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Tall Ship Eagle
2/c Dana Prefer 

When placed in a leadership position and tasked with a job it can be easy to delegate work to get it done, but you do not always see results. This is the opposite of what I have experienced during my first week as a cadre aboard Eagle. As the fore mast captain, I direct the swabs and cadre as to which lines need to be hauled on and which lines to let free in order to raise the correct sails. As I oversee the process, amongst the yelling of “heave” and “ho,” everyone is working as a team. When we reached the goal of swinging our stern through the wind, called a “wear”, the Captain made an announcement that we had done the whole evolution in 40 minutes, and I could not have been happier. We had managed to cut our time in half from the first time we performed a wear! By assigning the swabs and cadre certain tasks to perform during sail stations we had gone from never before interacting with each other to being able to work as a cohesive unit to achieve our goal.

Now, the first phase of swabs are back at the Academy, and I am ready to see what this next phase brings. I hope to pass on my knowledge to the swabs and to learn a few things from them as well. Maybe we will even wear the ship is under 30 minutes!
 

2/c Prefer

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