Before the start of the race last August I only had experienced a week of continuous sailing during one of the four training weeks that every participant in the race has to pass and thus was a bit skeptical. Would it be possible to bring together a group of people with different backgrounds, nationalities, age, etc. and shape a well performing team? After having completed three out of the eight legs of the race, I can tell you that this can sometimes be very challenging, but so far has always worked (and I am confident that we will also manage it for the remaining legs). The basis for our successful life on board is our crew contract, which we created during our first team meeting at the crew allocation last April. Firstly, we defined crew aspirations and then agreed on values and rules that would help us achieve these. Since the crew contract is displayed at several places on the boat each crew members tends to glance at it while coming off/on watch, during meals or in our free tome and, thereby, is reminded of what we have agreed on.

So how does a normal day on the boat look like? First of all, I have to explain that while sailing you completely forget which day it is, mainly because there is not one period of long sleep, which marks the end of a day. But to organize our everyday life we have agreed that each new day and thus the duties start at 7am. Thus, a normal day on the boat looks as follows:

• 7am until 1pm,
• 1pm until 7pm,
• 7 pm until 11pm,
• 11 pm until 3am and
• 3am until 7am

Due to the uneven number of watches your on/off-watch times change each 24-hour period, creating a fair system for each of us. This leads me to the life below deck and the bunk (bed) allocation. In total, we have 24 bunks, but effectively can only use 14 of them, as the others are used for storage purposes. Furthermore, there is one specific bunk for the skipper and we keep another one free for the person that has been on mother watch (I will explain it later why).

Thus, depending on the number of crew per leg, some of us have to "hot bunk". This means sharing your bunk with another person of the other watch. So far I only had to share my bunk on the first leg and had the pleasure of a own one for the last two leg, since we both times were only 16 crew.

What kind of jobs do we have on the boat?

Apart from having particularly assigned jobs, such as engineer, medic, electrician, sail repairer and watchleader, we also have jobs that we rotate in the crew every day. These mainly are the navigation, cooking, cleaning and checking/emptying the bilges (the areas below the floor boards might fill with water and need to be emptied on a regular basis). A schedule is created at the start of each leg, which defines who has to do what when.

1. "Motherwatch": Preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner for all crew for a whole day and occasionally baking bread and cakes. Since this is one of the toughest jobs on the boat, the mother is allowed to sleep for either two or three watch, depending on the watch they are on. Therefore, we have one mother bunk.

2. Cleaning: As the space on the boat is quite small for the number of people, it is crucial for us to keep everything clean. Therefore, each watch the toilets (called heads on the boat) and common areas are cleaned and anti-backed.

3. Navigation: This mainly includes making hourly logbook entries and identifying other vessels around us (if there are any). We work with both electronic and traditional paper maps (see on the right) 

4. Bilges: Since the space below the floor boards tends to collect some water while we are healed over, it is crucial to check these areas every watch and empty them if necessary.

I hope this gives you some idea of how the life onboard is structured and my aim is to further continue this description throughout the next newsletter.