A Typical Day At Sea!

A day at sea!

 -Wake up at 6:30

-Go out on deck for gym class at 7.We stand on the boat deck (upper deck) and stretch and do push ups and sit ups and all the stuff (There’s only so much you can do on a ship!)

-Go down below and eat breakfast

-Be out on deck for Colors at 8 (Colors is like a daily meeting with everyone on the ship to find out what’s going on during the day.) Colors is always at 8 no matter what and you always have to be present and always on time or else you get to do the early bird watch from 6-7am!

-Then we stay out on deck and work from 8-9 at cleaning stations, I currently clean heads (bathrooms), which change when each watch time changes. While the galley crew from yesterday cleans the banjer (our sleeping, eating, classroom, and social space) and the galley from that day goes and cleans up. (We each have galley groups made up of 6-8 people and there are 6 galley groups. I’m in galley 3, so on my galley day we get up at 6:30, have to be at the galley at 7 and then we help out the cook and the cooks mate for that whole day, and we do galley once every 6 days. Galley is great because you don’t have to do your 2 hours of daywatch and 2 hours of nightwatch, so you get to get a full night of uninterrupted sleep and you just have galley and classes for that day!)

-Classes go from 9am – 6pm and during that time frame you have your classes, daywatch, and lunch. Our schedules differs each day based on whether its day 1-6. Some days I have as little as 3 hours of classes, and some days I have 6 hours! But no matter what we always have 2 hours of watch, and you have lunch at 11:30 or 12, it depends which seating you are in.

-Daywatch is fun sometimes. My favorite physical watch position is lookout because you stand at the bow of the ship as the ship is pitching and you get that butterfly feeling in your stomach, and I’ve gotten drenched by the waves of the North Sea while on lookout, it was quite the experience, then one time on lookout a water plane circled around and the pilot waved at me! Lookout can just get boring sometimes though since your out there by yourself for an hour until the next person scheduled there comes to relieve you. I enjoy doing Helm as well, helm is a term for steering the ship. It’s kind of intimidating though.  Nightwatch helm scares me a lot because you cant see where you’re going, you have to say on the course or else the navigator yells at you! And when the water is really rocky you get thrown off the helm sometimes because the rutter is getting smacked my waves which jolts the wheel to the side which then lifts you off the ground. That’s when the harnesses come out! Steering a 500 Tonne ship with 60 people on it sure is fun!

-After daywatch we have dinner from 6-6:30

Then we get free time to do homework or watch movies or whatever ( unless you have daywatch from 6-8 or nightwatch from 8-10)

-Lights out is at 10pm every night. Just the banier lights go off, but we have the aft and fore nooks to do homework or silently chat with friends. But everyone is typically asleep right at 10 because were all so tired. It’s surprisingly easy to fall asleep with 22 other girls in the room! I have the bottom bunk which I have managed to fall out of sometimes because the ship is rocking back and forth because of the waves, but our bunks are very comfortable and just a little bit smaller than a twin sized bed!

Nightwatch hours run from 8pm to 9am. My current watch is from 12am-2am, every 3 weeks it changes times.  On October 6^th my watch time will move from 2am-4am. We are all divided into watch groups made up of 6 or 7 people and the watch groups you’re put in at the beginning of the year is the group you’re with most of the time fro the rest of the semester. It’s crazy how close with them I have become, we get up in the middle of the night every night together! It’s quite the bonding experience. Anywho, the previous watch wakes us up 15 minutes before our watch starts. An alarm never wakes you, someone always wakes you up which is nice! During nightwatch 2 people clean the heads, and the rest of us go on helm and standby (there has to be 2 people on the helm cause its tough by yourself), lookout, and firewatch which is where every half hour you make rounds of the whole ship making sure everything is safe and that no fires have started because there is a lot of tire hazards on the ship.

After your nightwatch is done, you get to go to sleep until the next morning where you do that all over again!

And whenever you have free time, everyone is asleep because you’re so tired all the time, and it’s tough not being able to eat whenever, just mainly at mealtimes and the small amount of free time you get on some days.

It gets really tiring sometimes, but when we get to port, its like our weekend because at sea we always have school no matter what day it is!  It’s amazing how you lose track of what day and date it is!

So that is a typical day at sea :D