So this was my first day on Elida this year!

I arrived to the train station at eight o’clock yesterday evening, took bus no. 80 to Billdal where Stefan and Diana live. It was Diana’s and Zemias’ (their second youngest son) birthday, and all of the people onboard Elida as well as a few other folks were there to celebrate.

We came back to the ship far too late, and I went to bed a bit too late, since I had to unpack all my stuff. Almost noone on board the ship seemed to have had a good night’s sleep, since it took several hours for almost everybody I’ve spoken with for them to fall asleep.

Up at seven, quick breakfeast, then down to work. Elida V, moored just alongside Elida IV, was a joyful sight after all these weeks away. I installed the battery backup central in the navigation cabin, the system that powers all the radios and radars in case of a power failure. It went well and I am pleased with the result.

The Ukrainian and the American building team aboard Elida have been working all day with painting the floor in the assembly hall, or the “saloon”. The saloon is the largest open space on the ship, and has a quite large floor that wasn’t painted yet.

Serihy, Rachel and Greg took care of the Gelcoat painting while Yevhén did the sanding. The painting works like this: First somebody spackles and sands the floor to get it really flat. Then the painting starts. After vacuum cleaning and washing the floor with Styrene, the painting starts.

Gelcoat is a plastic paint that is completely waterproof. The downside with it is that it is very slippery when it becomes wet, so we apply sand over the first layer to give it a lot more friction. The paint is going to dry tonight, so after that the painting team will vacuum clean away the sand that didn’t stick to the paint, and then they will paint a few more coats of paint to cover the sand.

In the evening we went to McDonalds to eat icecream. We have a guest on board this week who turned 23 today, so plus the cake and the great through-the-intercom wakeup song me, Greg and Jimmy had, we celebrated with McDonalds icecream.

At last, I and Greg had some fun with a sign on Pressbyrån. The sign says “Show your ID”, but the Swedish word for “ID” is “Leg”. Enjoy.

That was all for today, folks. I don’t think I can promise daily updates on this blog, after all I am on a ship and any type of Internet connection is a deviation from normality.