In Which My Hands Get Callused Again.

I'm home after a two-week stint of sailing in the LA area. Same boat as I was on this summer (the Hawaiian Chieftain), some of the same crew, some different. This time I talked Meep into coming along so that she could have the whole volunteer training experience, and so we could continue our tradition of spending New Year's together in interesting places. We had really nice weather, and terrific three-way battle sails with the Lady Washington and the Privateer Lynx. When we weren't sailing, there was more than enough painting, refinishing, sail mending and other much-needed maintenance to keep us all busy, which I also enjoyed. I think Meep would admit to having a pretty great time as well. At the very least, we must have stocked up several years' worth of inside jokes.

As has happened before, I resolved to journal my sailing adventures, but at the end of the day there was just too much to write down with what little energy I had left. However, I did manage to take a few notes, which I will now replicate and annotate here for your reading pleasure.

12/22/06
I dreamed I had forgotten to pack my boots, and woke to find myself wearing them, lying on a row of seats at the airport. The man beside me had a sketchbook & pen in hand -- I couldn't quite bring myself to ask if he had drawn me.

Airport naps: inevitable after staying up too late packing. Meep and her sister picked me up at LAX, and the sister drove us out to San Pedro. I greeted old crewmates while Meep's sister changed her baby's diaper on -- get this -- the poop deck. I know, huh?

12/23/06
Stumbled up on deck to discover we were already underway, motoring out to pump out [the black water tank], blue sea and sky and wind -- magnificent.
Later, was seasick.

I'd never been seasick before, though I'm generally a little iffy my first day out on the water. I would have been fine up on deck, but I was trying to do my morning chores, which that day involved cleaning the heads. So, below decks, bending over, in water with a bit of a chop to it... yeah. It wasn't as horrible as I imagined it would be, though, and I really did feel much better afterward.

12/24/06
Today I did something I never thought I'd do: I stood on top of the yard.

I really thought this was a big double-no. Turns out that when you're sanding down and refinishing the yards (the horizontal things the sails hang on), all bets are off. On the Chieftain, the upper and lower yards can be close enough together that you can stand on the lower and lean on the upper. If you're harnessed in, it's really pretty secure (Mom), especially if the boat isn't going anywhere. Later on I discovered the secret to not being freaked out when you're climbing around in precarious places: a seat harness. I don't know why they even have those crappy chest harnesses on the boat. I am getting myself a seat harness ASAP.

12/25/06
12 hours @ Disneyland is about as exhausting as any day I've spent on a boat.

Seriously. And two or three days later, half of us came down with colds. We had a pretty great time, though. I was 3 years old last time I went, so it was... different. I found it all a little creepy, to be honest, but that's another blog post. I think my favorite part was the fireworks display -- not because I watched it, but because everyone else did, and so we ran around to as many rides as we could because the lines were gone.

...12/29/06
May have been the best day of my life so far. Fueling/pumpout/transit/battle sail w/Lady & Lynx. Huge sailing buzz, got all choked up. Later, crashed youth ministry convention w/2 drunk sailors.

The sentence with a lot of slashes sums up an adrenaline-fueled sequence wherein we had to get from San Pedro to Long Beach in time to participate in a scheduled "grand arrival" battle sail, but were delayed by repairs and by the need to refuel. We were bending on (reattaching) the sails while underway, and touching up paint at the fuel dock. Good thing we weren't scheduled to take any passengers. I was busy with lines when I realized the gunner was loading the cannons, and then I looked up and saw the Lady and the Lynx and just about dropped my eyeballs, I was so in awe. How to describe that rush, I don't even know. I kept saying to myself: I am so lucky to have lived this day.

(The convention, now, that was surreal. I will have to cover that another time. I wasn't serious about blogging about the creepiness of Disneyland, but I will definitely blog about the convention.)

...12/31/06
Sailed Lynx. Wow.

Sailing on the Lynx was my first schooner experience, and it was fascinating. The current captain of the Chieftain has captained all three of the vessels I've mentioned, and he compared them as follows: "The Lady is like Grandpa's truck. The Chieftain is a Jeep, and the Lynx is a Corvette." It was the cleanest, prettiest boat I've ever seen -- you could entertain royalty in that swanky hold -- and it was fast. Sailed circles around the Chieftain, literally. Setting and furling the sails was a lot more labor-intensive, but the results were well worth the effort.

The other two visiting Chieftain crew members and I discussed how "our" boat looked from the deck of another. The Lady is a pretty classy-looking vessel, and the Lynx is downright sexy. But the Chieftain, we agreed, has a disreputable air to it, like a gypsy caravan or an old VW bus with Grateful Dead stickers in the windows. Sketchy. You can't tell from the photos I linked to above, but the sails are all faded and stained, with patches upon patches. As much as we hate it when people shout "Arrrr!" at us, a pirate flag really wouldn't look out of place atop that mast.

1/1/07
Lunch w/Aunt ___. Dinner w/[old friends]. Good to get away.

We had the day off. Some of the crew hung out watching movies and nursing hangovers, and some wandered off to various points of interest around town. Meep and I met up with a few people I knew in the area, who fed and hugged and made much of us. I was really tired and had trouble maintaining my end of a conversation for any length of time, so I was glad to have Meep along to give intelligent responses on my behalf. (She wisely went to bed before the shanty-singing began on New Year's Eve. I was not so wise.)

1/2/07
Ed sail. Taco Nite & DDR.

An "ed sail" is when you take a boatload of schoolchildren out and give them little mini-lessons on Life in the Age of Sail. They do a bit of line-handling, hear about the life of an officer and of a common sailor, and learn a little about the triangular merchant trade, iron tools for sea otter pelts for silks and tea. I like ed sails, though not everybody does. They're a big part of what the Lady and Chieftain do year-round, but I didn't get to see any last summer because school was out. After the sail we all went to a local Mexican restaurant for $1 taco night. While we were waiting for a table for 14, several of us went to the arcade next door and played Dance Dance Revolution. I'm so bad at that game, but I love it so much.

1/3/07
Blackwater explosion! Boat cleaning day.

We had a full morning of maintenance planned, and then disaster struck. The blackwater tank (into which the toilets empty) had filled up during the night. There are two ways to (legally) empty your blackwater tank: into a pumpout dock, and a certain number of miles offshore. We were actually right next to a pumpout dock, so the engineer and captain attempted to empty the tanks. But there was some sort of incompatibility with the hoses, and blackwater ended up spraying both of them and gushing out into the main hold, where most of the crew sleeps. So instead, while they showered, the rest of us turned to bleaching the main hold from top to bottom. After that we cleaned the smog off the railings and wiped out all the nooks and crannies on the deck. And then we went sailing.

1/4/07
Painted bowsprit a beautiful shade of blue.

Probably about a dozen interesting things happened on this day, but this is the one that got written down. It really is pretty, though. The bowsprit was white before, but it was hard to keep that looking nice. Plus, the blue actually matches the rest of the boat. Earlier, I got to strip paint off the bowsprit as well. It was fun to hang off the front of the boat in my borrowed seat harness. When we took the paint off we found something written on the bowsprit to the effect of Lahaina Welding w/c Kahului. I forget the exact wording, but I took a photo of it before it got painted over.

1/5/07
Sailed on the Lady Washington.

Not my first time sailing on the Lady, but my first time to sail as crew. And I got to go aloft to cast gaskets (unfurl the sail), which was extra neat. It's such a cool boat. I like the way it sort of wallows through the water. I don't like the lines, which look like rope but feel like synthetic twine. They were paid for by Disney so they would all look uniform for the movie. And they do look sharp, but they're nasty to handle.

1/6/07
Meep and I had flights around 7 pm, but didn't want to miss the 2-5 sail. At the captain's suggestion we did not wait for the Chieftain to dock, but rode in on Pele the small boat with [the coxswain, or master of the small boat] and [the crew member with a car], luggage piled high in the bow. Big boat to small boat to car to plane, and so home again.

The small boat is small, I mean like a good-sized bathtub, and notoriously leaky, and has been known to flip. So I was a little nervous as I climbed down the Jacob's ladder and settled into the little inflatable vessel with three other women and several heavy bags. But Pele was kind to us, and our lifejackets never touched the water. We skidded across the surface of the harbor, crewmates waving to us from the deck of the rapidly shrinking Chieftain, and Meep said, "Well, that was a pretty neat exit. I mean, you can't really top this, can you?"