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!
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!
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