Week 1- Bark Europa and the unexpected voyage from Ushuaia to Scheveningen
We are almost one week into our journey. It feels like we left Ushuaia quite a while ago but we are still only at the very beginning of the voyage. The Falkland Islands are behind us now. After an initial slow start and slow speed the wind picked up and for a few days we averaged around 7 knots, occasionally peaking at 10 knots. That is a very good speed and we made up some ground lost during the slow start, maybe we even jumped a little ahead. The good wind didn’t last forever and currently, at the time of writing this blog, we are experiencing a significant drop in the wind speed and the ship is doing something like 2.5 knots. The forecast says the weak winds are going to last about a day or two.
The crew separated into port and starboard watch is getting into the groove. Life on board is just like during any other trip, except we don’t have any voyage crew with us. One may think, that over two months at the sea is going to be very boring. Make no mistake, there is always something to do. Sail handling is the obvious thing however, that is not the only job that keeps the crew busy. There is ongoing maintenance on board that is necessary to keep the ship in a good shape. The old lady requires a lot of attention and attention she gets. Since we had to scrap the initial dry dock maintenance scheduled in Valparaiso, we try to do as much work as we can during the trip. One of the tasks we grapple with is refurbishing some of the interiors on the ship. Some of the cabins and deckhouse are getting a new facelift. That is lots of scraping, sanding, and varnishing jobs to be done. In the meantime, Gjalt and Emma are doing a fantastic job in the galley as always keeping us happy and well-fed.
Besides all this work we do, there is some time for fun as well. We have our “bier times” after the watch ends, we had a “lazy Monday” just to forget about the work for a while and well, be lazy a little. I think it doesn’t hurt. During the course of this voyage, we have some birthdays to celebrate as well. In this first week of sailing, we already wished happy birthday to Natalie. She got a few cute presents made by the rest of the crew and we enjoyed and happy and joyful night of karaoke in the launch.
Looking at daily life on the ship, nobody could tell what are the reasons why we are actually doing this trip. Only the missing voyage crew is the telling sign of the reality but everything else is business as usual. Occasionally Eric updates us on the situation going on in the rest of the world. The corona pandemic seems to be going strong. At the moment, we are probably in the best place to be right now. Let’s see how the situation develops in over two months when we arrive in the Netherlands. Hopefully, this time flies by quickly and we can finally reunite with our loved ones. Till then, all I can say, everything is going fine. I cannot imagine it in any other way with this very capable and experienced crew. Slowly but surely we are making our way to our destination.