 Lali started a blog series with ‘Finding my ship’. In this blog, she will continue to tell you about her journey of exploration of the Atlantic Ocean.
From Cape Verde, it took three weeks until we reached Antigua and during that time the crew got to know each other pretty well. There were thirty voyage crew, six permanent crew (the ones who knew what we were doing) and three volunteers.
We had to wake up at seven thirty every morning unless we’d just been on watch. At ten thirty until eleven thirty it was ‘happy hour’ which means we were scrubbing the decks, cleaning heads (loos) or sweeping below deck etc… Additionally, we had a four hour watch in the day and four hour watch at night. In our free time we were often called to help put sails up and down or change tack though we stayed on the same course for most of the voyage so we didn’t really change tack often.
In our watch group, we had a watch leader, and seven other people. These where the people who we got to know a little better as we had to spend eight hours each day with them. At the beginning the watches were silent and sometimes people might have had a conversation. Nevertheless, by the end of our voyage we were talking, joking, singing, laughing and teasing each other and having been a dread, our watches became the highlight of our day. We’d each take in turn on the helm (taking charge of the whole ship). There was the met. Obs. Which we had to write and send to the people who did the weather forecast and someone had to write in the travelogue every hour (I don’t know what for). M watch leader was a fantastic seventy year old man who had brown, weathered skin like leather. He was incredibly strong and enthusiastic although he did like to do things his way and he didn’t like it when people didn’t do things his way.
