Location: V&A Pier, Capetown SA
Welcome to the start of the 2025 Seamester spring trip logs!
I’m Kiki, your guide to the start of Argos’ journey. As the skipper for today, my first duty was to wake up and round up all of the crew at 7 am. This was a task I was dreading as we had no alarm clocks to wake us up yet. However, I was surprised to be instead woken up by the sounds of groggy, jetlagged friends turning on our bathroom fans and prepping for the day at 5:30 am. I guess the US/Britain to SA jetlag served us well! Just before I ushered everyone onto deck for our first breakfast together, I took the extra hour or so to watch the sun rise over the harbor and follow along on some silent stretching and yoga.
As I was wrapping up my impromptu morning exercise session, I saw a few brown masses floating toward the boat. I had no clue what they could be until they got within 10 feet of the boat, and I realized they were small groups of seals floating on their backs and enjoying the sunrise with us. After my happy realization that seals are my favorite ocean animal, I snapped our first group photo in the galley during breakfast meal prep! Our brilliant first-day gopher– we learned that every role and object on board has to have a seemingly random name far removed from its land counterparts, in this case, gopher meaning the crew whose job it is to pass things from the galley up to the main deck– Benny is pictured below passing out Chef Meg’s wonderful breakfast. I guess the seals’ lazily content vibes infected everyone on deck, as our first breakfast was full of laughter and wonderful ship-made peanut butter, oat, and honey chocolate bars.
After breakfast, our jam-packed day of learning started with a piecemeal tour of the boat and an overview of all the equipment we will eventually familiarize ourselves with on watch. During my deck rotation, our final crewmate, Darien, made her way onto the boat, completing our group for the next 89 days! We learned about all of our roles over the next few hours, and in the chart house, I snapped a picture of one of our gauges that records our distance traveled. Today, it sits at 1nm, and I hope my next blog will bring triumphant footage of at least 80nm more!
After our ship walkthrough, we broke back into our duty groups to complete our tasks to get lunch set up. Lunch was a delicious penne dish with leftover chili. Pictured below are our two “upper” and “lower” lunch lines snaking over the chart house and ending in the stern. Fueled up and ready to cram even more safety knowledge into the next half of the day, we started our post-lunch learning with a full read-through of the guidelines and handbook. Immediately after, we gathered all of our floatation gear: our type 5 PFD that we wear every time we are on board and under sail; our type 1s are the large orange classic lifevests we would wear in an emergency. Finally, our massive red gumby suits both serve as floatation and warmth in the case of abandoning the ship. First, though, we got to give the posh lunch-goers at the front of the dwarf quite the table-side entertainment as we practiced running and using one of our fire hoses. We even succeeded in mostly keeping ourselves and any other boaters nearby dry!
Next up, we got to top the silly charts with a Gumby race, also pictured below, where we raced to put on our massive red neoprene suits. I’m sure we were quite a sight to behold when we tried to have a little dance-off in our red Michelin man costumes. But safety comes first!
After what felt like an entire day’s worth of activities, we settled into the saloon for a chill review of academic standards, policies, and courses. With our bodies more relaxed but our minds now brimming with new information, we got to take the afternoon off until prep for dinner. Most of the crew decided to run a slew of heated games of Egyptian rat slap, while some went to the nearby pier to pick up missed cleaning products. After 1-2 hours, everyone was back on the boat and spent the rest of our free time either reading in the nets off the bow sprit or fitting in time for a quick nap.
In what felt like no time, we were on to our final meal of the day: dinner. Dinner today consisted of rice and beef, a personal favorite, topped with corn, beans, and plenty of chili oil. As the first skipper, I was taught about our new dinner tradition, squeeze. Squeeze consists of holding hands in a circle by the wheel and answering a question posed by the skipper in turn. After answering, each person then squeezes the person next to them’s hand as we move around the circle.
However, just as I was about to initiate our first squeeze, I was stopped by Meg bringing a cake up to the stern and a wonderful hand-painted card signed by everyone on board. I may have forgotten to mention, but today was both our first day on the sea and my first day being 21! After a truly one-of-a-kind birthday celebration, I showered and sat down to write up this small window into daily life on Argo.
Kiki, signing off.