Over the past few days, we’ve completed our final training near Lampedusa. During these exercises, we practiced the so-called “person overboard maneuver”— the scenario where a person falls overboard. In nautical terminology, this exercise is actually called the “man overboard maneuver,” but it’s important to us to be as inclusive as possible in our language.

After finishing our training yesterday evening and thus being theoretically ready for action, we considered whether to head into the SAR zone (Search and Rescue Zone) or not. The weather conditions were very poor, but we decided to look for refugee boats for a short window of time within a radius of about 30 nautical miles around Lampedusa. We didn’t find any boats last night (fewer people on the move set out due to the bad weather), and conditions have become more critical, so we headed back to Lampedusa this morning and are now waiting to head out again.