I flew into a town called Lautoka in Fiji and then made my way to a hotel near the docks where is was to meet the bursar of the ship Soren Larsen.
She arrived a little bit late but that was ok as it gave me a chance to get to know the other crew members that I was going to be working with for the next two weeks. We also managed to sink a few beer's in the process.
Before I knew it I was aboard the ship and we were headed out of the harbour to an island we could see just outside of the bay, we dropped anchor there that night and received instruction in how to sail a square rigger. It's not like you imagine, everywhere you look there are ropes but after 5 minutes you start to get the hang of which ropes do what, after all, these ships were created many years ago before the work hi-tech had even been invented so everything's pretty logical, one rope for putting up the sail and another for letting it down, even I started to get the hang of it! The tricky part is remembering which rope for which sail, but hopefully by the end of the voyage I might be starting to remember. The captain (Jim) tells us not to worry too much as we'll be getting lots of practice hoisting the sails anyhow and by the end of the trip we realised that he wasn't joking!
The next day the captain got out the charts and showed use where we were headed....
