By Samuel
On board there are many things you have to do. You have to cook for 50 people, if there is something broken you have to repair it, and the important thing is of course to sail the ship. All this work has the same problem: it makes a big mess. Even if you do nothing there will be dirt somewhere sometimes. The best method to escape this problem is “Cleaning the ship”. Each watch has its own cleaning station which has to be cleaned for one week, after that they get the next station. On Saturday is “Big Cleaning the ship” where everybody has to clean his own bunk and room but also his station. Afterwards a little meeting takes place on the poop deck with the whole crew.
There are four areas on the Thor Heyerdahl: the toilets, the cargo-hold, the messroom and the deck. On the deck, for example, you have to polish the compass and the ship’s bell until you can see yourself, or we scrub the whole deck. In the cargo-hold you have to clean the floor, the wall and the area between the floor and the hull, the so-called bilge. But after cleaning the cargo-hold everything looks the same like before. If you have to clean the toilets you have to do a lot: from emptying the rubbish bin to cleaning the good smelling plughole. Finally, there is the messroom, where you have to clean the floor and the wall of the messroom but also of the corridor. The station “messroom” also includes the cleaning of both companionways.
So as you can clearly see “Cleaning the ship” is very important for the living on board, there are always a lot of things to do. Sometimes it’s not so much fun but without the cleaning sessions we wouldn´t be happier because of the dirt everywhere. So hopefully in three months we will still have the same motivation to clean every corner or to polish all brass. I don’t think so but we will see. If our parents smell us in April 2 hours before we berth again in Kiel it didn’t work. But since we take the cleaning serious, right now we could eat from the
floor. Until the next “Cleaning the ship”!!!!!