Housemates are entering in to Day 18, with their third week of nominations due to be made later in the day, and they were woken up at around 10am to find the house has been decked out in pirate related decorations.

Anthony has revealled to the housemates that he had a broken nights sleep, and could hear hammering and drilling - clearly from the construction of the task materials out in the garden overnight.

The bedroom is now the "pirate quarters", and there's a gun cannon with cannon balls next to the Diary Room, whilst out in the garden there's a representation of a Pirate Ship, with Big Brother now called "Big Beard".

One captain will be in control of the Pirate Ship, must not take part in day-to-day tasks, and will benefit from certain privileges. To decide who the captain is, they have to pull swords out of a barrel, with the longest sword being key to the captain's role.

As soon as Science saw the Pirate ship he burst out in a Pirate voice and was clearly revelling in the task, so it's probably proven very fortunate for him to have pulled out the longest sword, making him the captain. Ooh arr pieces of eight.

Two housemates each have to take it in turn to sit in the crows nest (loft) and keep watch over the garden, looking for a flag which will be raised by Big Brother either signifying Land Ahoy or Pirates, and then have to raise the alarm getting all other housemates ship-shape and on deck within 5 minutes.

At just before 2pm the first flag was spotted, and housemates made it there in time but then should have done as they were all dressed and awake - it'll probably be a different matter if the flag gets raised during the night whilst housemates are sleeping.

Rough seas
The task had been going ok, but hit a patch of rough seas during the afternoon when Big Brother called the housemates to nominate, and then announced that three of them had been discussing who to nominate and so wern't allowed to vote.

This obviously caused a case of low moral to sweep over the housemates, who were already finding it hard to work as a team with Science ruling with such a hook-shaped iron fist, but wasn't made better when the house seemed to split in two with Derek, Craig and Roberto staying in the bedroom bickering, whilst other housemates were in the lounge doing exactly the same. (see The Eye Day 18 for more...)

Sing!
A mini-task to create a sea-shanty has been set down for the housemate, and they'll have to perform the song as a whole group at various intervals during the task, as required by Big Beard. The first performance happened at just before 9pm, although just as soon as it were over Craig has rushed back to the bedroom to sob his eyes out and hide from the housemates who he'd been shamed infront of when the video of him discussing nominations was revealed.