The Watches
Commercial ships of all types use a "watch system" that operates 24 hours a day in order to sail and do maintenance all day and night. There are different ways of dividing the crew, depending on the number and how hard you are expected to work, and the Picton Castle does three watches: 12-4, 4-8, and 8-12. If you are on the 4-8, like I am at the moment (soon to end, as we rotate every few weeks), you work 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. The time in between is yours to sleep or read (or do laundry or have a shower, which can be a production). It takes about a week to settle into a schedule, and mine goes something like this: I start my day with lunch at noon, have 4 hours off and start work at 4. Our watch gets a half-hour break for dinner at 6 and then we are off at 8. I usually go below right at that time (the sun sets early in the tropics so it is dark), read or write for a bit, and then go to bed. I am awoken at precisely 3:40 a.m. (3:30 if there is rain for extra time to put on rain gear, which has only been twice since we left the North Altantic), and have to be on deck ready to work at 3:50. We get off at 8 a.m., have a bit of breakfast and go back to bed until somewhere before noon, at which time the next day starts.
Different watches have different jobs that they do, mostly because of what kinds of things you do at that time of day. Our watch is (unfortunately) the "cleaning watch", but we also do a lot of sail handling. At the moment the sun is rising at around 6 a.m., so we sit around for the first two hours in the dark and then scrub down all of the decks with a salt-water hose and lots of brushes. Then we grab buckets and sponges and wash down about as much of the exposed parts of the ship as we can until our watch ends. Toward the end of our watch, the captain assesses the wind and sea situation and may as a result change sail configuration. Often, the royals (the top-most sails) are taken in overnight (so you don't have to send people up 90 feet in the rigging in the dark in case you go through a squall), so we set them again. Sometimes the courses (the lowest and biggest sails) are taken in overnight so they are reset in the morning. Sometimes, the courses are taken in the captain doesn't want to use them that day so we go "up and furl", which means climbing aloft and tying them to the yard so they don't flap around.
The afternoon (12-4) watch is often painting or varnishing, so we continue what they started and then clean up after them. Because the captain isn't running a slave ship (merely a "hell ship", in his words), we often get the hour after dinner off, unless there is sail handling. This means that out of our eight hours of work per day, we really only work solidly for about half that, and the rest of the time we are on stand-by for whatever is required to sail the ship. (The same goes for all the watches--half the time is real work and the rest of the time they are standing by for sail manoeuvres.)
At all times, two people from the watch are doing quite important jobs, helm and lookout. A "trick at the helm" lasts one hour and so 8 people from each watch every day steer the ship. Steering is actually quite difficult, and changes hugely depending on whether we are beating, on a reach, or running before the wind (different directions of wind on the boat). Steering under sail versus under motor is also very different. Compasses (in the old style) are divided into 32 "points" (using 360 degrees is the new-fangled way), and you have to try to steer within a point. When you relieve the helmsman, you state, "I am here to relieve you" and ask for the heading. He or she will reply something like "southwest by west", which you repeat to confirm that you got it, and then you say "you are relieved", which starts your trick at the helm, as they call it.
Lookout is much simpler. You stand on the fo'c'sle head (around the bow) and just scan the horizon. Anything that you see that isn't ocean is reported to the mate on duty. This includes the occasional freighter or (more rare) yacht, and any large flotsam. I like lookouts because you get some time to yourself and there are often interesting things to watch. More or less all day, you see solitary, or schools of, flying fish leaping and gliding over the water as they jump to get out of the way of the ship. They are about the size of a trout and can fly 50-100 m. In the night you can see the bioluminescent plankton sparkling in the wake of the ship (even though it hasn't been as spectacular as I have seen it in the Pacific); sometimes you see flashes of it below the surface as a larger fish kicks after being spooked by the ship.
In this way, the ship is a 24-hour operation. Even if we are only going 4 knots in a moderate breeze, well will make about 100 nautical miles, or almost 200 km per day, and that has been how we have made our way to Panama in 22 days. I am writing this while we are at anchor in Colon, waiting for our slot in the canal tomorrow, very early in the morning.
7:57:40 PM 
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