For anyone who is missing my regular blog updates and would like more, I have found out that on board the ship there is a daily report written by one of the watches and posted to ship's website. Depening upon who is writing it, it might be in English or Dutch.
http://www.eendracht.nl/news/laatste-nieuws.jx. For the race, I think I am in the white watch (I was in the Red watch for the last week). If it is in Dutch you can copy and paste the text to google translate http://translate.google.com/translate_t and get a sense of what was being said.
We spent the last week in the fjords of Norway including one that is on the unesco world heritage list. Other than the mountains being a bit taller and the fjord a bit deeper, the scenery is actually very comparable to that of Indian Arm.
Most of the other trainees on the ship are Dutch, so I am learning all the sailing terminolgy in Dutch. However, there are a few of us that only speak English.
To keep things interesting, in addition to our watch duties there are various competitions arranged between the watches and games. One of the games was the murder game where everyone was given a slip of paper with the name of one of the other people on board, a location on the ship and an item (your murder weapon). Once you got the person and the weapon to the correct location at the same time the person was dead and you got their slip of paper with the objective of being the person with the most papers by the end of the game. This game caused me to gain the reputation of being a crazy Canadian. All I did was sleep in the Laundry room for two hours.
I needed to kill one of the other trainees in the laundry room and soon discovered that my victim was on watch duty between 4am and 6am and would be completing the fire rounds where they check each space on the boat. So I decided that I would set my alarm for 4am, then hide (sleep) in the laundry room waiting for my victim to come and complete the kill then. The other trainee who was supposed to accompany my victim was in on the plan and would ensure everything worked out. Unfortunately, at the last minute my assistant was put on making toasties (grilled cheese sandwiches, our middle of the night snack). This ment my victim was doing the fire rounds by himself. I did too good a job of hiding in the corner of the laundry room, and my victim didn't even notice me and I was sleeping too deeply to even realize that he had come in. So 6am, with no murder completed, I relocated back to my soft bed. Apparently, that is enough to gain me the reputation of being nuts.
In the fjords, there wasn't much wind so we ended up using the engine most of the time, however one day we were on the outer coast and were actually sailing. The wind was about 30 knots. About 60% of the people on board were seasick (myself included). My watch had 7 trainees in it, but by the end of the watch there were only 3 left on deck with the rest of us in bed sick (we had the 4am to 8am watch). They had to wake up the cook and assistant cook and ask them to help on deck since they needed to tack and 3 people just weren't enough.
The weather was sunny and beautiful while we were sailing, but for the last 2 days in port in Bergen it has been raining.
About two-thirds of the trainees left this morning. It was sad to say goodbye to them. When you are living and working together in close quaters you get to know everyone very well in a few days. The new trainees are arriving before dinner. So much has happened in the last week, but I am on gangway watch duty soon, so I have to head back to the ship. Hopefully, I won't drown in the rain.
The bow of my ship
Some of my watch members enjoying the sun.
At the helm of the ship in the narrow fjord.
View from the bow of the ship while in the fjords
The Mexican Naval ship with some of the up the masts (there are 270 people on board that ship)
No comments:
Post a Comment