Tuesday Morning, March 15th, Sailing on the open sea.

Read Part Two HERE.

I was jolted awake by the chief engineer, flying shards of his coffee mug and a wave of seawater all crashing down the galley ladder in a jumble. It was raining hard and the ship was rocking in ten to fifteen foot swells. All was wet and slippery. Shauna, the cook, had made breakfast in between bouts of seasickness. The good news was that theses gusty winds and giant waves from the south meant we were sailing fast! At this rate we’d reach Eureka well ahead of schedule.

There had been no cell phone reception because we were so far from land, but in the middle of the night I had received a burst of text messages and emails. One spam message, "Morning Psalm 34" said, “I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.” I paused. It was easy to understand why sailors of old were either superstitious, religious or both; you need somebody by your side in the stormy sea. Suddenly, our fog-horn bellowed. I saved the email and climbed the ladder to the deck.

The rain was gusting hard from the south. We were running with the wind at six knots under full sail. Billiam, Niki, Connor and I steered back and forth with that clumsy tiller-pole keeping her on course, until the winds changed heading and we had to brace the sails. That meant heaving and pulling on lines and re-tying them off until we shifted the sail’s angle to match the wind. It wasn’t easy keeping our footing on the pitching deck awash with seawater. You needed a handhold plus good timing for every step.

Lying in my berth after my morning watch ended, I comprehended just how complicated it was to sail the Lady Washington. There were so many lines and so many decisions involved in just keeping the ship on course. Much skill is needed in sailing the Lady Washington, but it seemed that luck played its part too. In the confusing swells at the Golden Gate, when the main hatch slid off its rails and crashed on the deck, it was lucky that nobody was climbing up the ladder at that moment or they would have been decapitated. The swirling seas emptying out the scuppers on deck carried away a line that dragged underneath the hull; luckily, the engine wasn’t running so it didn’t tangle in the propeller.

Luck and superstitions have always been part of sailing. I imagined the captain and crew of the original Lady Washington in the 1780’s uneasily searching the uncharted waters from the Straits of Juan de Fuca to Alaska for the mythical Northwest Passage. Those sailors who could answer superstitious incidents with charms or magic must have felt a bit more in control of their fate. The unknown would have seemed more knowable. Shouts from the deck interrupted my thoughts; a school of dolphins were frolicking alongside the ship. I smiled and scrambled up the ladder. Even today dolphins are considered a lucky omen.

I watched the dolphins swim alongside the ship until it began to drizzle again. I went below. I didn’t have the heavy foul-weather gear that most of the crew wore. Connor’s bright yellow rain slicker, pants and schooner hat made him look like he stepped out of the novel "Captain Courageous." I wore hiking clothing under my lightweight rain jacket (which stayed perpetually damp the entire trip). I layered up with a polypropylene jersey, shirt, fleece, wool sweater and ski cap. I splashed about in rubber boots, but was amazed how often the crew ran around barefoot. I carefully stowed my sleeping bag in a garbage bag when on watch (my wife’s wonderful suggestion!), so that I knew even if I was cold and damp on deck I would be warm and dry in my berth.

I awoke from a long nap to the wonderful aroma of homemade spaghetti sauce. It was mixed with a whiff of creosote, the tang of diesel and a hint of unwashed clothes. Shawna prepared this meal for fifteen of us in a pitching galley, sliding on a seawater and grease-slicked floor while flopping down on a bunk every once and a while and lying still so she wouldn’t puke. Shawna came on board with me in San Francisco, so the crew didn’t know what to expect from her. She was rail-thin with a pale complexion, full lips, clef chin and dreadlocks. She was wearing a fir tail the first morning I met her. She was exotic, though not what I would think of when I visualized a ship’s cook. Shawna was tougher than she looked.

We ate our dinner together (except for the on-deck watch who came down and ate one by one) and listened to Captain JB’s stories. The dinner was delicious and I loved the chicken soup with miso and ginger for lunch too, but this morning, Shauna’s tiny breakfast muffins hadn’t seemed like much of a meal. Whelan, a wild-haired sailor wearing a dirty wool, pea coat, a nose ring and bare feet didn’t think so either; with the same murderous glance toward the galley that generations of disappointed crew mates at mealtime must have shown, he mumbled “F-this” and poured himself a bowl of cold cereal.

The evening watch began poorly. I broke the captain’s favorite coffee mug when I was helping with the dishes. The galley tilted at a crazy angle as a huge wave rolled under us. The mug slid along the counter, jumped the rail and crashed to the floor. Not a good omen I thought. The storm had overtaken us. I scrambled up the ladder and on deck. In the dark I could only see a few feet in front of my nose. The rain was pounding down. The psychotic wind and waves were lashing the ship from multiple directions. Captain JB had enough and ordered us to take in sail.

The four to eight o’clock watch was ordered to stay on deck and help our watch. It was so dark! There are no lights allowed on deck, so as not to compromise the vision of the person at the tiller. I squinted to see eight rain-slickers scamper up the rigging and disappear into the night. Fifty to seventy feet above the waves the crew was balancing on a wire, holding the boom with one hand and grabbing in soaking-wet, canvass sail with the other while the ship rolled and the masts whipped back and forth. Heather, the Mate from the four to eight watch, teetered up to me and asked if I would take the tiller. "Keep her steady at heading 270!" She shouted into the wind. “Course two-seven-zero!” I shouted back. Heather vanished into the night to help the crew.

The ship’s compass, sealed in glass and brass was the size of a dinner plate. It was housed on the top row of a wooden cabinet that was bolted to the deck next to the tiller. Below the compass was a small radar screen. The compass was bathed in red light to prevent night vision blindness. The compass tilted, pitched and rolled, leveling itself as the ship gyrated crazily underneath it. Rain and salty wind blowing sideways stung my eyes. I was at the stern alone, glancing at the radar then peering over the bow through the sheets of rain, petrified I’d actually see something looming in the blackness.

My first day at the tiller I stood a thirty-minute shift that wore me out. Tonight with only the compass to guide me, I manhandled that tiller and kept that two-hundred ton wooden ship on course for an hour and a half until all the sail was in and the crew shouted , "Last Man is on the Deck." Though never close enough to shore to smash the ship on the rocks, I could have screwed up and come about in the wind, puffing the sails into the faces of the kids in the rigging, sending them into space, dangling from their safety harnesses. I felt so relieved that the crew was safely on deck!

Many of the crew had never been sent into the rigging in such a storm. Swapping stories back on deck, they were proud of their accomplishments. Niki was so exhilarated. Wide eyed and laughing she said this was the first time she had ever been up in the rigging at night. I asked what she thought about the experience. She paused for a moment while the rain and waves pounded the ship. “We are nature’s bitch,” she said.

Though I managed to keep the ship on course nobody said much to me. How I won their hearts was by cleaning the pig-sty of a galley at the end of my watch. The four to eight PM crew was allowed to turn in without doing the dinner dishes because they had served a double-watch, so I cleaned up their mess. I even found a bleach bottle and sprayed every surface I could find. The crew noticed the clean kitchen. Brennan, the ship’s purser, said that the crew didn’t usually ask this of passengers, "But we wondered if you’d stay on and crew with us."

I told him I was headed home to my family when we docked at Eureka. "But as accolades go, that’s one that I’ll always remember," I said.

Read Part Four HERE.

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Read Part Four HERE.