Taking over the ship

Taking over the ship is one of the students’ tasks in the project “Classroom under sail”. During the entire journey, there are three ship takeovers (German: Schiffsübergabe) and every one of them is unique in their own way. The first one was very special because we arrived in the Caribbean Sea, the second one was with astronomical navigation completely without GPS or other modern navigation systems and the third takeover is going to be a challenge because we will be in an area with many ships, between the coasts of England and France. In this blog, I will just write about the second one, from the 17.02.2025 to 19.02.2025.

The day before the takeover was very interesting. Many students wrote their applications in the messroom. In the evening, our captain announced the positions. Everybody was listening to him excitedly. And the positions are…

During the second student-ship-take-over, we had two students who fulfilled a special role on board. They were in charge of media and photographed our takeover in order for us to hold onto the memories we made during this special time. In Bermuda, they held a short and funny presentation for us, in which they presented their work which consisted of all kinds of different creative material like photos, interviews and videos.

In the beginning, Captain Johannes gave the new Captain Cosima a position, where the ship should be at the end of the three days. From this moment on, GPS and modern navigation systems were forbidden to use, so it was necessary to do astronomical navigation. One really important aspect of astronomical navigation is steering very carefully because we can’t control our position at any time. We had to write down which course we sailed during our watches, so our nautical officers could calculate our current position. For that reason, Captain Cosima appointed two extra officers to support the astronomical navigation: Julian and Johannes M.

The Project managers planned the days and many activities during the ship takeover. For example, project meetings, sailing action and “Besanschot-an”. They also managed every plan on board, which include things like watch plans, lessons and galley duty. Project Manager is a very complex job, because plans change daily, and all the plans then need to be rearranged.

During the ship takeover we had a wonderful evening – “Besanschot-an”. On this evening, we met on the poopdeck and the music project played a few songs and sang along. Johannes, who is normally our captain, also sang a nice jazz song with instrumental support from our doctor Klaus and Lukas. After a beautiful sunset, captain Cosima and her crew were shooting the stars. This is a method to navigate. Afterwards, they sat in the library and calculated our position the whole night long.

On the next afternoon, 19.02., Captain Johannes revealed our true position (the GPS position) and with that, another takeover found an end.