L'Atalante Ship Games 2015

Today was a special occasion. I was asked by the chief scientist on board to arrange some kind of activity for the science team during one of our few days off. Naturally, I was up for the challenge, and leaned back on my previous training as an adventure guide and team-building instructor and compiled a serie of activities with what little resources and space I had available.

So I started planning something which I came to name the "L'Atalante Ship Games 2015". Participation was optional but I still had 18 people joining, which was great. They were split into three teams, six people in each, to solve different exercises heavy on teamwork.

In the end we all had a great afternoon with a total of 8 different activities and were able to crown a winning team as the L'Atalante Ship Games 2015 Champions.

Thanks Dalslands Aktiviteter, I never imagined I would be using my experiences from you guys to host games for a group of scientists on a ship in the South Pacific.

Below follows a few pictures from the games.

Kyle makes a leap for it during the first activity; the "Step on stones", which basically meant using four square shaped weights from the gym to cross a small area on front deck, without touching the floor.

Team three makes an impressive try to have the whole team standing on the small square during the activity "Everyone on board".

 
The picture to the left shows team two desperately trying to solve the ingenious puzzle "The T" within 10 minutes. The best part of this activity was actually the beginning when the chief scientist looked at me after I announced the rules and asked me: "Do we really need 10 minutes for this?".
At that point I can understand him because it is only four pieces, but little did he know about the puzzle I had prepared for them. His team didn't solve it.

The picture to the right shows Dominique in the middle of the obstacle course (after crawling under a ping-pong table). The catch was that you had to carry around a ball on a spoon, in your mouth, during the whole course. Quite difficult, and the source of many laughs since you do look plain stupid with that spoon in your mouth while focusing on the ball. Or perhaps constipated is a better word to describe it for some. Good fun either way.

In addition to what the pictures show, we also had activities called "sorting people", "fetching random things", "mini sock-bowling" and concluding it all with a "ping-pong ball race". The ball race is another brilliant activity I took from previous experience. I got some ping-pong balls in the gym, buckets in the lab and cut out "half-pipes" from water bottles. The teams then had to transport the balls using the "half-pipes" from a starting position into their bucket, further down the ship.

Later that night we had a brief prize ceremony with a few speeches and beer before the winning team, team three, finally received the trophy (as seen above) that they had been competing for (in addition to the fame and glory of course).