For lunch we had two sails up. As a result we were tipped over onto our side, funnily enough I didn’t try cook anything extravagant for lunch

Ben Edwards crew whole expedition, middle of Barents Sea Update 26 July UTC 19.00 Local time 22.00

Hello. Onboard we have two rotas, one for cooking and one for washing up. Each person does one day of each every week. Today was my first cooking day. Imagine how well that went. I didn’t have to do anything for breakfast. Everyone is expected to either get their own food for breakfast or be asleep. Most people are asleep.

For lunch we had two sails up. As a result we were tipped over onto our side, funnily enough I didn’t try anything extravagant. We had a small loaf of brown bread that had been made a couple of days ago so I cut some slices off that and made sandwiches. Happily these turned out to be edible so some people had them. Dennis and Nikolai had had soup about half an hour earlier so didn’t want anything, David was asleep (he told me so himself) and so wasn’t eating. Constance had some soup instead so in the end I only made three sandwiches.

We have no more cheddar cheese. I made dinner during my watch, or to be more accurate, I started making dinner during my watch and then The Mother finished the job. Dinner consisted of boil in the bag rice and some pre-cooked packages of lamb hotpot.

I’ve got my washing up day tomorrow and I expect that to be rather busier for me. I have my own system which says that on any of the days that I’m washing up or cooking for I don’t have to do schoolwork. That works out pretty well because trying to fit in cooking, schoolwork and sleeping together in the right amount is just a little too difficult to do. As it turns out I’m not the only one doing schoolwork on the trip. Barbara and David have become engrossed by my history textbook. They’ve placed postitnotes on pages 213 and 67, the Russian revolution and the Cold War, respectively.