Sailing Syzygy: Getting Knocked-Up and Knocked Down
Over the last five hundred years or so, if a sailor did something stupid like neglect his duties or disobey orders or insult his captain, or strike an officer, or desert the ship, or display rank incompetence or drunkenness or insubordination, or steal a dram of rum, or spit on the deck, or fail to stow his things properly or to clean his clothes adequately, there were any number of punishments that could be meted out: the sailor could be flogged, or whipped, or pickled, or cobbed, or made to run the gauntlet or to clean the head or to carry a 30-pound cannonball around the deck all day or to station himself at the top of the mast for a few hours or just to stand still until told otherwise. He could be lashed on board every ship in the fleet, or he could be tied to the mast for a week, or keel-hauled, or he could have had his feet bound and covered in salt and presented to goats for licking, which quickly went from ticklish to agonizing, because the goats don't stop licking before the sailor's feet have become bloody stumps. Or, if the sailor had mutinied or murdered, he could be hanged, shot, or have his head cut off, boiled, and then shoved onto a spike above decks, and left there for a week or so, to serve as an example to the remaining and hopefully far more loyal crew. Magellan preferred this latter technique. If the sailor had buggered (aka sodomized) another sailor, that, too could earn him the severest punishments. The sea was not San Francisco, man. But, if the sailor, while meeting the locals on some tropical island far away from home, knocked up a local woman, or a bunch of local women: nothing. Getting a girl knocked up was what sailors did when they weren't sailing, like Genghis Khan, or Mulai Ismail, the last Sharifian emperor of Morocco, who had something like 1400 sons and daughters before he died. Most sailors probably never knew how many women they knocked up on their voyages.
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August 03, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: bring on another thousand
There’s a cliche about boat-owning: they say that the best two days of a boat-owner’s life are the day you buy your boat and the day you sell it. Anecdotal evidence already suggests the opposite.
First, buying Syzygy was no fun. Buying the boat — literally paying for it — entailed electronically wiring the largest check I'd ever written to some obscure bank in Seattle, while at the same time second-guessing myself and wondering if I’d made a grave mistake. Was I buying the right sailboat? Had I taken a big hasty jump too soon? Did I just screw myself for the next three years? Five years? Life? My concerns ranged from tiny to huge, such that the actual boat-buying was fraught with anxiety and concern and distress. Which is to say that the day I bought the boat was not one of the best days of my life — 99% of the other days in my life, in fact, were better. A bad day at the dentist was better, because at least there was progress. With the boat, I wasn't sure if I was going forward or backward. I can't fathom how the first part of this myth was born.
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July 30, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: Faith
A mile out of the channel, John lost control of his rudder. One of the shivs holding the steering cable taut between the wheel and the sector had ripped out of a piece of oak one-and-a-half inches thick. These things happen.
John is the captain of Faith, a 40-foot wooden ketch built in 1946, that sits across from Syzygy. John's also the pilot of an IAR 823, a 1979 Romanian four-seater he keeps up in Napa, and he tends to keep his cool under duress. His steering had failed. It's not like he was a mile high and leaking fuel or something.
He rigged up the emergency tiller. It was made of old wood, and it snapped in two like a baseball bat. John has since fabricated a new one out of a steel bar.
With the engine still on, John raised the mizzen. The sail steadied the boat, kept her elegant bowsprit nosed into the wind. Everyone, including his eight-year old daughter Elizabeth, was fine. It was a Sunday in July. Everyone had a PFD, and dry clothes. It was windy, gusting to 30, but sunny and clear, at least on this side of the bay. Classic fogger weather.
John radioed the Coast Guard, and asked for assistance. The Coast Guard, by then, was busy; so busy that Jim and Jeannie, who were out that same afternoon aboard Kanga, picked up a sailor in the water before the Coast Guard was able to get to him. He'd been in the water for half an hour, and was blue. He was shivering uncontrollably. His 15-foot dinghy had capsized, and he'd been unable to right it. To the Coast Guard, this was typical: vessels without steering, vessels upside down. (A couple days later, I heard someone declare "Mayday," and heard the Coast Guard respond casually to the call.) Over the radio, they instructed John to drop an anchor, so that he'd stay put. He did.
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July 22, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: Two Years On A Boat
In 1834, Richard Henry Dana, a classmate of Henry David Thoreau, dropped out of Harvard because his eyesight was failing. He couldn't study -- couldn't read -- like he used to. So he joined the merchant marine, to sail from Boston to California and collect hides. The voyage, which began with 14 other men on the 86-foot Pilgrim and took him around Cape Horn twice, lasted more than two years. When he returned, he went back to school, got a law degree, and got married. Then he wrote a book about it, called "Two Years Before The Mast." It, like he, made waves.
Edward Tyrell Channing, a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Harvard, reviewed the book in the North American Review. He wrote that it was "a successful attempt to describe a class of men, and a course of life, which, though familiarly spoken of by most people, and considered as within the limits of civilization, will appear to them now almost as just discovered."
Indeed, it still reads that way. There are discoveries on every page.
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July 17, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: A Glorious Holiday
In honor of Independence Day, and brave adventurers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, I dug up an American flag from the wet locker and hung the stars and bars from backstay. I hate to get all jingoistic, but there's something fantastic about a boat, a flag, and the water, something almost timeless, something that people 233 years ago and long before that must also have recognized. I'd call the combination a triumvirate of awesomeness, were not that label already taken.
The flag, five feet off the deck, bestowed upon Syzygy some glory. That afternoon, the wind picked up from the west, and the flag began flapping loudly, wrapping around itself, fluttering and flicking about. I was working on the lazarette -- aka stern locker -- and kept ducking to keep from getting smacked in the face by the flag. There's a metaphor for a boat: sacrificing practicality for beauty, functionality for symbolism. These are sacrifices worth making, sometimes.
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July 09, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: Getting Over the Hump
A month ago, on a flight to DC, I started up a conversation with my neighbor because he was flipping through a catalog of farm equipment -- $150,000 tractors and combines and such. I asked what he was up to. He said he was a South Dakotan, and had picked up the catalog for fun, since his dad used to be involved in farming. We talked for a bit about machinery and engines, maintenance and reliability, lifespans and longevity. Such was our common ground. Was he still involved in farming? No, he worked for the South Dakota Department of Education, and was en route to DC for meetings with South Dakota's elected representatives. In particular, he was eager to talk to Senator Thune about getting funding for a program to deter bullying. I asked what he meant by deter, since it seemed bullying would always be around. He said I was right, and that the program would help teachers to better deal with bullying. This reminded me of John Guzzwell's definition of sailing: "prepare and deal."
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July 01, 2009
Old-Fashioned English Advice: Throw it Overboard!
A couple of days ago, I helped my friend Liz move out of her fancy apartment. She's lived in San Francisco for five years, and, as landlubbers tend to do, acquired nice furniture, a bunch of art, and a few acres of books, as well as all those little gewgaws that sit atop shelves and coffee tables. I was enlisted to help move the "heavy things" and "very heavy things" down three flights of stairs, so that she could transport them and store them elsewhere, until further notice. My help, unsolicited as it was, began immediately, over the phone. "Sell it all!" I said. "Put it on Craigslist. Put it on the street. Just get rid of it!" I tend to treat unwanted objects like jank.
Liz, who fancies her possessions, likes her lot of things, was not amused. And her initial experience with Craigslist -- some scam artist claiming he was hearing-impaired, hence the unusual shipping and payment arrangement -- was not encouraging. She rationalized her situation. If she couldn't sell her unwanted furniture right away, she'd put it in storage, and sell it in a few weeks. This was even worse: this was like being a slave to your possessions. "Just get rid of it!" I said again. "It's not worth the trouble!" Liz's uncle, a sailor, who was also there to help, agreed with me. While Liz crammed things into cardboard boxes, I offered to throw some stuff out her 3rd floor window. He said he's already suggested that. We laughed: a laugh, perhaps, that only sailors can share. Liz didn't laugh. She ran around packaging things up, making her life difficult, chained, apparently, to her stuff.
I've always been a minimalist, but living on a boat makes you an austere minimalist. You don't fret over things, or lament their loss. When deciding whether or not jettison possessions, the default becomes Get Rid of It. I'm sure the habit will come back to bite me in the ass later in life, but for now, I'm proud of it. I am the Jank Remover, and when the question is "To take or not to take," I have my answer in 3 milliseconds. Beat that processing speed, Google.
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June 25, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: a Janky Piece of Sh*t
A year ago, back when Syzygy was named Sunshine, and her port of call was listed as Portland, OR, I set to scraping off the old name and cleaning up the paint in preparation for applying the new vinyl letters.
The boat was up on stilts, then, at a workyard in Berkeley, so I had to climb a ladder to get aboard. I dragged the ladder back a few feet, closer to the stern, and climbed up five or six steps and from there began scraping off the letters. The letters were white vinyl, about eight inches tall, on blue paint, and it was just luck that I started on the left side, and not the right, so that after a little bit of work SUNSHINE became UNSHINE. I giggled at first, then thought about the irony, or the truth, as it were, in the new name. I sorta wished we hadn't sent off our paperwork to the US Coast Guard with the name Syzygy, because UNSHINE was so perfect. It was our style. It was unique. And it was so easy -- I'd barely started, and the job was already done. Voila, name removal and reapplication complete! If only other boat projects could be like that.
But Syzygy (which was my grandfather's favorite word) it was, so on with the work I went. Maybe it was an omen, this little taste of completion well before it was deserved. Or maybe it was an omen that before things would be completed, they would lack a certain luster. Or maybe it was an omen that painting (or preparing to paint) is a bitch. Or maybe the omen was this: there will be jank. Lots and lots of jank.
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June 17, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: Gaining Perspective
In late November I flew to the East Coast to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It was the first time I'd spent 10 days away from the boat in six months. They gave me an earful, my family.
On a walk in the woods with my mom, she asked if I was "prepared to weather a downturn in the economy." I hemmed and hawed, and admitted all my savings were sunk into the sailboat. Then I tried to explain that cruising is really cheap -- you load up on rice and beans, and just take off and go, like a climbing road trip. She seemed unconvinced, and rightly so.
My cousin Myles asked if I was done fixing up the boat; I told him it was complicated, that the boat was sorta like his house -- a huge, ornate 1880's Victorian, perpetually mid-repair, in a historic town. He grasped the situation immediately, and said, "So you'll never be finished." I smiled. "Exactly."
My cousin Joel told me to read "Adrift" -- Steve Callahan's terrifying story of shipwreck and survival -- and I told him I had, and that if he thought that story was good, he should read "Survive the savage sea," by Dougal Robertson.
This got them -- my whole extended family, now -- riled up, and the comments began to pour forth. Myles, reasoning that piracy was more of a threat than sinking, suggested that I acquire cannons. My dad chimed in: torpedos! Myles: machine guns! My cousin Jim: Missiles!
I opened another beer, and tried not to get defensive. Maybe I should bring their phone numbers, so that I could have the would-be-pirates call them directly to negotiate the ransom?
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June 11, 2009
Sailing Syzygy: Free Advice
There's no shortage of advice at the marina. One guy in particular, Steel Boat Jim, who I refer to as Maine Guy on account of his Downeast accent, is a treasure trove. You'd be hard-pressed to carry on a conversation with him and manage to sneak away without having received a point in some direction.
The first time I met Maine Guy, back in November, he was wearing a gray t-shirt from which his stomach protruded, and he had a beer in hand. It was maybe noon. I liked him already.
“So when ahh you leaving?” he asked. I was up on deck, the grinder in my hands, and earplugs in my ears. I pulled them out, and said, "Huh?"
"When ahh you leaving?"
“Not for more than a year,” I said.
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