Location: Port de Soller, Mallorca, Balleric Islands
Hello friends and family. Today started as everyone woke up, which was a long process for this crew. After a great breakfast of french toast, we had a class with Emma. Emma teaches Oceanography or OCE. But she calls it OC Emma. After learning about nutrients in the ocean, we broke for boat prep. During boat prep, we take all of the sail covers down. We then rolled them up and put them in the lazarette. After that was done, we moved on to getting the sails ready to be raised. The Halyards needed to be attached and pulled tight, so raising the sails later was easier. Once we got the sails primed, we moved on to securing the deck. To do this, we needed to ratchet down our two dinghies and lay out our jack-lines. The jack-lines are two lines we lay on the deck that you clip into during passage in the nighttime. Around this time, one of our staff, Tina, took a few students to go get food for the boat.
Lunch was an optional lunch on board, or you could go out to eat. Lots of people went out to eat, but a few stayed and hung out on the boat. When the food provisioners arrived, they came in two taxis because they had so much food with them. After all the food was put away, we started our second class of the day. MTE. MTE is the sailing course where everyone learns about sailing on Argo and sailing in general.
After MTE, we had more boat prep along with an optional hike up the coast. This time we were getting it ready for real because we were leaving right after dinner. We started the engine to let it warm up, and we turned on all of the navigation equipment. After all of this, we broke into our watches. Watch teem three was starting, and everyone else went to get some sleep before their watches started. During watch teem 3’s watch, we had to deflate all of the buoys and coil all of the dock lines. We then had to fit them in the chain locker. This is a very difficult process because the dock lines are huge thick lines, and the buoys are hard to fit.
After all of this preparation, we pushed off the dock and started to motor to our destination, Montril. It is a two-and-a-half-day passage, and it is going to be great. See you later.