Goodbye Cuba

That’s what we all had to say a couple of days ago when we left Havana. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to this island, that is so different from what we are used to, but also so beautiful with its nature, its culture and especially its people.

Since then, we have been making our way to the Bermudas, our next destination. Although the farewell was hard, most of us are happy to be back on board again, to sail again. It feels good to have the daily routine on the ship with the watches, the school and the galley duty. But some things are different than before, some things feel a bit off. When you look around the ship you see most people dressed in long pants, hoodies and rubber boots instead of shorts, T-Shirts and Sandals. In the watches you notice that the temperatures you write down in the weather book get lower from day to day and the position on the chart makes tiny steps further to the north-east. And the course on our compass also doesn’t point to the south or the west anymore. Instead, you steer a course north-east. It is the beginning of a long journey back to Germany, back home. Somehow that’s a weird feeling. We already have 4 months behind us. That’s 2/3 of our whole journey. And most of our major land visits are over too. No matter where we were, on Tenerife, Dominica, Panama or Cuba, we always had a fun time with lots of new experiences. But all this time we moved further away from Germany. The journey goes on, but we are not on our way back jet. That’s what we always thought. Now that’s different.

With two months left, our course pointing east and “only” the Bermudas and the Azores left as our next destinations, many of us start thinking about the time here on the ship. The time we already had and the time that is still to come. On the one hand these thoughts have a melancholy feeling to them, but on the other hand we know that we still have a lot of time left. A lot can happen in two months and we can all still make many new experiences. You just have to take a look at what we experienced in the first two months of our journey. And we definitely have a lot of challenges left. The North Atlantic, the Azores and the last two ship handovers will definitely be challenging. But we are all ready to face them and are looking forward to the time we have left on this ship, with this crew and all our friends to make it the best two months possible.