One day as a student on the Atlantic

Ship: Johnny
Date: 12.12.2024
Position: 14° 53,2‘N / 042° 16,3‘W
ETMAL: 156
Total distance: 2035 NM since Santa Cruz

Today I want to take you through our daily life as students on a sailing boat.

Let’s start with the basics. As some of you may already know, we are split into three watches (A, B, C). These are also each split into Port Side and Starboard Side, so in every watch team there are about four to five students and one crew member.

They switch every day. For example, while the Port Side has watch on Monday, the Starboard Side has lessons. And on Tuesday, that switches, so the Starboard Side has watch and the Port Side has lessons.

Okay, now that I’ve explained the basic system, I’m going to tell you how a school day on board is structured.

Let’s start in the morning. Everybody gets woken up at 07:00 AM. When you have lessons, you have to attend breakfast; otherwise, you can go back to sleep. Breakfast starts at 07:30 and lasts until about 08:00.

After that, five students have to do the „Grünen Plan“ (they have to clean the bathrooms and vacuum the mess room). Because all of that tends to take a while, school starts at 08:45 – so, for me, a lot later than at home.

The time before lunch (which starts at 12:00) is split into two lessons. They do have specific times, but it’s never really possible to stick to them because on a sailing ship there is always unexpected stuff that ruins the schedule.

The lessons continue at 12:45 and stretch until 16:00, our coffee time. That period is again split into two blocks. Thankfully, after that, we only have one more lesson before dinner. More wouldn’t fit anyway, because dinner is only two hours after coffee (so at 18:00) – at least that’s the plan, but most of the time it doesn’t start until at least 18:30.

After dinner, we finally have some free time, although not too long, because some need to go to bed early. If you are unlucky, you might have the 24:00 to 04:00 watch the next day.

So, all in all, we have about five different subjects in one day, which, for me, is a lot less than at home. We also don’t have every subject from home here on the Johnny.

I thought I’d give you a little example of what we’ve had so far: We’ve already had Biology, Math (🥱), German, English, History, Politics, Art, and “INSEL” (Individuelles Selbstlernen).

Another thing is, we don’t get homework to complete in our free time, which is probably because we don’t really have a lot of that on school days.

That was a little rundown of our school day.

Besides our lessons here, we get sent stuff that they teach in our school at home. Sometimes it’s stuff that’s a bit unnecessary and you only look at it briefly. Other times, it’s stuff where you really have to do work or it’s from subjects at home that are really important for when we get back.

Unfortunately, it’s always a struggle to find time to do that work. And if you’re really unlucky, a teacher from home sends you a test that you have to take here.

Fortunately, that has not yet happened to me, but in that case, you have a few days to study (which you have to do in your free time, or sometimes you’re allowed to skip lessons to study – thankfully, we always have teachers at hand that we can ask for help). Then, you write the exam in the presence of a teacher and when you’re done, they send it back home.

I know it’s kind of hard to imagine how school works on a little sailing boat in the middle of the Atlantic, but I hope that my blog has helped you understand better what we’re doing every other day!

(Sadly, I wasn’t able to take more pictures because our mobile phone ran out of storage for a day 😅)

Greetings:

Olivia: Ich vermisse euch alle ganz dolle & freue mich mega, schon bald wieder mit euch zu telefonieren!!! Mama, Du kannst Dir gar nicht vorstellen, wie dankbar ich für meinen Adventskalender bin, der versüßt mir jeden Tag & hilft mir mega in Zeiten, in denen ich mich mal nicht so gut fühle ❤️ hab‘ euch so lieb – Bussi & fühlt euch gedrückt!