By Valentin
Dear readers,
Outside of our daily school and watch life, we also have the possibility to choose extra-curricular subjects. We have to select a workshop and a project. This is a chance to improve our special skills and abilities. In this term the project options are astronavigation, Spanish communication and marine biology. It was not easy to choose, but as we need celestial navigation for the second time where students take over the ship, it was my choice. Most people chose it because it is a great opportunity to learn something out of the ordinary, which we can’t access easily otherwise.
The project is taught by Detlef, our captain who sailed with only celestial navigation when GPS was not even invented. At the beginning we were told that we can find out our position by only using the sun and different formulas. Everybody was quite curious how this will work but nobody expected that it will be THAT complicated. In the first lesson Detlef tried to explain to us how we can calculate our latitude but not many people were able to follow completely. In order to have all the information we need for our calculations for our next lesson we had to shoot the sun to get the angle of its highest point by using a sextant. It sounds complicated and YES, it is. In the next lesson we learned how to find out our longitude and therefore combined with the latitude our position. We are all excited for the next lessons and for everything we will learn but especially when we can use our knowledge to navigate on our own.
The other activities outside of our curriculum are the workshops. Our options were from music over medicine and communication to arts & crafts. As Christmas is one month away it’s a good chance to be creative in Arts & Crafts. Until now we made an Advent calendar with small presents for the community. It looks very nice as everybody used different materials and techniques for each day. Some sewed little bags, others folded boxes or painted old jam glasses. During our freetime we can also continue with our creative ideas and it is so nice to see a big group of people being in their element while creating DIY things and enjoying the calm.
Everybody would say how happy they are to have these awesome possibilities to widen the horizon of every single person. And it’s a nice change from our normal daily routine.
I hope this gives you an idea about how things are done on board.
See you next time.