From the 8th to the 18th of October I got the opportunity of spending 10 days on the "Spirit of New Zealand", a 45m long, three masted sailing ship on which the Spirit of Adventure Trust runs a youth development program. This program takes 40 teenagers on board the ship for ten days, the ship is led by up to 14 crewmembers, on my journey there were only 10.
On day one everyone arrived in Auckland an made their way to the wharf where we entered the ship and unpacked our bags into draws. We were then separated into watches of ten persons each and taken around for a safety tour and after that all joined again for lunch down in the aft cabin. The group photo was then followed by our first experience of going "aloft" - climbing up on the mast, everyone had to put a harness on and up we went, not to the top, but scary enough for the first time.

Day two started with the same procedure as each following morning of the voyage would: At 6:30 the generator turned on and woke everyone up - togs on and up onto the deck where we had to run around the whole ship until everyone was up there. Then we had a warm-up consisting of sprinting on the spot, press ups and other exercises until everyone was warm, next on the program was the morning swim - jumping down into the freezing cold water woke even the sleepiest of the forty.
Finally after we had gone through an amazing breakfast and several safety-talks we got to gather in our watches and got taught how to set sails, each watch was responsible for one group of sails, and then the white sheets were flattering up in the wind. By the time we got to sleep in our bunks at night we knew at least a few names as we had played several games to introduce ourselves.
 

The next days we spend learning about the ship, getting to know each other and having lots of fun at evening activities like a blindfolded obstacle course. On day five we finally got to have ground beneath our feet again - a 5 hour tramp took us through beautiful scenery on Great Barrier Island. Back on the ship the yard swing was put out and almost everyone dared to just step of the side of the ship to swing out about 15m and dive into the water which didn't feel anywhere as cold as in the early morning.
Maybe the day with the biggest diversity of happenings was day six: In the morning my watch went sailing on one of the little boats that are kept on board and even though there was hardly any wind we had lots of fun playing "mafia" and talking. After lunch I was lying on deck with a friend and suddenly we heard a noise, as we looked out at the water we saw the back fin of a whale diving into the water. Another five or six times we saw the little Grey triangle coming up and heard the air being blown out until he finally swam off, out of the bay. In the afternoon we rafted to one of the beaches in the bay and cleaned up all the rubbish the water had carried on shore and in the evening we went on shore again - this time for a campfire, soccer on the beach, barbecue and marshmallows toasted in the fire. Until late into the night we gathered around the warm fire and sang to the guitar we brought from the ship.
On day seven we had one hour of "quiet time" where no one was allowed to talk, engine and generator were turned off and the only noises around were coming from the sails and the sea. When we left the boat for lots of us this was one of the highlights of the whole journey.

Day nine gave 13 of us Trainees the opportunity of testing how much we had learned over the last eight days and to develop even more leadership skills than by just leading our watch (everyone had had a go at this over the last days) as this last full day of traveling is the "Trainee Day". For this everyone elected a crew the night before, all positions from captain to cook were delegated to one of us teenagers. I got elected first mate which is the position straight after the captain. Hence we spent the night of day eight on planning route and activities for the next day.
Making all our worries pointless the next day was a full success as for the first time we had no drop of rain and we covered all distances on schedule. This meant that we had time just before lunch to pull up the yard swing again and everyone could enjoy either the water or watching some spectacular back flips.
In the afternoon we arrived back in Auckland harbour and everyone started feeling sad. For most of us the voyage had been one of the best experiences of our lives an when we spent the evening down in the aft cabin singing to the guitar one last time lots of us couldn't hold back the tears as it was hard to believe that we had to leave all our new friends and all the fun we had had behind to go back to school.