everyone has to get up at different times, we are not allowed to use alarm clocks, because everyone would be woken up by those (the walls are basically as thin as paper). But it already happened a few times that we were woken up by a fire alarm drill. Normally, (but sometimes you just have to be lucky) the previous watch wakes you up 15 to 30 minutes before your watch so you have some time left to get ready.

Food combination recommendations

But enough of waking people up, let’s talk about food and how that’s handled on the ship. Because we don’t have everything on here, we sometimes just have to get creative with our food. Since we don’t have nutella on here, I guess honey has become the new favorite thing to eat on bread, probably just because it’s sweet. In general, food that contains sugar is very popular on here. And also bread, all day long everyone keeps asking if there’s any bread left and if we could eat it. But I actually agree on that, because the bread here actually tastes really good. Other interesting food combinations I haven’t seen before are: Banana with honey, pretzel sticks with peanut butter, oats with cocoa or milk and sugar. But when eating a lot and especially at sea, it happens pretty fast that someone spills their soup and clothes have to be washed…

At home I‘d just immediately throw them into the washing machine, but unfortunately that’s not possible here. We have a washing plan where always two cabins share one day of the week, while the weekend is reserved for the crew. So if something gets dirty, you sometimes have to wait almost a week until you can wash it. Luckily that doesn’t count in case of urgencies. Generally, cleaning rags, things that have vomit on them and just stuff from the crew always have priority.

No showers for hours

And now to showering: I guess at home most of us are used to taking showers everyday and not worrying about the duration, but here things got completely switched up. We only shower every other three days for only about three minutes to crank down our water consumption. If there’s not much water left in the tanks it can happen that we have to even extend those showering periods.

I hope now you can imagine a littlebit better how life changes when living on a sailing boat. Most of the things were also new for us, but I think that slowly everyone is getting used to it and in a few weeks we won’t notice these things anymore.