There’s this funny little thing called unconditional love. We’re automatically born into it with our families, our parents raising us to the best of their ability despite the countless sacrifices and pains that we children give in return. There are other types of unconditional love though, and I’ve found them aboard a small ship called Concordia.

            I first arrived in Lunenburg not knowing at all what to expect – and even knowing this I was surprised with how different everything turned out to be. I met all these new people, some with the Class Afloat experience under their belt, and many who were new just like me. The great thing about meeting new people is that they’re all diverse and every quality or characteristic they have is unique. This too, however, means that for the first bit you don’t know them, and they don’t know you.

            This, combined with an unknown environment, extremely close quarters, a whole new lifestyle, and five months at a time sharing this together on a ship that’s impossible to get off of (except when in port) seems like a recipe for disaster. Surprisingly, the contrary has turned out to be true.

Over our journey, my crew and I have been through some pretty unimaginable things. We’ve experienced the unlikely together, some of us are puking partners as a result of sea sickness, we’ve climbed aloft together for the first time, bargained an incredible price with our shore leave groups, danced on the streets and around fires, seen places of magnificence and magic, rotated every 2 hours through the night with our watch, been involved in foreign cultures, hauled lines in sail manoeuvres, watched the sun rise and set, and, what we’re doing at this very moment, sharing the important holidays together (it just so happens to be Christmas).

With time, our crew has grown closer together as each experience we share makes our relationship more and more unique. We live a life that many could never fathom (also known as 6ft to us all), and are taught lessons that others are not exposed to and even neglect to consider.

I’ve lived four of my happiest months on Class Afloat; it has become my home and the people aboard are my family, the people I love unconditionally. There is no way to describe what this experience is like; you’d have to have it first hand to have any idea what I’m talking about. But what I can tell you is that it’s above and beyond anything I could’ve asked for in my entire life. If Class Afloat was shooting for the moon, it made it to a whole other universe.