Monday 3 January 2011

Picton Castle at sea; Monday 3 January 2011 בס"ד

Woke up at 0615, wrote my log, went over the book the Captain loaned me again, taking notes on a few of the rig types I was less familiar with. Breakfast, then set up for work, but jobs today included:

- holystone the main deck

- holystone the focslehead

- super deckwash with soap

- ospho topsides and bulwarks

- scrape, sand, and penetrol breezeway head floorboards (which only I did)

Holystoned until lunch, then deckwash and some ospho for me, before doing the floorboards. Finished by 1600, where we braced sharp on a poart tack, and all hands mustered quickly for the Captain to tell us we'd have some tacking drills, since, well, we really don't have to ever tack the ship in the trade winds as we head westward. Last time I think we tacked was north of the line, outside Galapagos. So I went with the 8-12s (which I'm part of during our stay in port) and up on the focslehead to be part of the headsls and foretack team. This is the part I was the least familiar with, and though I understood perfectly the theory, I would never have thought to let the headsls flog as they did as we passed through the eye of the wind, and then manually backed them. It was an extremely violent flogging, and it seemed counter intuitive to all of my training to let the sails do that, but that's the only way to pass through, otherwise we'd stop short and miss stays. Tacked twice up there, then rotated to midships and handled the main gear and the fore braces, tacking twice there. Our third attempt had an error in the headsls backing and we missed stays (somebody was unfamiliar with the violence of the flogging and sheeted in the headsls to stop it). Anyway, it was good practice, something that is constantly done in different conditions but almost never when sailing ever westward in the trades. At dinner we could see Reunion island behind a massive cloud. After dinner, I bribed Pania with a beer to scrub my back clean in the shower with a scouring pad, since I had a serious dirt tan all over that was truly filthy. Of course, we got locked in the foclse shower for a few extra minutes by focsle residents, and we pleaded to be let out. Watched the Hurt Locker in my bunk (don't wanna start a new book yet), then bed.