Day 08 – V11/25, Darwin to Broome

As the sun rose again on the North-Western coast of Australia, the boys were woken from their bunks at 6am to weigh anchor and get underway for another day of sailing.

The Staffys performed yet another fantastic morning brief with many a special guest appearance, including the one, the only, Chef Steve (who was looking for a rat in the galley).

We then set our sails to catch the wind, and all the Youthies (minus the Whities, who were busy laying aloft up the mast) banded together to get into the happiest time of the day. HAPPY HOUR HAPPY HOUR HAPPY HOUR YAYYYYY!!! The ship was scrubbed, mopped and vacuumed bow to stern until she sparkled.

Afterwards, Karson gave us an awesome brief on the Rules Of The Road (sea?!) and taught us all about marine traffic and navigational hazard markers.

There was yet another round of rope races, this time on the square sails, with the Blueys taking the cake once again (come on Redys, we got this!).

The Captain followed with a more detailed Nav Part 2 brief, where we split off into two groups to find our way from point A to B with only the wind direction and the time of departure, thus bringing together all of our knowledge up to this point. We plotted course, sailplan, time to waypoints and discussed some considerations that the Command Team might have to think about when planning their day around the navigation plan… No doubt useful skills to develop prior to our own Command Day!

“ALL HANDS TO TACKING STATIONS!” Within an hour, the Youthies tacked the ship four times and we took turns observing the organised chaos from the bridge. To date, we have been doing all the hard work down on deck, so it was very interesting to learn how the ship actually moves through the motion of a tack and how it is controlled from the bridge.

Finally, we settled down to watch the sunset, with some spagbol for dinner, as we prepared for another long night of watches…

To you land-lubbers from us salty sea dogs,

Adrian and Marcie