Heave Away...

Arrr. So I finally decided to write a nice little blog about my trip on STS Leeuwin II. Aka. How I'm an actual pirate now. Luckily I have an extensive journal which I kept at the time so this is easy and much more accurate. So it begins with Day One (remarkably). 12:01am: Realise I need to be on the bus in 7 hours and thus should pack and sleep. 1:00am: Stop playing video games and begin to pack 1:05am: Finish packing. 7:30am: Set off on the bus with the other trainees and my friend Rosie (the long haired hippiejesterpirate from my brother's 21st, for people who were there). 2pm some time: Arrive at STS Leeuwin. Meet friend Danielle. She tells me she's my watch leader. Perfect victory. The rest of the day was mostly initiation. Introductions/Harnesses/Climbing/Helming For Leeuwinites reading this Crew: Captain - Liam :D Mate - Bryn Bosun - Slade Cook - Debbie (AWESOME) Engineer - Adam PF - Digger :D Purser - Brian Red W/L - Danielle Green W/L - Angie (Tdub- Mark) White W/L - Digger (but mostly Rosie did everything) Non leeuwinites: Everyone is randomly assigned a watch who do activities such as eating, hauling, furling, handing, setting, cleaning .etc with (usually 4 watches, this time there were only 3) I was in Red Watch which was clearly the best one. We renamed ourselves the "Risky Red Devils". Then a guy from South Freo turned it into "Frisky Red Devils"... This stuck. Day Two: This is the day that we actually set sail. Most of the morning was spent going through the procedures surrounding basical sail handling. Such as setting (putting them up), handing (putting them down), and furling (tying them down when you don't need to use them anymore). First time aloft properly was to the Upper Topsail. Which is the second highest square. AMAZING up there. We also did a lot of activities surrounding getting to know and trust eachother. During night watch I took the helm (big wheel that steers) for the first time. Awesome feeling. Day Three: We did wearing exercises (turn the ship around slowly and easily) most of the day. Wearing out David. I slept in the sun on the deck for a few hours (it was nice and calm) after getting to know most of Green Watch. I learned a couple of knots. Except forgot them lots of times. I think I still need to study them even now. I'm crap. Hahaha. During the night the Main Sail tore in half because of Rough Weather. This is not good at all. I think it still isn't on the ship. Day Four: Omg. Rough. The highest speed we saw on the Helm was about 43.5 knots. Lots of people got seasick and eventually this meant that some of us non-seasick people ended up yakking a couple of times from the smell/watching them. I chose the wrong day to have the peaches/cream/yoghurt breakfast. :S The night was really really fun because it was still amazingly rough. :D Unfortunately we'd spent the entire day using the motor, not the sails. Otherwise they'd all break and we'd be fucked. Day Five: We anchored near Canarvon after all that crappy rough weather. This mean that our crap 12-4am watch was cut short to only one hour. Yay sleep! By this stage I was getting the hang of which ropes would raise, lower and control most of the sails. It's quite complicated at first. By far my favourite day. We went up to Mr Top Gallant (the highest squaresail). TG and I are now in a seriously relationship after that. Even facebook says so. Standing about 30 metres above the deck, on a line that's only a few centimetres thick and hanging off the yard so we're actually over water a good few metres. Wow. THEN I climbed to the very top of the main mast. The highest part of the ship, thirty three metres. There's a very cool plaque with a secret insciption on it for those who reach there. OMG at the view as well. :O Day Six: By this time we were moving again. We tried some tacking exercises (turning the ship around quickly, against the wind. Hard to do.) They failed because we had no main sail. :S We didn't do anything really all that new. I had memorised about half of the lines and what they did by this point. In the evening I took over the Watch, becoming Watch Leader for a few hours. This meant that I had to call sail orders, direct the other trainees to their lines and stuff. It was fun yelling at the few douchebags that were in our watch. The feedback was all positive which was good. Day Seven: The most important day because I finally memorised every single line and what they are for. Yay me! I directed the Frisky Red Devils to a pretty successful fizz quiz result (race to a line after it's yelled out) because of this. In the morning we were back out on the Upper Topsail. High above the ocean for sunrise. Then, as the sun was coming up. A whale began breaching quite close by. One of the best moments of the whole trip. Red watch basically expolded with laughter and "OH MY GOD AWESOME" on the yards. I'm surprised none of us fell off. Day Eight: Shark Bay. Swimming. Amazing. Furled the headsails. Which meant being out on the bowsprit over the clear blue water while the Monkey Mia dolphins were swimming around everywhere. We'd anchored and finished the sailing so all that was left was cleaning, admin and relaxing. Day Nine: Early morning, about 5 we all got up and left. 12 hour bus trip home, bogan year 11s being dickheads. Pwning noobs with Lewis, sending them 2girls1cup. Watched Master and Commander and Madagasgar. Good times. YAY! Photos on facebook, have been for quite a while.