From September 7 to 27 2021, Bark Europa sailed from Scheveningen in the Netherlands to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This is a bit of what my life onboard was like.
We’ve been sailing for a week now. We started the watch by playing with the skysails because a squall was coming our way. It missed us by a couple of minutes. We spent some time trimming the sails for a broader reach because the boat couldn’t stay on course and people had trouble steering. We cleaned the deckhouse, the windows, crushed beer cans (crushing cold ones with the guys) and prepared breakfast. We finished the watch with a deckwash and left the deck with some stormy weather on the horizon.
After lunch we had beautiful weather. We set the main skysail and I worked on my halyard splice. After the coffee break, one of my scientist colleagues was giving a lecture so we deckhands alternated between steering and lookout so the voyage crew could all attend. We played a bit with the trim of the square sails and put an unrigged sail back in its bag using the “potato bag race” technique. After the watch, I was reading in the library when one of my colleagues came in to ask if I could come play music. I joined the other music enthusiasts with a guitar on the sloop deck, we had a really good time!

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