Final Voyage?

I have finished the final voyage of the season, and potentially of my career as a mariner. It started like most of the others: we loaded up the fridge, filled the ship with students and off we went. I wish I had a lens wide enough to take a photo of the stocked drystore.

We sailed up to Coles Bay again and exchanged the students for another group who had been hiking for the past few days. The weather was pretty good most of the way, but the trip across Storm Bay sickened the students, as usual. Once we were past that, we had a day where we set nearly every sail:

We dropped the kids off at Maria Island for a bit, so here’s the obligatory happy snap:

The second half of the trip involved a quick getaway back to the D’Entrecasteaux Channel as the weather forecast wasn’t looking good. One night we were motoring into a 25-30kt wind and I spent 45 minutes up aloft with another crew applying sea-gaskets to the sails. It was dark and the ship’s pitching swung us around on the shrouds, while we held on rather tightly. Out on the footropes, the motion of the ship pulled the yards away from us and drove them back into our stomachs as we stowed sail.

Once we were in the channel, we had a number of days at anchor because the forecast wasn’t that great there either. We didn’t let the kids just sit around and do nothing, though; we drilled them in the handling of rope and sail and put them through a navigational test and a test where they had to move a load along the deck using rope.

All told, it was another successful voyage, and one that’s given me just enough time at sea to get my coxswain’s ticket. Now it’s time for the classes back ashore.