I think it's something like day five at sea now. We've been skirting the African coast, which takes a long long time to be sure. The feel amongst the crew and students is that we're all here for the long haul, we knew from the get go that this voyage might be as long as eighteen days at sea. Being in a relatively traffic free zone of water, we've spotted few boats, and we're all falling into the three day watch rotation nicely.
   I think the high point of my days are the daily Ship's Reports. It was funny when old crew first explained the idea to me. In the official explanation, I was to give interesting facts about the voyage to date; like how far we've come, different things that may have been broken or fixed, and other engineering type tidbits of news. Being unplugged from all media, we make our own news. But immediately after the "official explanation" of the ships report, they sub-noted: forget all that stuff, the ships report is entirely for our entertainment. "Ah excellent, now there is something I can run with," I thought. Also in the news we are all getting used to our new captain: Eliza. It's been a wonderful to have her aboard, and everyone is getting much more involved in different aspects of shipboard operations. There is a new program called J-Wo (jay-whoa) where the members of a watch take turns being the watch leader. The normal watch officer is still there to do instruction and have the final say, but there is a real sense of excitement amongst the students as they take over different jobs on the ship.
    Well, I want to leave something for the other crew to blog about, so I'll leave out other news ;)  Alison: looks like I've burned through the letters you've packaged for me, now I've only got one left! That means I've got to go straight to the source for more material doesn't it?! Family: I'm looking forward to seeing you in February or soon after Love to all of you, mrDrew

Comments (0)