Author: Anna-Lena
Date: 03.04.2019
Dear Trainees!
Are you interested in an internship on board of the „Thor Heyerdahl“? It may be different compared to an internship ashore and I guess you never had an internship like this one before! At KUS there is the opportunity to have a look into different jobs that have to be done on board. About that I will give you some information now. First of all, you can have one to three internships during the journey, depending on what you would like to do and how many other pupils are interested in the same internship. It is possible to have an internship with the bosun, the engineer and with the provision masters, and it lasts about two to three days.
In general, the internship starts at 0830 am and lasts until shortly before dinner (one exception is the internship with the engineer because they have to turn on the generator early in the morning and turn it off later in the evening). In the following, I will tell you what tasks you have to do and which things you can learn at each internship (although this last point may be different from one person to another).
I will begin with the internship with Laurent, our bosun. Especially when there is a lot of wind and when the ship is moving a lot (like it is at the moment) the bosun has to keep an eye on the safety on board and, if something breaks, fix it. For example, there are sails that have to be sewed, broken ropes that have to be replaced and much more (nearly always you can see that Laurent is at work). If you are lucky you can build a nice and useful tool with him (for instance a tool which holds the bin in the galley). I really liked the internship with Laurent, because it was cool to build something which is very useful on board, to get to know what Laurent has to do all day long and how to work with the tools in the cargo hold.
Another internship is the one with the engineer Simon (or during another semester it was, as you will probably know, with Willi). Friedrich, who had an internship with Willi, told me that he learned a lot about our engine, the generator and also the osmosis machine. They had different kinds of work to do, like turning on and off those important machines and cleaning them. „Willi showed and explained a lot.“, said Lucie. So if you are interested in this area of responsibility, you might enjoy this internship.
The last one of the three internship possibilities is the one with the provision masters. When you decide to do this internship, you will get some information every morning on what has to be done that day from Jule or Mirte), to count how much food we have in the dry store or below a bunk or to support the galley duty with some work. In this internship, it is common to work with a partner, because that makes a lot of things much easier. Sometimes you may also prepare something for coffee break. For instance Hanna and Philip made some delicious cinnamon rolls during their provision internship yesterday. In general, one can say that, thanks to this internship, you get an idea about how all the food is stored, how much it is and also how much you have to plan so that we have yummy and enough food for each meal. That can be very interesting.
To come to an conclusion, I have the impression that everybody learned something new in the internships and that most of us also enjoyed it. I hope I could convince you to have an internship here on board. If you have any questions left please contact me and I will try to answer them.
Yours Sincerely,
Anna-Lena