9-25: Sam the White Collar Stiff

So...I work a 9-5 now. This is weird.

Okay, it's not the average 9-5. I spend a lot of time now painting ship hulls on a derelict raft, or climbing the mast to unscrew blocks the size of my head, or driving a pick-up truck full of marine toilets to the Shop. But it's a 9-5 in the sense that...you know. I work from nine to five.

Don't skip that part over, now. When you're on the water, it's more like a 6-11. Even--maybe especially--on the turnover days, the job's hectic as hell. Now that the Bailey's downrigging, we're going by the ring of the bell at the top of Union Street. Nine rings means we start, twelve rings means we stop for lunch, and five rings means quitting time.

Of course, because this job wouldn't be this job without spontaneity and chaos, they put a drunken toddler in charge of the bell. This means that sometimes at nine o' clock, nine bells ring. Sometimes at nine o' clock, seven bells will ring, then two more a minute later. Sometimes the five o' clock bell will ring at 4:45, which is great. Sometimes the 4 o' clock bell will ring at three in the morning, then the three o' clock bell will ring, which is just absurd. At least it keeps us on our toes!

And just because our downrigging couldn't have gone that smoothly, we went ahead and found that the main boom had a few inches of rot in it.

The bad news: this meant that we had to pop the entire boom--think a telephone pole, sideways, covered in varnish, hung over the deck--off of the ship and carry it back to the Shop. Yikes.

Fortunately, we didn't have to call Comcast. If we did, the boat might have capsized.

The good news: by its very nature, it's already rigged up to a crapton of pulleys. And it's surrounded by water. And it floats.

Which is how, as the Admiral disinterestedly worked the halyard, Wolfman, Picasso, Little Chef, and I put all our weight into the two-ton boom as we did our best to drop it into the Camden Harbor.

It's not really as hare-brained as it sounds. Or maybe it just feels that way in comparison, because half an hour later we lashed it to a trailer a third its length, hitched the other end to the Tundra, and towed that forty-five foot fucker ten miles up Route 1 with a bright red mooring pennant waving on the back, pedestrians gawking and diving out of the way.

The Admiral, one hand on the wheel, shrugged, adjusted his steel-colored aviators, and casually began telling us the first of many stories in which he'd towed much crazier stuff.

Like I said--keeps us on our toes.

9/16: Landlocked

Well, that's the season, folks!

It happened pretty fast, actually. The Admiral laconically informed us last week that at the end of the 9/8-9/12 voyage, we were to get all the food off the Grace Bailey. Downrigging would soon commence. Just like that, the last voyage began.

It actually went pretty straightforward. Go figure--just as I start to get deckhanding down, I end up landlocked. Although two events of note (aside from my ninjitsu escapades) occurred on this sail:

• Thursday saw, as if in some kind of nature-given boss battle, the most intense winds through which I have ever sailed. While tacking--a maneuver that under normal circumstances involves the relatively docile moving of the jib from one side of the ship to the other--I stood feet away from whipping lines that could easily have knocked me out. The jib wasn't passed so much as sucked from one side to the other by the roaring winds; the staysail club swung towards our heads like a baseball bat the size of your leg. All of this went down with salt spray and rain washing over my body every few seconds.
• Friday, conversely, saw us taking a two-hour day sail with forty-five 5th graders from a local school. In one sense, it was a nightmare. Try communicating across a hundred-twenty three feet with forty-five screaming children in the middle. It's amazing we didn't crash the thing. In another...holy crap, that was adorable. They were excited, hauled up the sails better than the adults ever did, (although it was nigh impossible to get them to drop the line) and the pirate references just kept coming. I'm not saying I'd do that everyday, but it certainly was a great perspective.

This last week has been a bizarre downrigging process. The icebox, the stanchons (hand rails), the water barrels--so many things on the ship I'm used to have disappeared, taken away to the Shop.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the Shop. Think of your basement. If it's anything like mine (for those of us without finished basements), it's a strange mix: racks and racks of tools hang on musty, dust-covered walls in between nigh-opaque windows, wreathed by half-finished projects, old appliances, "treasured" family heirlooms, broken picture frames, Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations, Independence Day decorations, St. Patrick's Day decorations, Arbor Day decorations--all kinds of miscellaneous crap. Accenting all of this is a vague feeling that there should be a dissonant minor chord playing in the background as a ghost forlornly shuffles from the Halloween section to the Christmas section. Sound about right?

Cool. Now pretend your basement was owned by a mad sailor with hoarding issues. And it was ten times the size it is. And three stories tall. Now you've got an idea of the Shop.

Everything you would ever need to build a boat is, I shit you not, in this building. The Shop is three doubtlessly-haunted stories of woodworking tools, spare heads, spare ship parts, piping, and enough scrap and intact lumber to repopulate the Amazon.

Today, my job was to split most of that scrap wood into kindling with a hatchet. Shirt off in the crisp autumn air, swinging the hatchet thousands of times over the course of a few hours, I can safely say this was probably my favorite day in quite some time.

I'm still here for a few weeks--the Merc is still out and we've still got plenty to do on the Grace. Beyond that, I've got some kind of travel plan going. It will be cold, it will be northern-bound, and it will be epic.

Oh, and I leave you with goddamn Mjolnir, a little treasure I found in the corner of the first floor. I pray I get to swing it someday.

Ain't no kill like overkill.

9-11: The American Ninja Warrior

Exhausted and at the library for a short hour, so I'm just going to tell the story of how I didn't go for a swim yesterday.

We came in towards Castine, a small town on the coast known for a Merchant Mariner academy. The cool part was that there was a great wind putting us towards the dock; the less cool part was that there was a rather massive tide tearing us the other direction.

So, you know. Tricky conditions, nobody really knowing what to do, and a big decision bearing down on us--drop a serious amount of anchor, or try to catch a mooring--a small hook that'll fasten us to the bottom of the harbor?

What the hell. Let's shoot for the mooring.

Remember those cables I was balancing on? Well this time, I found myself sitting on the lowest one with a red hook attached to a black mooring line the thickness of two fingers. The goal: to get the hook around a three-inch diameter shackle attached to the buoy that marks the mooring. Yelling commands up to the captain at the helm, I get it to within a few feet of the ship.

I stretch and try to hook it. No dice--it's still a few feet away. And drifting past the ship. Fast.

I look up, and I see another chain. I prop my feet on my seat, grab the other chain, and lean out more. Nope. Just short by a few inches.

At this point, pandemonium is going down on the deck. Picasso is cheering me on, the Admiral wants to know what the hell is going on, and the passengers are reasonably sure their deckhand is about to get keelhauled. Suddenly, the image of having to hand-crank a hundred feet of anchor chain the next day pops into my head.

Oh, fuck it, I decide, and let go with my legs. As I dangle, twisting in the wind, by one hand, I swing my momentum over and jump onto the buoy. The red hook swings around, and click-- it's on. Sweet!

Ah, right. Now I'm stuck on a mooring buoy.

I scramble back and manage to grasp the cable. Holding on with both hands, my feet scraping the water, I look up and see the Admiral handing me another black line.

"Swap it out."

Oh, joy.

I swing back over to the buoy, manage to thread the shackle, and hand it back to him. As soon as it leaves my hands, the boat shifts, and I'm left hanging again.

"Oh, gosh." the Admiral says, and his tone indicates something approaching mild alarm. "Don't fall in."

And, because I am a bonafide master of clever one-liners, I of course respond with something kitschy, dashing, and clever, right?

"I have great upper-body strength, sir!"

Oh, fuck off. I was too busy being a ninja.

That's what the passengers seemed to think, anyway. After I pulled myself back onto the deck, I received a number of high-fives, and one decided that I was "the next American Ninja Warrior" for the rest of the day.

It's been that kind of week. Today we furled the headsails--the one that involves climbing across the bowsprit--in eighteen-knot winds and bitter rain, then did a surprise docking in Camden. Got compensated in shore time and steak, though, so I'm calling it a win. Catch you later.

9-5: Sam Goes Back to Serbia?

Another Friday, another weekend trip. We board the passengers as per usual. Frantic, rushed. We try to keep the ice from melting under a sweltering sun as we try to raise our awning through whipping wind. Wolfman reads off the passenger list, and I hear the name "Dragan."

Huh. That rings a bell.

The trip commences, and as I'm pumping the bilge, I see him walk by. We strike up a conversation, and to my incomparable delight, Dragan is from New Belgrade! I tell him that I used to live and study in the Balkans, and when he hears that I studied conflict resolution, he nods sagely.

"You know," he says, as a matter of course, "the Americans started that war."

Ooooh boy.

Which is how in conceivably the last place I'd expected, I became embroiled in the knock-down, drag-out, strangely, pleasantly familiar conversation of who-the-hell-started-the-Yugoslav-War. My personal favorite part was when I brought up the involvement of paramilitary war criminal Arkan (in concurrence with the thirty page paper I wrote comprising most of my last semester in college). Dragan brightened up and said, "Ah, Zeliko! I taught him to box when he was fifteen!"

Arkan, and yes, that's a real tiger cub. No, I don't know how much your balls have to weigh to rob a zoo.

Well, shit. Where was this guy a few months ago?

Aside from meeting the primary source of my dreams, this trip was unique in that we were wracked with one of the most formidable storms I've ever had the pleasure of sitting through. Storms are great on porches, even better in skyscrapers--they're downright entrancing on a ship (as long as you've dropped anchor and flaked out some extra chain. Otherwise, I'd imagine they're much wetter).

As it pitched the ship around like driftwood and spat jagged dashes of lightning a few dozen yards from the deck, Wolfman, Picasso (the messmate--you should see him paint) and I undertook one of the most intense dishwashing jobs I've ever heard of. Hey, just because Thor and Zeus are throwing around in the firmament doesn't mean we get to skip dishes. And since everybody (understandably) packed into the galley when the thunder started, there was only one place to do them.

Up on deck, we ignored the sideways sheets of rain buffeting our faces, instead allowing it to rinse off the soapy suds as we lathered up half of the galley dishes.The paltry glow of a few headlamps cut through the lightless night, and as we belted The Doors off-key against thunderclaps that cracked hard enough to shake your chest, it hit me: stress, exhaustion, and disrespect aside, sometimes you wouldn't need to pay me to do this shit. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I'm pretty sure I'm okay with it.

Back on dry land, I heard rumors that we narrow down to one boat after the five-day that starts tomorrow--meaning that in a week, I'll theoretically have about twice the shore time that I do now. Granted, considering how my last week "off" went, this probably means I'll end up in the forest mushing sled dogs or something equally insane. Not a terrible thing, I suppose. I'll have more concrete details next week!

Interlude: Summertime in September

Remember those few days off I talked about? Well, so far I've been pressganged, moved towns, joined the ship of the insane, possibly died for a few days, and drank an inordinate amount of Dark & Stormies. Yesterday I found myself dangling 45 feet above the deck, clinging to the mainmast amidst bouts of uncontrollable laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Needless to say, the days off didn't really happen. Should've seen that one coming.

Sunday featured an open house on the boat, in which hundreds of people got on board, commented on the galley, and asked the same five questions. As Wolfman, Little Chef (the cook on the Grace--kind of the opposite of Chef) and I sat slumped in the galley after a week's work, the Admiral came down the stairs.

"Sam," he said, not a trace of anything behind his opaque aviators. "Can you be on the Summertime tonight?" The Summertime, located a few miles north, is a ship half the size of the others that runs day sails and overnights.

Don't let punctuation fool you, kids; tone and body language are where the money is. And this was not a question.

"Good," he said. "It's an overnight. Be ready at five."

I checked my watch. Five of four. Awesome.

Which is how I found myself in the work truck bound for Lincolnville, a small fishing village a few miles north of Camden, sitting next to Hawaii. Hawaii is a hell of a character, having spent much of his life sailing from one tropical paradise to another. Captain of the Summertime, he now spends his time doing daysails, overnights, and repairs, while singing '50s pop songs and drinking Barbados rum. He runs a revolving door crew ("I go to the bar and see who's mostly sober"). This week he had Maine, a gentle fellow with a good attitude but a poor grasp on punctuality, and myself.

The Summertime is surreal. Due to the booze, exhaustion, or some other factor, much of our time here is spent in a wandering state of ambiguity in which conclusions are never reached and tasks take hours to finish.

Adding to this is the fog that rolled in an indeterminate number of days ago. Until this morning, we could see roughly fifteen feet in any direction--roughly enough to make out a single other ship in our mooring field. We could hear the bell buoy, or occasionally the ferry go by, but nothing else.

I think I went a little crazy at this point. Maybe, I thought, I'm dead, and my company here in purgatory is a crazy old Hawaiian and an IT professional-turned-sailor. Instead of Dante's mountain, however, we sit in a ship in the endless fog, making repairs that never seem to take.

It didn't get boring, though. One of these repairs necessitated my going up the mast in this, a rig called the Bosun's Chair:

Hauled by this guy:

And, as I ran line through a shackle  high off the hard wooden deck, my life swaying uneasily at the behest of an old belaying pin and Father Christmas up there, I was struck with a wave of laughter at the stark absurdity of all this.

A lot of these sailors--the salt-sprayed old hands, not the seasonal chumps like me--have been saying the same thing: you have to love sailing. Mate, Obi-Wan, the Admiral--you have to take it up, feel it in your blood and bones.

And I don't think if I do. I don't mind hard work, rough conditions, even the injuries (the daredeviling, admittedly, I'll probably do for free). But I can't say for sure that I love this. I certainly have a few personal reasons that I don't. And if that's the case, then it might be a long month ahead until the end of season.

But I won't lose. I gave my commitment in to October, and I'll be damned if I renege on that. So I guess we'll see how it goes. Maybe it'll grow on me. Maybe it won't. Either way, I think the term "adventure" as laid out earlier is well beyond applying.

Anyway, I didn't die horribly up there! So I'm calling that a win.

I'm getting off the floating carnival and back to Camden today. I've ordered some Onnit stuff to give me an edge, and maybe I'll pull through this lunacy on top.

Finished the Odyssey. It was...eh. Good story, but I just don't care about sacrifices to Zeus enough to read fifty pages of them. To quote Mark Twain (or Oscar Wilde?), classics are the books everybody loves and nobody reads. Maybe there's a reason for that. Incidentally, I've started A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, and am so far immensely enjoying it. Go figure.

Also of interest: I might be hiking the highest mountain in Maine after all of this. Stay tuned!

8-30: Sam ALMOST Crashes the Boat

Well, shit.

First week of deckhanding is down. Through a lot of fuck-ups, I've managed to come through it. The meat of it is that there were a couple close calls with lines, a busted starter on the yawl boat, and a captain who thinks I'm an idiot.

I'm not sure I buy that last part (although I suppose an idiot wouldn't know--similar to how a crazy person doesn't necessarily know they're crazy) I think that I'm on my twenty-sixth straight, fourteen-hour work day, and I've been promoted to this position with absolutely no training. I don't like to shift blame, mind you--I totally fucked up at least a few times. But I'm also burnt out, which is why I'm putting a perhaps imprudent amount of faith in the rumor sthat we're not going back out for four days.

At any rate, I'm scraping my way through. And I'm getting gradually better. My fingers have gotten some grip strength back, and my blisters have turned (mostly) to hard callous. So that's good.

Mentally, some things are starting to click too. Today, the jibsheet snapped on the port side--the rope that controls the direction of the foremost sail. Which meant that I, on the starboard side, was left holding the entirety of the sail in my hands. The sail that filled with enough wind to catapault me off the deck like greenbeans out of a toddler's spoon.

For those of you complaining I haven't posted any pictures of myself.

I took in the line and dropped to the deck, making it off as I clutched it in. Thinking about it, at the beginning of the week I'd probably have gone for a swim.

I'm also taking to heart the fact that, technical skills aside, I still have little to no compunction about the daredevil side of things. Like leaning off the bowsprit--the very foremost tip of the boat--with an eight-foot boathook as we tear through the water leaning hard to port at 7+ knots, reaching out to snag the severed jibsheet so we can turn away from the shores of the rapidly-approaching island.

So hey. If you can't be the smartest or the fastest, be the bravest.

Or the stupidest. Eye of the beholder, I guess.

We made it into port yesterday in time for the Windjammer Festival, kicking off with a big parade of schooners into the harbor, where a fairground setup was taking place. Sights included:

• A bagpipe-playing clown rocking the Star-Spangled Banner like a champ
• An Orthodox priest inexplicably wandering our boat
• Paper lanterns drifting through the sky
• One hell of a fireworks show.
• Obi-Wan wandering the crowd. Always good to see him.

And, of course, the ships. To see one is, well, mundane. I live in the freaking forecastle. But to see a forest of masts, many of which encompass the oldest working watercraft in the country, is simultaneously an awe-inspiring sight and a transporting one. Looking above the modern vehicles in the parking lot and taking in the flagged masts of these ships, you could almost glimpse a day when these didn't take tourists around the bay, but took wood and granite all along the eastern seaboard. Sometimes it's easy to forget you live and work on the Industrial Revolution equivalent of a big-rig. Hey, I guess the head still beats a rest stop.

I'm about to sink into some sorely-needed R&R tomorrow. A long shower at the Y, a longer stint in the library, and anb unreasonable amount of hard cider seems to be in order. Catch you later!

8/25: Bilges and Bowlines

Whoops.

I didn't screw up (at least not much). I wrote that word because I want you to look at its width. Maybe half an inch? Well, that's about the width of the semi-slack steel cable I spent half an hour balancing on tonight. Twenty feet off the bow. Over dark, frigid, impermeable waters.

God, this job rocks.

I woke up this morning on the Grace and climbed out of the forecastle. My firs tlesson as a deckhand is that most of the terminology is based on drunken, uneducated British antiquity. Case in point: "forecastle" is pronounced "folks-ull." Same way "main sail" is pronounced "mainsull" and "jibe" is spelled "gybe". Just drink some rotgut, hum "God Save the Queen" and roll with it. I promise it'll make sense.

Being a deckhand is a lot like what I was doing in the galley: lots of washing, punctuated by stressful intensity. I wash the heads thrice (see? Think British thoughts) a day, wash down the deck at least four times, and cautiously pull and push a myriad of levers that keep the boat afloat. The key differences lie in the amount of sunlight I get (more), the amount of smoke I inhale (less), and the required skillset (enough to make me wish I'd joined the Scouts as a kid).

Every activity has a routine, and it can get stressful. In the galley, they were independent--wash the dishes, wash the floor, all self-contained. Up on the deck, something like raising the sails or dropping the anchor has a few timed, precise steps. Diving right in has been a bit nerve-wracking. It's getting better, and easier every day, but nerves are still wracked.

Where I shine are moments like tonight, where we drop anchor late just for the opportunity to literally sail into the sunset. We did; it was indescribable (so I won't try). It left us, however, sitting with the two foresails still hanging out and unfurled--and the night fog rolling in, with not a light in sight.

Furling the foresail and mainsail is pretty straightforward--remember my cowboy gig? It's that. Except instead of hanging out on the back of the sail, I'm on one of the halyards (big rope that lowers/raises the gaff, in turn controlling the height and tautness of the sails). The headsails, however, involve walking out on the tightropes in front of the ship and rolling them by hand like a giant cloth cigar. As your objective is to furl up the sails, there's very little in the way of handholds.

And, in keeping with the chaotic theme of my sailing escapades thus far, it should go without saying that my first time doing this took place on a brisk, windy night, surrounded by impermeable fog that coated the steel cables under my feet and varnished wood under my hands with a fine, slick sheen of water.

Just in case this was all getting too boring.

Wolfman led the charge, climbing out in front of me. Named for his epically shaggy beard, Wolfman is the first mate on the Grace, a competent sailor, patient teacher, and enthusiastic person. As we inched our way out on the tip of the bow, he instructed myself and the messmate on the way to get the job done.

"Grab a big chunk of sail," he said, clutching the canvas in his grip. "We're going to give it three shakes, and after the third, we'll pull it aft [back]. Hard." and, because sailing isn't complete without rhythm and psychopathy to distract from the fact that we're balancing over a boreal Maine ice bath, he began a chant to match our tempo."

"My-NAME is-SAIL-or DAN--HUH!" on the "huh!", we yanked back a section of staysail. The club, sheeted in, rocked back and forth, threatening to sweep our shins.

"I-AM a SAIL-or MAN--HUH!" the sail moved backwards. Our handholds got smaller.

"Some-BOD-y KISS-ed my-WIFE--HUH!" in the inky blackness below, something--let's say an adorable harp seal for the sake of my imagination--splashed quietly through the water.

Close enough.

"I'm GON-na GET-my-KNIFE--HUH!" The cable shook in the wind, and the fog-shrouded night was silent as a morgue.

"And THEN I'll END his LIFE--HUH!"

Charming bunch, the sailing industry. We soon finished and slinked back to the deck.

So that seems to be the deckhand gig. I'll spend eighty percent of my day making beds; the other twenty will consist of getting punched in the face by a flogging jibsheet as I try desperately to make it off, or slacklining over cold water with no tie-in to furl the sails. After a few days, I can only say that despite a wicked sunburn and flog bruises, I'm loving the hell out of it.

We've got a huge schooner festival back in Camden on Friday. A boat parade, fireworks, food, and maybe best of all--shore time. I'll keep you posted.