Three Funniest Things Heard While Handling Docklines

All of these were said while I was on the ship, working a dockline in the middle of a docking maneuver.

Number one-
Man on land: "Nice yacht you have there!"
Me: "It's, um, a schooner, actually...but yeah, thanks."
Man: "Are you the owner?"
Me: (handling a relatively unimportant line on the bow of a 130ft tall ship while coming in to dock, clearly not at helm) ". . . No."

Number two-
(while going through the Ballard Locks)
Man on land: "So... Is this some kind of fishing boat? Are you kids all in school?"
Crew: ". . ."

Number three-
(overheard, while captain is fighting the helm against the wind, just nearing the dock, now thirty feet away, now twenty feet, now ten...)
Woman passenger to captain: "Got much wildlife around here?"
Captain: "?!? Not now!"


Hey look! A bunch of sailors dangling over the water!

Back on Land, Sad Sailor

My ship has come in, but I'm very sad to be a landlubber once again. I miss that the rooms don't all rock and that I hear no water lapping near my head as I go to sleep. I miss the steady action... but I don't miss jumping to the whims of the first mate. And I definitely don't miss having to hike three blocks to go visit the shore head. (Hooray for free showers! Showers forever! Showevers!)

I also miss the constant singing. Granted, it was usually just *me* doing the constant singing - I was compared at one point to the Singing Bush in "The Three Amigos." No one around; just me scrubbing the sole boards and singing, singing, singing. (But look, you have to sing while you clean heads or else you just go crazy, that's all.) There were also the chanties we sang while we worked the sails, songs you heard a million times yet never tired of - John Kanaka, The Esoquibo River, Cape Cod Girls. On a few crew-only sails we chantied to other songs...Memorable especially was when a particularly loony crewmate led us in a chanty that went "Man!...boy!...man!...boy!" over and over again. (The same crewmate who substituted "Pi-ka-chu!" for our traditional "2-6-heave!" while sweating up the lifts.)

I checked off a few of the goals I set for myself this season. Walked from the tip of the bowsprit to the end of the main boom without touching the deck. Learned how to splice line together. Helped set the anchor. The biggest by far was flying the topsails, the three additional sails to our usual four that we aren't allowed to set when passengers are aboard. The wind was mild and agreeable the day we chose to do it, but by the time we had everything ready to go, gusts and gales were blowing around us, and waves were breaking hard on our bow. But we had spent all that time preparing and weren't about to let a little weather stop us, so just outside Seattle we raised all seven at once, all hands to every line, then sent out our Zodiac tender to capture a few quick pictures of our ship in all her glory. As soon as the pictures were taken we dropped the sails fast, but the wind was yanking and ripping them all to skelter and threatening to whip any inattentive sailor right over the lifelines. While taking down the main topsail I myself was jerked down from my perch on the fife rail and dragged along the deck a few feet before I had the presence of mind to drop the line; the others on it were bunched together deck-of-cards style before they did the same, halyard dancing above us like a tiger's tail, sail canvas slapping against sail canvas with a crack that seemed to call back the ghost of the ship's battle around Cape Horn.

But alas, we were not off the Horn, only off Elliot Bay, and there was no one around to see our glorious show but a few ocean tankers, a distant ferry, and a curious Coast Guard. It was a good moment. A ship without all her sails flying is like an eagle with its wings folded in.

Give a Sailor Her Grog!

Hey look, I'm alive! Funny that while I have access to a computer, I avoid it at all costs, but now that I'm back sailing on the ship again, I lunge at the internet every chance I get!

Yes indeed, I'm back aboard the Adventuress and sailing along merrily as you please. This season I come back to the crew knowing my port from my starboard, my jib from my jibe, and that makes me "seasoned," I guess. An old salt. Neptune's own daughter. But I still don't feel entirely comfortable when I'm 70 feet up in the rigging.

I wish I had some fun pictures to post, but I forgot my camera cord at home, so the pictures are still trapped on the camera.

What to report so far? Well, I visited Olympia for the first time. The town is charming from the water. You look down the length of the deck along the very tip of Budd Inlet, last southern stand of the Puget Sound, and a mere four hundred feet away is a dancing fountain with the capital dome looming up behind it. Better yet, the same distance in the other direction is a seafood shack with better oysters than I thought the Sound could ever offer. But the downside is that the water of Budd Inlet is the backwash of Washington State, never flushed out, nasty and brown and devoid of all life but the hardiest filter feeders. I became rather depressed while searching for minnows for our educational aquarium, because I couldn't catch any that weren't deformed, diseased, or covered in tumors. I was at last tempted to go for one of the massive lion's mane jellyfish that dotted the waters. ("Hey kids! Here's our aquarium. Yeah, touch this!") So if the Washington legislators want an environmental project, they don't have to look very far.

What else? This year is bringing new challenges - learning to trim the sails myself, learning navigation, tying a turk's head knot, taking on the role of passenger herder in the event of emergencies. Also, I'm the Marine Science Officer (capitalized!), which gives the the glorious job of standing out in a tidal mud flat at 4 in the morning with a net and a bucket going, "Here, little moon snail! Here, moonie, moonie!" I's a'stockin' the aquarium, yeehaw.

Life Aboard the Ship

Well, I'm off the ship now, more's the pity, but it doesn't sail in Puget Sound in the winter. Too much rain. Too much wind, as well, which you think wouldn't be a problem for a sailing ship... and it wouldn't, if it was just us crew, but when you have a deck full of 45 kids and parents and are trying to do quick maneuvers, things get a little dicey. We tried setting sail once on a dark and blustery day, but only managed to just put it up, sharply heel over, get a few "oohs" and "aahs" from the passengers and then drop and sea stow it, which is to say that we furled it as quickly as possible, and none too neatly, just to get it out of the way. Sea stowing is grand with a sail that weighs 2500 lbs...

So I'm off, but way back when in the day, "Life Aboard" was one of the classes I often taught. And a lazy class it was, too, for it mainly involved taking groups below decks, pointing out a few of our living arrangements, and then answering the barrage of questions that followed. The class was essentially a long answer to the question: What is it like to live aboard a ship?

Well, every ship is different, isn't it? On some, the crew get their own private bunk for their entire stay, decorating it the way they like and unpacking as much as one can unpack within a bunk. Not the jolly crew of the Adventuress! We had 37 bunks aboard, and only one of those was private. (The Captain's.) Well, I suppose the First Mate had a designated bunk too, but since the rest of the crew used it in the daytime as a couch, it could hardly be counted as private. For the rest of us, we picked a bunk for the duration of a trip, whether it was four day's worth of day programs or a six day overnight, and then when it was over a blank bunk sign-up sheet was pinned up to the main mast. Since the lower bunks were used for other things in the daytime, like the seating around the table in the main cabin, it was protocol to pack up one's things every morning and stow them in the upper bunks, a fact I always told the kids after asking the question, "So, if you came aboard, how much stuff do you think you would bring?"

Typically, the kids were simply amazed to learn that we actually lived aboard the ship. I guess they thought it was a day job.

We used the ship as a metaphor for the planet, showing that we had to conserve the resources we had aboard, and - hey, look! The planet has limited resources too! Space was one resource, and after I showed the kids how we used the bunks for multiple things, I would lift the floorboards and show the storage down in the bilges, or show the lockers that were cleverly worked into every nook or cranny.

So what won't I miss about living aboard?

I won't miss the heads. You can't throw toilet paper down a marine head. Instead we had painfully tiny trash receptacles next to the toilets that would have worked for, say, six people. Sadly, we often had more than thirty, most of whom were teenagers. Gross. Enough said.

I won't miss the bunks. The first one I ever slept in had a clearance of about an inch when I was laying on my side. Made me feel lucky to be as small as I am. That first bunk was also home to "Def Leppard," the electrical plug for the anchor light, that had a nice big scary label on it, something about don't touch this or you'll be electrocuted.

I won't miss six days without a shower. Although I do have to admit, not having ship's showers made me surprising familiar with the Shore Heads of Puget Sound. (I should write a book.) It was not only the shore heads I got to visit (Elliot Bay has the best, FYI), but many fitness clubs that opened their locker rooms to our use as their way of supporting to organization. Mmm. Free spas.

I won't miss munging the soles. Mung is the mysterious black layer that builds up on the edges of the sole boards, and so every now and then we would lift the sole boards one by one and scrape down their edges, wipe them top and bottom, and vacuum underneath. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad, except think of the sole boards as gigantic, awkward, heavy puzzle pieces that you can only grip by two metal bolts, resulting in strained backs, smashed fingers, and, for me, lovely bouts of arthritis in my hand. Jolly fun.

But there's far more that I will miss...

I will miss Lucy, the merry little heater that warmed the main cabin in the colder days of late fall. I'll miss the view of the main cabin on those nights, when Lucy's glow flickered on the walls, with the blue light shining on the main mast and the red light glowing from the hall we called the bowling alley. It was like our own little Las Vegas down there.

And I will miss hiding out in the Engineer's hidey-hole from ten to eleven when I had the eleven o'clock anchor watch. There's no point in going to bed for an hour and getting up again, and the hidey-hole, the most hidden room on the ship, almost always had little treats for the crew squirreled away in it.

I'll miss the anchor watch "ninja walk" that was necessary to creep about above decks like a ghost, and the amazingly strong calf muscles it produced.

And I'll miss those unexpected little moments that only come from living aboard a ship. The seal on the dock that lunged into the water just in front of me when I'd walk to the shore head at night. The gronking grating racket of the blue herons at 3 in the morning on an anchor watch. The cradle-like swaying that rocked me to sleep. The feeling of the wood straining and the ship lunging when the sails caught the wind.

I guess it's a darn good thing I'm going back to it next year.

Scenes from the Adventuress

The view from the bowsprit, a good place to take a nap. This was a wonderful fall day, the last sail of the season!



Looking up the main mast, where we flew the flag of the Adventuress. The ensign, the American colors, flew off the stern. The color of the sky here was not unusual later in the season. (Read: lots of rain.)



Mt. Rainier from the Port of Tacoma, the main boom quarter-tackles in the foreground.



Sunrise over Blakely Harbor, Bainbridge Island, with the morning fog burning off the water.

Murder Mystery

After six days aboard a ship full of teenage girls, the crew was ready to kill each other. So we did.

Murder Mystery started yesterday. It is like the game of Clue. Everyone draws a victim, a location, and a weapon, and when you kill someone you take over their current assignment and make it your own. You cannot have any witnesses to a murder, and you have to actually touch the weapon to your victim.

So...

One of the crew, "D", kept a tortilla in his pocket all day until he could use it as a murder weapon in the engine room. "M" was suffering from a cold, but she managed to hide the lead line (a 60 foot length of coarse rope with a massive lead weight at the end) under her pillow in the crew cabin until "Dn" came in to bring her a blanket and was promptly murdered. "S" ended up trying to lure another person into the very small Pee Head whilst holding a guitar, and the Captain met her end with a drawing of a moose in the deck house. Meanwhile, I remain innocent and alive, since I can't quite figure out how to get my victim to come alone with me into the forepeak hatch while also trying to sneak in a three-foot long fender.

Good times.
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New "People" in My Nautical Life

Jefe - The small gray pontoon powerboat that guides the Adventuress in and out of harbor. "Jefe" means boss, which is appropriate, since he shows he is the boss of everyone on board (including the Engineer) by refusing to start at inappropriate moments.

A-ya-shee - The small wooden sailboat/rowboat that balances out Jefe on the other side of the ship. Unlike Jefe, she is always cooperative and quite forgiving of the kids who, new to rowing, make her go in drunken circles.

The Llama Pinatacorn - (That should be a ~ over the "n", but I'm not sure how to write that character.) A prank gift from the good ship Zodiac, who makes random appearances within our voyages. The Llama Pinatacorn is at once a llama, and pinata, and a unicorn all combined into something far greater, and far more frightening.

The Duty Llama - Our ship is ful of llamas. The Duty Llama makes its home on the chest of the Duty Officer of the Day, making that task much more bearable.

The Barfy Brown Bag - Previously I had only one massive black duffel bag for all of my stuff, which resulted in a ten minute rummage every time I needed, say, a sock. The Barfy Brown Bag provides a miraculous alternative to this with its copious pockets and nooks. Acquired from a second-hand store for the whopping cost of $7, the Barfy Brown Bag features a nauseating poo-like color scheme on its outside and an entrenched odor of airsickness on its inside, which, luckily, sticks only to the bag itself and not my clothing.

The Mechanical Advantage Band - An up-and-coming new rap group. White girls go ghetto. I take the stage with a leopard print belt as a necklace and hollah, "Now is the time we talk about the wheeeel! It turns the ruddah, behind the keeeel!" Keep your eyes peeled for our album.

The Truck - The very highest point on the mainm'st. If you can kiss it, you get ten points.

And last but not least...

Mr. Floaty - Victoria B.C. still pumps all of its sewage, untreated, directly into Puget Sound. There's a grandfather clause in Canadian law that allows them to do this. One of the groups opposing this is People Opposed to Outfall Pollution, and their mascot is Mr. Floaty. Unfortunately, the Adventuress was in Victoria before I came aboard, so I missed out on having a picture of myself hugging Mr. Floaty. (Similar pictures hang on the fridge in our galley.) Mr. Floaty sings the song,

"I'm Mr. Floaty, how do you do?
You come from Victoria, I come from you!"


You have to love that.
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Haul Away for the Windy Weather, Boys!

My repertoire of sea chanties is growing. I now find myself at odd moments of the day belting out, "Bound for South Australia!" or "Carry me to Shimbone now!" or "John Kanakanaka to-rei-oh!" And after a rather failed attempt at leading a chanty (I wasn't paying attention to the rhythm of people's hands) I semi-succeeded in my second go, though . . . does anyone's voice sound good when it's belted out as loud as possible into the wind? Eek. Not mine.

Our ship is quite musical. I think the act of sailing stirs up with it other lost archaic desires, like sewing ditty bags, knotting decorative lanyards, and rediscovering that every human being has the capacity to be a musician. Just last week our ship was home to three (four?) violins, a banjo, two three-string music sticks, an accordion, three guitars, and four-ish penny whistles, all of which came out to make an appearance at some point.

Also, at last, we began to take aboard three-hour classroom trips for kids, mostly 5th to 8th grade, which are organized so as to cram every available minute with some activity. Ding! the bell rings, and I lead my group of kids in a lesson about Marine Life, and then Ding! Now we talk about Plankton... (Ding!) I mean... Now we talk about Watersheds! Ding! I am scrambling around in the costume box to dress up as a Cascade Mountain for our skit, while the kids enjoy "quiet time" up on deck, and then we the crew go flail around with costumes and funny accents until Ding! Yay! It's time for Nautical Skills!!!

And so on, and so forth, and then there's an hour to cram in lunch and everything else before the next clot of children comes scurrying over the side of the ship. It's a little frantic, but great fun.

The fall season is halfway through now, so I've been ticking off things I've yet to do one by one. The other day it was shimmying out on the bowsprit to help furl the jib. A few days before that I finally got to drive Jefe, our small boat. Another crewmate and I casted off the ship's docklines and leapt into Jefe, where I promptly proceeded to flood the engine. So as the Adventuress grew smaller and smaller in the distance, I finally got the persnickety thing going and then roared across Commencement Bay in the drunken weave of one unfamiliar with outboard motors, catching up to her and docking at her side. A few days before that I got to "cowgirl," which means sitting out at the end of the main boom and guiding the leech of the mains'il as it comes down for everyone else to furl. Luckily, I had a couple of excellent Tonto-ers teaching me as I went.

So I am learning by the day, and that's just the way I like it. They say the sailing life is terribly addictive. Have I been bit?
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The Schooner "Adventuress" - Part I

I am slowly being indoctrinated into a different world. A different universe, one that never sets foot on the land. The people of the sailing world, especially the tall ships world, maintain a culture unique to themselves.

I should back up to talk a bit about the Adventuress. She was built in 1913 at the expense of a man named John Bordon, a young entrepreneur who, in the footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt, wanted to go out and hunt big game under the guise of conservation. Specifically, Bordon wanted to procure the skeleton of a bowhead whale, which because of the value of the bones was not yet to be found in any museum, and donate it to the American Museum of Natural History's new whale exhibit with a plaque above it proudly declaring that he was the man who had harpooned it. He took with him another young man, a naturalist by the name of Roy Chapman Andrews, who later in life would traipse around the Gobi Desert in his signature broad-brimmed hat and become the inspiration for Indiana Jones.

Because she was to travel into Arctic ice, the Adventuress was given a thick hull and sturdy ribbing. Because Bordon was a bit of an aristocrat, she was also fitted inside with spiral staircases, a bathtub, an organ, and a galley any cook would kill for. Her designer was man named B.B. Crowninshields, who had worked on racing yachts early in his life, later applying that knowledge to drawing up plans for distinctive schooners with graceful lines and unusual speed. (One of his earlier ships, the Martha, shares our waters in Puget Sound. We see her frequently, an almost spitting image of the Adventuress.) But the Adventuress was considered his greatest work, with an undercut stern that lets her turn easily in a breeze, and sails that allow her to go close by the wind.

She was launched out of the shipyard in Boothebay, Maine, crossed to the west via the Straights of Magellan, and headed up for an ill-fated trip to the Bering Sea. Several men on board were simply friends of Bordon and had no useful knowledge, aggravating the rest. Andrews was put off by the cavalier attitude of his patron, who seemed to have a short attention span for the natural sciences. The team never saw a bowhead whale, but put out once for a nearby humpback as a consolation prize. Bordon was poised to throw the first harpoon when the humpback upended the little boat, and the men aboard had to cling to it in the icy waters while the Adventuress worked its way in to pick them up.

The mission was curtailed when the Arctic ice began to close in on them, but it was not without its accomplishments. Andrews managed to get ashore to study fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Their pelts were extremely valuable, one of reasons the United States had acquired Alaska, but their numbers had declined so much by 1913 that a moratorium had been placed on hunting them. No one knew anything about how they lived, how they bred and raised young, so Andrews went ashore to make observations and take video, the first ever of the fur seal.

After the Adventuress returned to Seattle, Bordon had already had his fill of whale hunting and turned his attention elsewhere, selling the boat. There is a rumor that she then went up to Juneau and served as a floating brothel for a few years, but I'm not sure if it's true or just a joke among the crew. But she definitely ended up in San Francisco in 1915 operating as a bar pilot for several years.

And that's as far as I've gotten in learning her in-depth history, so I'll have to buff up a bit more for Part II.

The picture I posted down below is a bit misleading. It shows her decked out in full sails, all seven of them, whereas we usually use the bottom four - the mainsail, foresail, staysail, and jib. The other three - the main topsail, fore topsail, and flying jib - are hardly ever put on the ship because the Coast Guard doesn't think she would meet stability requirements. (Although rumor has it that they came to this conclusion without ever actually putting those sails up.) We can't use them with participants on board... but we can when it's only the crew, so there are high hopes among us all that before the down rig at the end of the season we might be able to take the sails out of storage and really deck her out. Everyone is very excited about this idea. Putting more sails on a boat, to a sailor, is like putting more cylinders in an engine, or more loop-de-loops in a roller coaster. You can make almost any crewmate's eyes light up with the magic phrase, "We could get out the topsails..."

Is the Adventuress a ship or a boat? Both. The Navy defines a ship as a vessel which can carry aboard it a boat, and since the Adventuress has two little boats (Jefe, a powerboat, and A-ya-shee, a wooden row/sail boat), she can officially be called a "ship." But she is also a "sailboat," so boat works as well.

What else can I say? She measures 110 feet on deck, 135 when she's all sparred out. (Meaning that her main boom and the bowsprit overshoot the deck.) She can sleep 37 people, but I'm not sure if that includes when the crew dogpiles all over each other in the deckhouse, or when I sling my hammock out on the deck. (Which has only happened once but, I vow, will definitely happen again! It's the best way to view stars, you see.)

That's all I have for now. To be continued.

More Handsomely on the Blogging!

Wowza. So I've been thrown into the sailing world without a moment's notice, no time for catching a breath! The past weeks have been intense. By day one I was hauling on lines and by day seven I was manning the helm. (Albeit with the captain right by my side.) Our ship has more lines than I can count, and I've had to learn them all quickly and accurately, so that when the mate shouts, "Tack the lifts!" or "Ease the gaff vang!" I can run over and uncoil the right line without bringing the boom crashing down in the middle of the deck. We have a main-m'st, not a main mast; a foc'sle, not a forecastle, jibs, halyards, peaks and throats, oh my!

Luckily, the crew is loud and lusty when it comes to singing. We sing chanties to haul up the main sail and fore sail, the two heaviest of the bunch. We are woken up at 7am with a song and put to bed at 10pm with another (which I have sung a few times myself.) So much better than alarm clocks. I've had to stand anchor watch in the middle of the night for the past week or so, so I'm a little short on sleep, but the stars have been gorgeous, and even the one night it rained I was able to stand at the helm and just watch the water glisten off the shrouds. I've climbed up the rigging to the cross trees, not quite to the top of the mast, but it was high and precarious enough to make my heart beat. And, and... I've seen more of the San Juan Islands in the past few days than I ever have before! Hooray!

Our first trip out after the training sail was an Elderhostel group of about 19 people ranging 55 to 75 in age. They were a rollicking bunch. We spent several nights doing nothing but singing, and it was so much fun to watch them lay into the lines with as much enthusiasm as any of the crew. So many interesting stories too! One of them had working on the lighting in the Kingdome, another had worked with Coco the gorilla, and there were three mischievous sisters from New Zealand who egged everyone else on into the most hilarious antics.

As to the crew, there are 17 of us in total, mostly in our twenties but going all the way up to 60s in age. I've been arbitrarily assigned as Assistant Galley Coordinator, which means I can dive down into the galley and bake cookies if the mood strikes. Kneady Bubbles has also found a happy home aboard the ship, and I've been growing it so our chef (who is a gourmand and once worked for restaurants in New York) can use it. Um, um...

I'm totally running out of time, so I will write more, oh so much more, later!

Landlubber Today, Sailor Tomorrow

By a strange long series of events, I suddenly find myself a crewman aboard a sailing ship. I was shanghaied.

My ship for the next two months is the Adventuress, which looks something like this:


I'm not quite sure how I got here or what exactly I'll be doing, but I know there's singing involved. Sea chanties, to be exact. It's even in the handbook.

"Here" is the Puget Sound. The Adventuress plies the waters between the San Juans to the north and Tacoma to the south. It's an educational vessel, purpose: teach people about ecology, sustainability, community, and other good tidbits. I believe I'll be pointing at the water a lot saying, "Look, kids! Plankton!" And singing sea chanties.

But at the moment I'm a bit fried. This is day three of my travels to get to the ship. This morning started with a boat ride which for me was transportation but for everyone else was a whale watching ship, so I had to rouse myself from napping a few times to go stagger out on the deck and train the binos on breaching killer whales, which were multitudinous indeed. It's amazing how far across the surface of the water the sound of a killer whale's breath travels.

I shall post updates when I have the internet... or perhaps not at all, not at least until November, when my feet stay on dry ground once again.

If any of you find yourself in the same place as the Adventuress, come find me for a free ride. The calendar is to be found on the Sound Experience website, the organization in charge of it all.