First Day Sailing!

MFT: Sailing and yummy food!

LFP: Feeling sick and not enough sleep

Hallo, so today we left Papeete dock right after lunch and started off towards Fakarava. My day started off with my first watch, a port watch, at 5:30 am. Luckily I had gone to sleep the night before around 8 pm so I got almost a full 8 hours of sleep.  Basically we just did a full boat check and weather report in our hour of watch. It was fun and a lot less stressful than doing it at sea for the first time. Then we had a great breakfast of orange coconut almond pancakes with fresh vanilla whipped cream and maple syrup! Plus lots of fresh local fruit. Honestly, hard to beat these meals.

The morning mostly consisted of lots of drills and emergency preparedness. Also, I finally got a shovel and my permits for fieldwork! Thank you Jan and Mahoono. We learned what each person is expected to do and where to go in different emergency situations (fire, man overboard, abandon ship, etc.). Mostly our watch group (B) handles sails. This is because our staff member is the boatswain (pronounced bosun fyi). In the event of an abandon ship order, I get to hand out the immersion suits, which apparently are the one extra piece of gear you grab in a fast abandon ship (aka sinking immediately).

So first we learned all about what and where we supposed to go and then we got to drill a man overboard, then a fire that was not controlled and turned into an abandon ship. It was fun trying on the immersion suits, but boy is it big on me. There was also a local TV station crew on deck interviewing some of us and recording our drills. We also had a picture taken for the local newspaper. If I get any copies of these things I’ll post them on the blog. It’s rather hard getting pictures right now. First off, during your watch you are too busy to take photos. Then when it is not your watch you tend to be sleeping or eating. If it is night photos are not really allowed because the flash would ruin our night vision. I’ll try to get more today but just a heads up, I try to stay out of people’s way or I’m doing the work myself.

Anyways, after lunch we began the slow maneuver out of port. It took us maybe an hour or two to leave the dock. Then we motored out of there because the wind direction was not useful for our destination. We have to average around 5 knots per hour towards our destination to make it to Fakarava on time. Luckily the sea state was really calm so we didn’t have to worry too much about major swell or waves. A lot of people took sea-sickness pills but I decided to stay away in case it made me tired. It was all hands on deck to help out with leaving port and motoring through the channel. So we all got to get some work done yesterday afternoon. Then once we left port for good it was C watch on deck. You can stay up but it started to really pour during the afternoon. I ended up taking a saltwater shower on deck to conserve water but still clean my hair. The rain meant that I got a bit of freshwater rinse at the end!

During the late afternoon, I tried to take a nap because my watch was mid watch from 23:00 – 03:00 (11 pm to 3 am). Dinner was also fantastic but it took a bit to get used to the gimbaled tables. So when we are underway, we take these pins out of the tables in the main salon and then the table can move with the waves so it is always level. Of course this means that if you put weight on the table (like your hand) the table moves under you. It works pretty well and I’ll try to get a good photo to illustrate this phenomenon because it’s pretty weird and cool. There was some swell yesterday (around 3-5 ft waves) but overall the sea was pretty smooth. There was some sea-sickness but the meds tended to help most people. We ended up sailing in the evening because the wind changed course and we stopped the motor. That was pretty sweet. I tried napping again after dinner with limited success. Mostly I lay in my bunk in a short of haze between awake and asleep. Hopefully I’ll get better at this!

Finally our watch came at 22:50 (you always start the watch 10 minutes early). I was assigned to the science lab. Basically we have a bunch of instruments that are continually recording (CHIRP, Flourometer, ADCP, GPS, Temp, Salinity). We have to record all of these outputs manually every hour in our logbook. Also we take walks around the deck and do lookout for various things like flora and fauna. For instance last night we could see bioluminescence in the water (not a ton but enough to be very cool). Normally we deploy some other more intensive instruments during specific time periods (drag nets, CTD, carousel) but last night we didn’t have to. We really lucked out on our watch because it was pouring the watch before ours, but we had basically no rain! This meant a pretty awesome time.

We ended up rotating jobs a lot last night so everyone got a chance to try different things. I got to be the helmsman (steer the boat) and lookout (stand up near the bowsprit and look for problems up ahead). It was pretty amazing. It’s fully dark out, there is nothing but ocean around you and some stars and clouds above. You are given a compass reading to steer to and you just steer this huge boat that is sailing! The sails on this boat are insane, I’ll try to post a picture of all the sails and their names. Plus for every sail there is at least 3 lines: downhaul, halyard, and sheet. So imagine about 8 sails and you easily hit over 30 lines (several sails have a lot more lines). Anyways, I’ve been trying to learn the sheets as much as possible. We mostly sail under 4 sails: the main sail, mainstaysile,  fore-staysile, and the jib (need to double check spelling on these). All in all our watch went really well. The weather stayed mostly good and we had a good evening. We have another day and half of sailing/motoring till we get to Fakarava. Hope everyone is enjoying the blog. Thanks!