Internships

At the beginning of the transatlantic crossing one month ago, we had already learnt very much about seamanship and the different tasks on board. Yet there were still some roles on the ship which we did not get to know in detail. That is what should be changed during our journey across the Atlantic, when we got the chance to apply for an internship. During the whole journey, we have two of them in different or the same positions.
There are three internships that you can chose from: you can become a bosun, provision manager or engineer for three days. In the week of your internship, you are not on watch duty and start working either on Monday or Tuesday before it switches everyday between classes and internship.

As a bosun, you are responsible for almost any work on deck, from maintenance work and sanding down the steering stand to renewing the ratlines in the rigg. It is a varied work, and you have many different tasks. Especially for us students, there are many new things to learn.

If you are not that interested in working with tar, houseline, paint and wood, you can apply for the position of the engineer. In this internship, you learn all about the exact sequences of technical events on board, for example how you work with the pumps and the generators or how our pipe system functions. If we have dead light wind, we need our engine and the new engineers might even get the opportunity to start it.

The third option is becoming a provision manager. In this position you are packing the ingredients for the meals for the day, deciding with what you want to cook. To do so, you must know what needs to be eaten soon before it turns bad and how you can combine different ingredients so that there is variation in the meals. Additionally, you have to keep our storage rooms organized and clean and check the food to see if it is rotten.

Last week, Kora and I finished our first internship which we had with our bosun Henry. He showed us a lot of things, for example how to renew our ratlines. One day, after lunch break, he taught us about how the rigg works in theory. Then we climbed the jibs to check the tension of the forestays when suddenly, we saw a shark swimming directly underneath us. Now we have already seen three sharks on our journey!
The bosun is also partly responsible for our safety on board. He has some periodical to dos, for example checking the bullseyes every two weeks to see if you can close them completely, because if not, it would be a high safety risk. Kora and I spent a whole afternoon controlling them.
When we did not have any tasks on deck, we were in the storage room, preparing differently sized grommets. These are rope-loops that you use to stand on in the upper part of the rigg.

I really liked my internship because I learnt many new things and a lot about the work in the rigg, on deck, and below. You have an interesting day and the tasks you do vary quite a bit. What I liked the most were the tasks using ropes and knots because that is something that fascinates me: it challenges me and I get to learn and improve my skills.