Life On Board

This is no luxury cruise. All the passengers are required to work and be part of the crew. We have to work 8 hours a day, broken up as two 4-hour shifts, 12 hours apart. So there were 3 shifts named Red, White, and Blue, after the colors on the Dutch flag:

Red: 12am to 4am and 12pm to 4pm

White: 4am to 8am and 4pm to 8pm

Blue: 8am to 12pm and 8pm to 12am

Meal times were fixed: breakfast 07:30, lunch 13:30, dinner 19:30

The schedule made things very rigorous. The Blue shift was the best one because you could actually get some decent sleep time. White was much worse and Red was the worst of all! With those shifts your sleep time was broken up into few hour segments, unless you skipped meals which I ended up doing a number of times. Sleep is more important than food! In addition we could also spend some time assisting the scientists on board. I did a few sessions of bird watching for the ornithologist, and debris watching to assist the other scientist doing a survey of ocean debris. With this schedule there was hardly time for other things, like blogging!

A shift would involve taking a turn at the helm steering the ship, pulling on the ropes to hoist or lower a sail, or other miscellaneous tasks. There were many sails on the ship (10 sails and a total of 900 square meters of sail area!) so there was much "heaving" and ho-ing" of the myriad ropes. The sails were extremely heavy so it sometimes took 3 or 4 people pulling on a single rope. All ropes had to be pulled by hand; there were no motorized winches.