From September 7th to 27th 2021, Bark Europa sailed from Scheveningen in the Netherlands to Tenerife in the Canaries. Here's a bit of what my life onboard looked like.
We started the watch by setting some staysails. While my watchmates were unfurling and setting sails, I prepared breakfast. We are off the coast of Brittany, near Ouessant and we saw a lot of dolphins playing around the ship. We had a lesson about wearing ship from the Mate and I took the helm after doing the wake ups.
The afternoon watch was hilarious and we learned an important lesson; if you have to bend on a new square sail, don't put all your North American crewmembers on one side and all your European crewmembers on the other or you'll find yourself in a unit of measurement confusion. We had trouble setting the chain tackle to have enough length to stretch the sail, then the earring lashing broke while we were at one centimeter to get the sail centered. I prepared a shorter line to replace it and returned aloft to splice it around the corner of the sail. We managed to get it all done in one watch but I think the bosun had some doubts about our capacity to do so...
