Getting up today was somewhat difficult; I woke up disorientated with a sharp poke in the side and a really loud notice of  “Imogen 10 minutes until breakfast!” having just been dreaming about sleeping in my own bed back home. So I wasn’t initially expecting the day ahead to be anything easy or pleasant.

But as the day played out I was nicely surprised. I was up on deck preparing for 7am watch, when Hannah told me today was my turn to be junior watch officer. Yesterday, the captain began to talk of the next step in responsibility, in duties and hopefully learning. Being junior watch officer you have to organize a lot more, multi task and keep things on time. Ben the engineer talked to me about the engines and let me fire ‘er up! By 10am, both port and starboard engines were running at around 1400RPM, heading south. “South?” you say. Yup, we’re heading towards the Azores, the 9 Island region of Portugal. Ben slipped and hurt his foot so he needs an X-ray. By using the engines we should get to Faial Island by tomorrow morning. It’s a nice and unexpected stop, seeing as we were late to merry old England anyway. So, what I found out today was how hard leading can be. I hated telling Mike and Erica to coil lines while I stood there waiting, so had to jump in and help. At the beginning of the watch we had to trim to sails, to help with our speed. Trying to lead that was difficult because its an area I need to work on myself. What does it take to be or become a leader? My mum actually writes all about leadership in education, but I never really grasped what it was about because I never had to. Today was the first day of the students taking over the Amistad. Many more days are left so to the crew…beware! 

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