From 5 to15 March I went on the Spirit of New Zealand.

The Spirit is a huge sailing ship, where 40 teenagers (20 boys and 20 girls) live together for 10 days and learn to sail the ship, but it is not only about sailing. We learned to take responsibility and to be in leadership positions, to interact with people, but also to sometimes step back and trust others to do it right. The Spirit is also about friendship. When you live with these people in such a small space for 10 days you automatically get really close and find friends for life. Of course they didn’t just give a bunch of unexperienced teens a huge sailing ship, though. On board was also a crew of adults, who knew what they were doing, including a cook, a navigator, an engineer, etc.

We started the trip at Auckland harbour and then sailed from island to island, from bay to bay to get to Great Barrier Island and back with a few detours.

The 40 students got separated into four groups of ten, in which we were working for the time on the Spirit. There were also four sail-stations, one for every team, which we switched from day to day. Every day we decided a team leader for the morning and one for the afternoon, who was in charge of their team and told everybody else what to do. On two sail-stations you also had other “chores” to do, on one you had Specials, which is pretty much just helping in the kitchen and washing dishes and so on; the other one is Night Watch. That meant you had shifts of 1 ½ hours, where you and someone else of the team stay awake and make sure that the ship still swims when everyone wakes up. Everyone hated Specials and Night-watch so much that there is even a poem existing about that:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

Night-watch sucks,

And specials does, too.

Another thing people had mixed opinions about was the morning swim every day (I personally loved it). We started our day in our togs doing a bit of morning exercise to get warm and then jumping into the water and swimming alongside the ship to wake up.

Nearly every day we sailed around 20 sea miles, played little team building and leadership games and after sailing we often had a “pool party”, which is just time to jump in the water or even swing from a trapeze that they hung from one of the masts. Sometimes we would also take out the rafts and paddle to one of the islands around to do a beach cleanup, play games or go for a hike.

All of this was preparing us for trainee day (day 9), where the crew handed the whole boat over to us.  The night before we elected a captain, first and second mate, a navigator, an engineer, a cook and a watch assistant (leader) for every sail-station (I was watch-assistant for the foredeck). Everything went well, we didn’t sink or burn the ship and managed to get to Auckland in one piece, which is really impressive, considering that on day one nobody knew anything about how to sail this boat.

I think the greatest part of being on the spirit was that everyone could be real and truly themselves. Nobody knew anyone else on the ship beforehand so we had nothing to prove, and because we weren’t allowed to take our phones, we were completely separated from the world outside the boat. All of this meant that nobody had to fit in or to change themselves to do so. Everyone could be who they are and wanted to be and I don’t think that I’ll ever feel that free again.