My Ship Has Come In

Picton Castle entering Benoa Harbor, Bali

The picture above was taken from very far away as the ship was motoring into the harbor.  I joined her shortly after and I have been living on board when I'm duty.  We have 46 sailors on board for this leg, which is only 2 people short of a full compliment.  In contrast to the leg they just completed from Fiji to Bali, when they had 25 people on board.  I understand that this upcoming leg is unique in that we have a very high number of experienced tall ship sailors on board.  The full compliment of trainees is 36, we're 2 short so we have 34 but only about 8 are first time trainees, like me.  All the rest are apprentice sailors, who have at least 6 months of previous experience on tall ships.  Some have as much as 24 months of previous experience on Picton Castle.  I think it will be a good thing for us new trainees as there are lots of people to give us pointers and help us learn the ropes.  Since we're in harbor, we've been divided into two watches, Port and Starboard, and each watch is divided into two divisions.  I'm am currently on Starboard watch, division 3.  This helps make it quick and easy to assign work tasks.  The salt water is very hard on the ship and maintenance is extremely important so, while in port, we are cleaning up all of the rust on the ship and repainting the entire thing.  The high temperatures have been around 84 degrees but the humidity is high and, because we're about 8 degrees South of the Equator, the sun is very intense.  Our schedule is setup so we work on ship maintenance in the mornings and then sailing training after lunch, which breaks up the dirty mundane but necessary work with the more fun sail handling training.  We worked for the first 4 days on board and then each watch got a day off.  Now we work 2 days on and get 2 days off, which I think will be the schedule until we leave.  This allows everyone enough time to explore Bali.  When we're on duty we rotate galley (helping the cook), scullery (washing dishes) duty and 1 hour anchor watches at night so they're keeping everyone pretty busy.  I'll try to get a better picture of the ship when she's "ship shape" and ready to sail.  It's amazing how many saying have nautical origins...

My bunk in the salon, lower with the grey pillow.

My bunk is about 6 1/2 feet long and maybe 3 feet high, not quite high enough to sit up in.  It's in the main salon, which is where everyone eats if the weather is bad, which explains the table.  I have a couple of small shelves near the head and then I have a storage area in the bench on the bunk side of the table.  Not much room but enough.  It's comfortable enough as beds go but there isn't much air moving around below deck so it's very hot.  I've been sleeping there but many people sleep on deck at night.  I bought a battery operated fan and brought it with.  It lasted one and half nights and then died. I'm adjusting to the heat and humidity though so it doesn't seem to be a problem.  I'm living bare foot on board and it hurts quite a bit going up into the rigging, which we've done a few times now.  The decks that don't get shade get insanely hot, which my feet have not adjusted to yet, but they will.

All in all, things are going exactly as I expected and I'm having a great time.  I'm afraid it's checkout time so I have to post this and vacate my room.  Next time I'll fill in some details about my crew-mates.