I’ve been asked to consider if I want to join the drama team or not. One of the guys left, went home. He decided to leave about 3 weeks before he left, and had been discussing it with personnel for some time. Id still have to do deckie job full-time and then drama team a few evenings a week, during free time.

In deck department, apparently in a few months some of the carpenters are leaving, and if no professional carpenters join, they may be looking for normal deckies to start learning that job. The carpenter’s job does have slightly better hours… basically normal deckie, but no firerounds or gangway watch! Yes, it would be hard, giving up firerounds. It’s so fun getting my sleep pattern all messed up, feeling depressed and never knowing what time it is, waking up terrified that I’ve missed the watch, and wanting to go home, but I think I could handle the disappointment of not
experiencing it.

If I try really hard.

One of the other deckies told me he thought it would be my kind of thing, as I like doing stuff with my hands, and am quite perfectionistic, and so on. I’d love to learn more proper carpentry.

We’ve been doing fire-fighting training this week. Went to the Chennai technical college of maritime, for 3 full days of lectures, plus one practical day, and one other day when the time was kind of confused. We’ve been hearing loads on board about the training course the previous preship went to in Sri Lanka, I think, and how it was fantastic, real loads of training, having to crawl through cargo containers set on fire, put out loads of types of fires, and so on.

We didn’t learn ANYTHING in the lectures, nothing we didn’t have in preship. We didn’t even touch a fire extinguisher, or see a match get struck. But we get a certificate, just the same as the other people!

About the malaria tablets… they seem to perhaps be causing restlessness and sleeplessness, in varying degrees and forms. But many many people on board are finding it hard to sleep at night, just lying awake wanting to walk around or get up and type, or work out, or whatever. Particularly on Sundays, when we have to take the weekly extra pills. But we’re not really tired in the day. Everyone is so hot and sweating so much anyway. We take 2 tablets daily, and another 2 extra on Sundays. so many and we must all take salt tablets as well, as we sweat so much.