Running Away To Sea

This month I did one of the craziest things I’ve done in my adult life: I spent two weeks as a trainee crew member on a tall ship. If you don’t know what that is, think pirate ships: square-rigged, two masts, figurehead, the works. In fact, this ship, the Lady Washington, played the Interceptor in Pirates of the Caribbean, though the crew is quick to point out that she is a replica of a merchant vessel, NOT a pirate ship. 

The Lady Washington docked in Tacoma

I don’t know exactly what made me up and decide to spend two weeks learning how to sail an eighteenth-century brig. Maybe it was my love of Treasure Island, maybe it was the encouragement of a friend who went through the program before me. Partly it was immersion research for a creative writing project (yes, it’s about pirates, but don’t tell the Lady Washington crew). Maybe it was just a plain old desire for a spot of adventure. But they were two of the most challenging weeks in my life, and not just because sailing a tall ship demands every ounce of strength, agility, and focus a body and mind can give. 

A memento in the main hold of the ship's
role in Pirates of the Caribbean

What made it particularly challenging for me, a mid-career professional, is that I was completely new to it. In my job, I am confident and even reasonably competent. But stepping onto that boat two weeks ago, I didn’t know a sheet from a halyard. I was surrounded by younger people—some the age of my students—who not only knew infinitely more than me but who did everything with such ease that I had no idea how difficult it was until they told me to do it. If you’d seen the bosun make fast a dock line on a cleat—which was under the pin rail and behind a heavy coil of line, all while a hundred-ton ship was pulling on the other end—and then watched me do the same thing, you’d have a vivid demonstration of the difference between an old hand and a greenhorn. 

A line (not a dock line)

It was frustrating on some levels. It was frustrating to be the slowest at everything, to puzzle through the steps involved in carrying out the command, “Hands to set the fore topmast staysail” and then discover that the crew had already done it in the time it took you to figure out you needed to be in the bow of the ship. 

Main mast

But it was also rewarding to see myself get incrementally better. I stopped coiling lines the wrong direction after day one. By day seven, I knew where the gear and braces were and what they did. By day fourteen, I could sweat a line to tighten it without feeling like the skin was being flayed off my palms.

 

The fore course and fore topsail set

It made me think about how good it is, just every once in a while, to find oneself in a situation in which one knows absolutely nothing. It’s useful to be humbled by another’s knowledge in the face of your ignorance, productive to struggle and make mistakes, just to be reminded that it’s okay to do so. It’s good to remember that there is no such thing as unskilled labor; there’s a right (i.e. safe) way to haul on a line, and there’s a wrong (i.e. finger-breaking) way to do it too. It’s salubrious to remember that knowledge and education aren’t the same thing, and that someone who dropped out of high school may have something to teach you that you’d never figure out on your own despite the degrees you hold. It’s very good to be reminded that no matter how much you learn, there is always more to know. Even the senior crew were constantly learning new things as the situation changed.

 

One of the ship's two guns, which can be fired
but aren't anymore due to their age

I hope it will make me a more patient teacher, having returned after so many years to being on the receiving end of patience and forbearance as I struggled with things that felt to the other crew members as natural as walking, as I repeatedly forgot words that to them were as simple as “up” and “down.” Sometimes I need the reality check that the rules for commas, so ingrained in my own head, are not, in fact, a natural part of speech, and that words like “litotes” and “assonance” are as obscure to most people as “hawsehole” and “lazarette” were to me two weeks ago.

 

The topsail set, with the t'gallants ready to be set

I learned a great deal, and I’m proud of myself for managing as much as I did, even if others might have come further in the same amount of time. I am small, slightly built, and hesitant to jump into things I don’t fully understand. It slows me down. But these are some of the little things I'm proud to have managed, nonetheless: 

1) I went aloft to furl the topsails. (This involves climbing more or less upside down to get to the working top. It is not easy, physically or psychologically.) 

Me aloft on day two

2) I successfully threw dock lines onto the dock without dropping them in the water. Dock lines are over an inch thick and weigh a ton, especially when wet. 

On deck

3) I lugged Larry the inflatable fender from bow to stern. Larry is bigger than me and probably more than half my weight, and there are three steep steps to carry him up to the quarter deck. 

Ship's bell

4) I raised and lowered all three ship’s flags (right side up!) when I had boat duty and didn’t forget to check the bilges to make sure we weren’t sinking or on fire. 

Martha, the figurehead

5) I suppressed my natural obsession for cleanliness to go two full weeks without a proper shower, with tar under my nails and crusted salt and seafoam all over my pants. This was harder than most of the others.

The fore course, ready to be set

6) I didn’t give up, even though every fiber of my indoor-creature being screamed, “Have you lost your mind? Go back to your warm laptop and safe, dry books!” 

A neighboring schooner, the Zodiac, seen through our anchor hawsehole

These are small accomplishments in the big scheme of things, and I may never use them again. I hope, at any rate, to remain in close proximity to hot showers from here on. But the experience left me with a great love and respect for the sailors who make a living preserving these memories of the Great Age of Sail, and it gives me immense personal satisfaction to know that, just for a short time, I was one of them.