Last year, a friend invited me to a sailing trip. I very quickly said no, since I had already conflicts in my calendar. When I was asked again for this year, this time with no conflicts, I just had to go.
Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of things from friends who sometimes went on sailing trips. It always sounded like quite the adventures with a tight-knit crew, experiencing nature, and highly specialized knowledge - knowledge for sailing isn’t particularly useful for much of anything else, after all.
Regardless, I decided to go and so the last week (May 23rd to 30th) we went. It was a whole lot of fun. Let me tell you some stories.
The first part of my travels was getting from Frankfurt to Eckenförde. I wanted this to be uneventful train travels, but they turned out to become anything but. If you want to read about them, read my post on train adventures.
Eckenförde to Kiel
So we made it on the ship eventually, and first got some food, after which we got a basic introduction on the plan. First stop: Kiel. In fact, one friend was not yet on board, he wanted an extra day of recovery so as not to infect us with whatever he had.
So, we wouldn’t be in Kiel overnight, mostly just to pick up supplies - and our friend had to get there. In fact, it wasn’t really Kiel either, it was a fair bit north at an industrial port.
When we got started in Eckenförde we really didn’t know much of what we were doing - in fact, it was a traditional saiiling ship, not a modern one. We had a number of very different sails and while I read the docs in the train (we received a document with basic explanations of the terms and practices), I expected not all of the terminology to be equally relevant (it wasn’t) and some of it even used differently than documented (in particular which ropes connected to which function in raising/lowering the sails was connected to which nail on the side).
We received a pretty strongly-worded safety briefing, after which, without knowing much were just thrown into it - ‘you, get here and hold this until I say otherwise’ or ‘pull, now’. Well, most of the commands were actually in german, and a bit more specific, but you get the idea.
Overnight from Eckenförde we didn’t fully go down to Kiel, instead we put down the anchor not far away from it, and reached the industrial port next to Kiel soon after Breakfast.
Kiel to Malmö
Mostly uneventful, really
We had the shift from 18-21, at which it was predicted that we might make it to Malmö by 3am - before we would be woken up for our shift at 3:30am, except we would be woken up anyway because
Malmö
Malmö to Wismar
The wind early Tuesday was supposed to be quite strong, and we wanted to get most of it. So we got started before breakfast - we were woken up at 5:30, it was all hands on deck at 6am to get going.
Life at Sea
While on sea, our life turned into a very strongly regulated routine - we were split in three groups (‘Wache’ A, B, C) which rotated through shifts. The day was split in seven shifts - 3x4h, 4x3h - so 0-4-8-12-15-18-21-24, so that you’d rotate which team did which shift too. Meal times were 8am (breakfast), 12pm (lunch) and 6pm (dinner) - with the upcoming Wache having their meal 30mins earlier.
Time to sleep was usually hard to come by - even in ideal conditions you had the shift 21-24, needed at least 30mins to calm down and get ready for bed, sleep by 00:30, and then get woken up 6.5h later at 7am to get ready for breakfast at 7:30 for the shift at 8. If you have an earlier shift there (i.e. 18-21) you get half an hour less sleep, because one of the shifts you sleep through is 1h shorter, but you don’t need another 30min for breakfast.
Base Crew on the Ship
Our group was not alone on the ship - in fact, there were five ‘Stammcrew’ not part of our group. The Captian, two Steuermänner, a Cook, and a Machinist.
(reconstructed route from AIS data 23rd to 28th)