Clean, cleaner, the cleanest…

Blue, green, yellow, white, black and red buckets and different colored rags… Everybody knows what that means! It means it’s time to clean the ship again…!

In order to guarantee that every part of the ship is as clean as possible, each watch has its own cleaning station, which rotate weekly throughout the stages of our journey. The different stations are the sanitary facilities, the messroom and the stairs (which are called ‘companionways’ on a ship) the hold (the workspace and place where lots of things for repairs are stored) and astern (the back of the ship) and the deck. On the Thor Heyerdahl we have a system of colors for our cleaning equipment. So the different colors of the buckets and rags are there for hygienic purposes more than a nice look. Whereas blue and green buckets and rags are used for the walls and the ceiling, white and black ones are used for the floor, yellow ones for everything that has to do with food, black ones are also used on deck and the toilets are cleaned with red buckets and rags. The ship is cleaned every day for about an hour, but on Saturday a greater pleasure is waiting for us: “The Grand Ship Cleaning”. As the name already says, there is more to clean than on the other days, because our cabins want to be cleaned once a week too. We are also allowed to hear music during “The Grand Ship Cleaning”, which we are not allowed on a normal day of cleaning the ship.

At the sanitary facilities station most people try to avoid the red buckets and the white ones with “drain” written on them, for not many people like to clean partly stinking drains, but it’s everybody’s turn sometimes. Also, all the walls and ceilings need to be cleaned (as we now know with blue and green buckets). Furthermore, all the towels, toilet paper and soap must be refilled, and the floor scrubbed. The jobs take some time as there are five toilets, two showers and not much room to stand, but as there are no unexpected tasks to do, you can plan it quite precisely.

In the messroom all the tables and benches must be wiped, as well as the ceiling, walls and floor. To be sure that every bit of dust is gone, it is helpful to use a torch laid on the floor to see the dirt better. As the station also includes the companionways, these must be swept first and afterwards scrubbed with water. Once a week some special chores are waiting for us, like cleaning the messroom-fridge or the shelf for our cups and our glasses once a week. In my opinion this one is the best station, because there is lots of space and if everybody does their job effectively, the station does not take a long time.

The hold and astern station is a station where you can clean many things and invest lots of time in cleaning as there are always some corners where no one has cleaned for some time. Similar to all other stations we must clean the walls, the floor and the ceiling, but in the hold, there are lots of bilges that need to be wiped. A bilge is the space beneath the floorboards where we store many spare things like food or objects that we don’t need at the moment. In order to avoid that one bilge is cleaned on a daily basis and another only once a week, we have a plan where it is written which bilge was cleaned last, so that every bilge is opened regularly. When a bilge is opened everything must be taken out of the bilge and must be wiped. After the bilge is clean again, everything that belongs in that bilge should be stored back inside. Astern the job is to clean the saloon every few days, so that it doesn’t get too dirty there either.

On deck there are some jobs that must be done every day and others that have to be done every few days. One of the jobs that must be done every day is polishing the compass, typhoon, rudder and bell and some more things. This is a job that most of us are looking forward to, because it is rather relaxing. The rest of the deck is cleaned in different stages. On one day we clean the quarter deck (at the rear of the ship) and the engine-house. On the next we scrub the main deck, the deckhouse and the skylights and on another day, we scrub the cargohold hatchway and the fore deck. When we are done with the fore deck, we start to clean from the back again.

All in all, cleaning the ship is a very important job that we do mostly for ourselves, because it is much nicer to live on a clean and hygienic ship than it is on a dirty one!!