Working hard – but together!

Date: 15-17/10/2020
Position: Wendtorf, Holiday Apartments

This year is very special. It includes several challenges, not only for us, but also for the crew.

For some of us, the journey started very early in the morning, at 6 a.m. at Munich. During the ride to the north we sang, danced, talked and got to know each other. At half past 7 p.m., we finally arrived at our apartments, it was windy and cold and everyone was freezing. Our first task: Unpacking the bus and finding our personal items. After this long ride and a very tasty meal, cooked by the crew, we were glad that we could go to bed. (Some earlier – some later…)

The next day started with galley (=making breakfast). Later, we got a lot of information by Ruth and after lunch we were motivated to start working on our different tasks.

This year – because of corona, we weren’t able to prepare the ship as usual. Instead, members of the Thor Heyerdhl e.V. had to prepare the ship for us. But we met some of them when we went to the Thor Heyerdahl for the first time. They had to paint the ship, repair many different things, pack sails, fix ropes and lay power cables. At this point, we really want to thank everyone who helped to get our home for the next six months going. But to support them, we overtook some tasks without setting foot on the ship. And there was a load of things to do! Checking documents of all crew members, teachers and students or correcting errors in navigation maps as well as adding new information were just some of many different fields of work. Most of the jobs had to be done outside where it was very cold. We interviewed one of the people who had the chance to work in the office and asked: “Why do you like your job? “Because it’s warm in here, unlike outside” – we couldn’t have said that any better.

Another thing to do was sorting the books we brought with us and register all of them or preparing the food for the first part of our journey (from Kiel to Tenerife).

For our stay on the Cap Verde Islands we brought donations for our host and the children there, which had to be sorted, too. Another task was to pack for expeditions, they had to be controlled and the missing things had to be added (which were more than we expected…). On our third day, we had the same tasks, but to get to know each other even better, we had to finish them in different groups.

In the evening we sat together to practice our song for the farewell on the upcoming Sunday. It was kind of chaotic but the result was – we don’t want to praise ourselves – pretty good.

Saturday was the first time all of us were together on the Thor- it was time to set sail. We had a lot of cleaning to do (for some of us a new experience). After some hours of cleaning and several other tasks like carrying books we were finally allowed to move into our cabins (which turned out to be even smaller than we expected…).

It was a very intense week with a lot of work and new information and now we are very excited about running out on Sunday. We spoke to a lot of different people and asked them about their expectations. Some said sailing, some their first watch and some the distance between us and corona.