Franka Archives - Ocean College

Here are some examples:

Going to sleep at 8 pm

Wearing eight jackets, six pants, and four pairs of socks and still being cold during night watch

Having a great time at night watch at 4 am

Having an average of five hours of sleep per night and being fine with that

Not drinking coffee but three glasses of chocolate milk per person

Getting milk restrictions because of that

Wanting to eat fruit and vegetables so badly, there are real fights about the last apple

Cleaning under your mattress so well there is not even a little grain of dust left

Not showering for two weeks

Splitting your clothes into very dirty and unwearable and just dirty and wearable

Feeling powerful and strong while steering or just emptying a vomiting-bucket

Getting a team that quick and looking forward to the same things

Looking forward to school one day

But this is what happened today: It was our first day of school today and in a very weird way, we were looking forward to it. Just the thought of having school after four weeks was refreshing. Every watch was split up into two parts. Alpha 2, Bravo 2, and Charlie 2 had school from 9 am to 1 pm, and Group 1 had from 3 pm to 7 pm. We only have one or two subjects per day, but it’s more intense than in a normal school.

Today it was German class. The first thing we talked about was some (boring but necessary) organization stuff. After that, we had a discussion about traveling and our journey. I think everyone learned something new and was inspired by the opinions of the others. The following free learning phase we used for doing our weekly reflection, school work from home, or in my case, this daily report. 🙂 By the way, today was also very cool because we finally passed Lisbon and the first people wore shorts and t-shirts on board.

I think I can talk for everyone when I say this was an interesting but also challenging day for us. But all in all, we will have a good time doing watches and school at the same time and are looking forward to it.

Sleeping, Cleaning, Killing

Emma, Franka

Date: 26th of October 2023
Position: Scheveningen, Port
Etmal: 27nm
Ship: Regina Maris

Attention: Killers running around

At 10 o’clock sharp, the big game started. At every corner, we now fear a killer waiting for us. Yesterday, each of us picked a name of the person we have to kill, an object we have to hand that person in order to kill him/her and a place where we have to hand the object over. An example from the last year: Someone had to hand a hairdryer to the cook, who obviously does not climb on the mast. (Don’t worry, we are not going to give any accurate examples 😉

We don’t know who is dead yet, but we are eagerly awaiting the winner 🙂

Just another deep clean…

Before the game started, though, we learned the difference between cleaning and deep cleaning. We had to get the sand away, which, as you can imagine, hides in every corner of the ship. Additionally, we had to tidy up and clean our cabins to get a free shore leave. Luckily, we all managed.

Our favorite: Free shore leave 🙂

From 3-7 pm, we had free shore leave and we split up into different groups. One group decided to visit the famous Christmas shopping place we discovered two days ago. They also made a short visit to the beach and ate some fries due to “starving.” (That’s what they told us at least)

Another group went running 6 km. I think the opinions on that run are very different according to who we ask, but generally, it was really refreshing to do sports again and to be able to move more than just 48m up and down the ship. We also discovered an enormous guitar store; it was great!

The most important thing on board: SLEEP

In the afternoon, we interviewed a few people about how they feel about the current sleeping situation and as you can imagine, it is kind of hard to get sleep when we have night watches. Here are the results:

Stella: She gets enough sleep when she is not on duty and the worst watch according to her is 4-6 am. But she is still emotionally less tired than at home.

Julius: He likes the 0-2 am watch the best and he thinks watch is really fun, also because there is always something happening in the harbor. According to him, the 2-4 am watch is the worst because of the short sleeping periods.

Kris: In the morning, she is really tired, but it gets better during the day. The best watch is 6-8 am because you get to wake people up (haha) and you get to sleep through the night.

Jane (Watchleader): She is not tired at all and has the perfect amount of energy for the whole day. (No wonder until now she was lucky not to be scheduled for harbor watch) 😉

We asked Mathieu (our 1st mate) about his experience with night watches and he gave us some tips and insights: He really likes night watches because they are cozy and the captain is not awake;) The 1-5 am watch is really lucky because they get to have picnics and hot chocolate. And there may be a sneaky night party as well 🙂 Generally, if you want to have a good night’s sleep, even if you have a watch, you should go to bed early, get at least eight hours of sleep and do a lot of napping. (By the way, he randomly started singing the tips when we asked for advice).

From us (Franka and Emma): Well, we now know to use every single minute to sleep! The funny thing is that through the interviews we found out that people may be physically very tired but emotionally less so than at home. Since we didn’t really start to sail yet, the sleeping situation is not too bad, but we’re sure that there is going to be an update very soon… 🙂

Party time!!!

You must be wondering how we got this motivated to actually clean everything. Well, the secret is a little reward we are very much looking forward to 🙂 In the Messroom, we have tons of Sodas, chips, and sweets for the party tonight just waiting to be eaten by us 🙂

Greetings home:

Von Emma: Liebe Grüße nach Hause, hab‘ euch alle dolle lieb 🙂 <3

Von Franka: Liebe Grüße an meine liebe Familie und die liebe Elisa, ich hab‘ euch alle lieb 🙂