All Hands Aye!

November 10, 2007
1000 hours

We left the Lady Washington behind in Rio Vista and went up the Sacramento River, where the waters are shallow and the bridges low. Now we're docked behind Joe's Crab Shack in Old Sac, which has a tendency to blare "Wild Wild West" and other songs of a similar quality late into the evening. I am amazed by Old Sacramento, with its boardwalks and souvenir shops: 160 years since the rush, and still pulling in the gold. It reminds me eerily of the Western Town area of my favorite amusement park, the Enchanted Forest. I keep expecting to glance in a window and see an animatronic barber pulling the last tooth out of an animatronic prospector's head, or an animatronic formerly-Chinese-but-now-politically-correct fellow doing laundry in a washtub. If only it had a fort with a big slide, or an underground maze that exits through a tipi, I would be so happy.

Anyway, I'm forging new frontiers in exhaustion here on the Hawaiian Chieftain. Here is our daily schedule: 0700 reveille, chores, breakfast, muster, prepare to meet the public. 0900 we load the boat up with schoolchildren (typically 5th graders) for an educational sail. Our education coordinator is among the most energetic people I've ever met. He gets the kids' attention by shouting "All hands!" at the top of his powerful lungs, to which they scream "All hands aye!" If they're not absolutely deafening, he makes them do it again, "about ten million times louder." And Nigel, they go to eleven.

An ed sail schedule goes something like this:
- Board passengers and leave the dock
- Break up into small groups and teach line handling basics (safety, commands, belaying and coiling)
- Students set the sails (under close supervision by crew, naturally)
- First rotation through stations taught by crew (Life of a Common Sailor, Officers and Navigation, History of Triangle Trade in the late 18th century)
- All students on deck for a moment of silence while they close their eyes and imagine what it was like to voyage in the Age of Sail (O, brief blessed peace!)
- Second rotation through teaching stations
- Students douse the sails
- Third rotation
- Kill any remaining time with shanties and silly songs
- Dock and disembark passengers

All of this, as you can imagine, makes for a very long three hours. Then if we're lucky we get about 20 minutes for lunch before the next group of kids comes down the dock and we do it all again. And then, when we've finished with the second group (around 1530), we get to furl the sails and re-belay and coil nearly all the lines, while simultaneously opening the boat to the public at 1600 for an hour of dockside tours. After dinner (1800, if not delayed because we're so short on crew that we need the cook to help with furling) someone usually puts in a movie, which I rarely get all the way through before stumbling off to my bunk, listening to 1/2 hour of soothing music and falling asleep. Getting ten or more hours of sleep, I have learned, really helps with days like this.

Of course the ed sails are pretty cool. By this time I can teach all three of the stations, each of which has its own nifty props and fun facts. Most of the kids are really into it, because this is pretty much the coolest field trip ever. And teaching other people to set the sails means you really can't fudge anymore on knowing the names of the lines or which ones are supposed to be going up or down, something I, er, may or may not have been guilty of in the past. It's just that it's an insane schedule, especially taking into account that we don't get weekends off. Even our lively education coordinator is looking haggard after only four straight days of this.

And that is why, even though my contract is up in less than a month, that still seems like a long, long time from now.