Ever deeper into the South Pacific – Daymen on a Tradewind Passage in the Picton Castle.
Wednesday was the first full workday for our new daymen. Now that the crew really know their lines and are comfortable with sail handling steering, ship handling and can follow orders well, we have broken some of the gang off the watch schedule to turn to extra training in classic sailing ship’s work. This is an old deep-water sailing ship tradition, on long trade-wind passages, to break off a ship’s most experienced ABs to get rigging and sailmaking done on their ship when the weather is good while the less experienced crew sail the ship and gain in responsibility and skills doing that, although in our case they will simply take turns. For now Logan, Nadja, Julie and Liam are now daymen riggers under the direction of the Chief Mate; Nadia, Joani and Johanne are daymen sailmakers under the direction of the 3rd Mate Rebecca and the Captain; Jan is a dayman carpenter working with 2nd Mate Paul; Jon is a dayman engineer with Engineer Christian; and Meredith M is now bosun’s mate with Bosun WT. Having all of these people focus entirely on these areas means that the daymen can get lots of experience with these kind of skills and it’s good for the ship too with many projects getting done efficiently. Here’s what we’re working on: 2 new sailmaker benches, patching both old royals and gaff topsail, overhaul port aft head, serve and make leather covers for main yard cranelines, canvas covers around all turnbuckles, overhaul the inside of the longboat, assemble and overhaul all gear for setting studding sails, etc.
Conditions are just perfect with lovely warm trade-wind breezes and seas laying down, beautiful blue skies, flying fish and yesterday we saw a huge whale from up aloft. Not so bad…
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