I wanted to talk a little bit about our three watch system that we started using for leg 7 and have continued using for leg 8. With this system at all times there's one third of the crew on deck, another third on support doing tasks like cooking or cleaning and available to help the crew on deck if needed, and another third resting or sleeping. This requires to divide the crew in six groups and assign a schedule to each of these groups. Sounds complex but once it has been set up, you just need to follow the schedule for your group which repeats every 24 hours.
With this way of working you have several advantages over a traditional 2 watch system
- Each person gets an uninterrupted period of rest of 8 hours
- It works great for small crews because it allows you to have two thirds of the crew available at any time
- You share some time with all the other members of your crew, not just with your watch
- It repeats every day, so once you learn it, it's very easy to follow
It's disadvantages are:
- Some of the people get better schedules than other (they sleep at night, for example)
- Since you split the work in three main groups that are not available at the same time, you cannot assign a bunk to two people so that they can hot bunk it. So usually this means that every sleeping period you need to find a bunk that is free.
But thanks to Florian, our brilliant German crew member, we now have a system where three people share two bunks and this works brilliantly and you don't need to hunt for a place to sleep any longer. This removes the last big downside of this system and we are all really happy to be using it.
