Cleaning the ship – written by Christoph

Cleaning the ship doesn’t sound like fun. Every time your parents tell you at home: ‚Tidy up your room, or …‘ you get angry. Even this phrase makes you feel mad. But here at our new home, the Thor, it is a little bit different. Nothing is more important than having a clean surrounding.
Imagine fifty people sitting at your table, sitting on your WC and walking trough your living room.
Imagine what an immense amount of dirt even one person produces during 24 hours. On top of that we have got sensitive instruments and machines on board for example the electronic sea map in the chartroom.
So we clean the ship. Every day. To make it easier the ship is divided into four areas:. Messroom & stairs, cargo-hold & chartroom & saloon, sanitary and poop deck.
Each area is assigned to one of our four watches.
Until now my watch was responsible for cleaning the messroom and now we clean the cargo-hold.
We have got another important system to hold everything hygienic, the cleaning-cloth-system:
The red cloths and baskets are only for sanitary, the yellow ones are only for things that can or could come in contact with food. For the floor we have got the white ones and the green ones are in general for the walls and surfaces.
Every Saturday is the ‚big cleaning the ship‘ day. That means we are cleaning more precisely and for a longer time. There is also a person, who checks your area and searches for every little bit of dirt in hidden corners. On Saturday we clean our bunks, too. This check is very rigid, there mustn’t be a fold on your bed. This is hard, but you are allowed to hear music, which is only allowed when it is the ‚big cleaning the ship‘ day. Everything goes a little bit faster and is more fun.
By now I just cleaned two areas: If you have to clean the messroom, you have to clean every surface with its own cloth colour. Cleaning the surfaces doesn’t just mean to clean the tables once. Surface also means walls, flour, frames, drawers and so on and so on. Several times.
The main part of cleaning the cargo-hold is to sweep up the floor and clean the bilges and the bulkheads. Cleaning the cargo-hold is an annoying thing for all those who are seasick, because the cargo-hold is right under the bow of the ship where it is extremely shaky.
Tomorrow, my watch has not to clean the ship, because on Sunday we relax. Except the watch that cleans the sanitaries. Otherwise, we could not use our toilets and showers any more, because they would smell extremely bad even after one day.
My ‚favorite‘ area until now was cleaning the saloon, because everything is nice an homey.
On Monday every watch gets assigned its new area and I will clean the poop deck for the next week.
A little tip: The best thing is to avoid dirt.