For a little background, sailing on this ship is not a passive activity. During each Drake Passage crossing which totaled nearly 10/22 days of the trip, everyone on the boat is working. The voyage crew (us!) had rotating shifts that ranged from 2-4 hours, multiple times a day and everyone slept between shifts so the ship can sail 24 hours a day. The voyage crew were split into 3 different groups of about 10 people each so we were not on shift 24/7.
Each shift consisted of three categories:
- Steering the ship from the helm..think about Jack Sparrow steering his ship with the big wooden steering wheel, yes, it was essentially like that! We would receive specific coordinates from Captain Moritz or Dan and we would have to do our best to follow them on the actual compass or the iPad compass
- Watch consisted of 2 people at the bow (front) of the ship watching for other vessels, land, lights, animals, floating obstacles like icebergs, lost shipping containers, lost buoys, or anything else.
- Ropes or rest was the 3rd job where you were either in the deck house warming up with a hot cup of tea or you were working on the deck (usually sweating!) setting sails, taking sails down, setting safety lines, or helping the permanent ship crew with any other tasks that needed to get done. Working on the deck is hard work and you can easily break a sweat from pulling ropes since the sails and yards are very, very heavy. In order to all pull at the same time on 1 rope line, the leader at the front of the rope would yell "twooooo, six!" and everyone would know that you pull/full body lean on their call of "six". I am not sure why they used 2-6, but we all caught on quickly to what it meant.
