MV Greenpeace / PC 8023
Noon pos: 4 21'N 135 06'E
June 1, 1996
Day 16
Sleeping is one of the joys in life and the way you are woken
can determine your mood for the rest of the day.
There are many methods used to wake someone and on the ships I've
seen a few. There is the `foot stomping, door slamming, yeller',
the `shake the shit out of your senses' style, the ` torch in
your face shiner', and the gentle `good morning please turn your
light on' waker upper.
Jeannette and I are lucky, our watch waker is of the last kind.
But we seem to have both successfully aquired the bad habit of
pretending we are awake, turning on our lights without missing a
beat of our dreams.
The sea has been calm and a nearly full moon is keeping us
company at night.
This morning at 02.25 hrs we crossed the equator at longitude
140 15.8'E. So now we are in the northern hemisphere.
Since all of us have crossed before we just had a quiet barbeque
on deck this evening. Pity Lynda was not here with us, we had no
excuse to dress up and act like idiots.
Later this afternoon we had a emergency drill. This time going
through the liferaft launching procedure followed by a first aid
course from Bora. Explaining the ABC's on first
finding a injured or unconcious person, CPR,being shown how to
operate the oxygen masks and bottles then finishing off with the
a scenario of someone with a broken spine and putting them onto a
special stretcher designed so that it can air lifted from the
ship by helicopter.
I was the patient and it felt a little unerving to lay on this
stretcher with straps crossing all over me to hold me in then the
final layer over the top. I felt like Houdini in a body bag. Once
firmly strapped in and the crew felt they had taunted me enough,
I was then carefully carried out to the heli deck for evacuation.
While trapped,there was talk of seeing whether the stretcher
floated.....I knew they wouldn't really.
It was an interesting exercise that we all take seriously as it
could happen to any of us and as in any emergency we all have to
trust and rely on eachother and work as a team.
Tanya Popp
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