All of us on board currently love games. The pinrail race was followed up by a pass-the-pig tournament. The game goes as follows: you throw two tiny rubber pigs and get points based on how they land. This whole affair was as silly as it sounds. It became even sillier as I, the grandmaster, forgot some of the rules of the game, essentially taking away all opportunities for using tactics and having contenders make it to the next round purely on luck. Wanting to change the rules back to the originals was heavily protested by all contestants and so the game continued making no sense at all. Furthermore, I am relentlessly teased for being a judge who wants to change rules mid-game or reward extra points for spectacular throws- it has by now been made abundantly clear to me that I am not allowed to do any of these things.

The great thing about Pass the Pig is that it is more thrilling than one would ever expect. No matter how bad someone can throw, the game can turn around at any moment. More than once, players in the lead almost reached the winning number, with the underdog then throwing a remarkable combination, overtaking them in the last seconds of the game. The tension in the air was palpable, with the O’s! and A’s coming from the playing field punctuating the events of the game just like one would expect during famous soccer events.

While we in tension wait for the finals, life on board continues. The studding sails have been in use and we are getting quite experienced in bringing them up and down. Even though we have been able to admire them for a few days now, they remain spectacular to behold. Furthermore, Duarte has been busy with preparing classes on celestial navigation and today we are shooting the sun. When people would speak about “shooting the sun” before, this made little sense to me, but since today I know it is determining the position of the sun relative to the horizon, done with the use of a sextant. We are all getting the opportunity to use the tool and secretly it makes us feel like real sailors like they are portrayed in the movies. Later this week we will use the angles we are measuring to calculate our position, and then we will probably realize we are not really fit for the movies yet and lucky to have a captain and mate managing our course.