Picton Castle is currently at sea on the notorious Middle Passage, the slavers’ route between Dakar, Senegal and the Caribbean. For more information on voyages, see picton-castle.com.
10km and receding,” he says. I am relieved — nothing like sitting on a steel vessel at sea with three great lightning conductors poking into the sky to keep you on your toes.
At 5am, I relieve Nicole on for’ard lookout. “Lookout is a cure for all ills,” she says as she clambers off the fo’c’sle.
I stare into the night. There is a bright light off the starboard bow. Is it a star? I watch it for a while until I am sure, hell no, that’s no star, it’s another ship, a freighter ploughing south. I go tell Beamy. “Thank you,” she says.
I am relieved as the grey, rainy dawn creeps over the sea. The ship begins to stir. I can hear Donald, the Grenadian cook, knocking pans about in the galley. The aroma of coffee hits the breeze. And is that the smell of baking bread?
At 6am all the watch save helmsman Jens are scrubbing the decks. Beamy washes them down with seawater from the firehose while we scrub. We scrub the ship from bow to stern, all 60m of it. The instructions continue: “Scrub across the seams, else you’ll ruin the caulking.” “Don’t hit the superstructure with the broom — you’ll wake the captain’s kid.” Then I get a bucket and some Vim and a sponge and spend the next hour doing “soogee”, scrubbing rust off the superstructure. One of the officers sees me. “You’re doing it wrong,” she says. “Use the other side of the sponge.” As I scrub I reflect on how I’ve paid the equivalent of about R10 500 for the privilege of doing an hour of soogee every day.
“Some people find that Zen moment in soogee,” John the sailmaker says later. John has been aboard for three years. As sailmaker he’s a dayman — his soogee days are behind him — but he has some advice. “When you’re on night watch on the bow, under the stars, you’ll realise it’s all therapeutic and this too shall pass.”
Afterwards, I get a bucket and begin washing the superstructure with fresh water. “Don’t use so much water,” says a passing deckhand whose name I do not yet know, “the engineer will shit.”
I would not want Billy the engineer to shit. I saw him minutes after I joined the ship, blue, oily bandanna on his head, silvered goatee and eyes the colour of crevasse ice, walking down the deck, reverently massaging engine oil into his massive hands. This was the man who days before had stretched the vessel’s plumbing out along a wharf at the Victoria & Albert dock and there, right in front of the smug, ice-cream-licking tourists, blew seven months of accumulated fecal matter out of the pipes with a pressure hose.
Billy and I click. It might be our advanced years compared to the rest of the crew, most of whom are in their 20s. He came to tall ships for the romance. “We’re the last of a dying breed,” he says.
He had an epiphany during a 10day voyage between the islands in Fiji. “We sailed under a full lunar eclipse and I realised this was what guys were doing in the age of sail, sailing along . . . no lights, no towns and wondering if the next local people you meet will be friendly.”
In that sense, the Picton Castle is keeping alive centuries-old traditions of seamanship, and that is why the volunteers are here. Bruce, like many of the older trainees, is living a dream, something different to fill out the arc of their lives. “It’s an experience out of time,” he says in a rare garrulous moment.
The younger crew — mostly Scandinavians, Americans and a smattering of Bermudans — have come to get hands-on sea time. Many will look for places on other tall ships or pursue careers in the merchant marine. “There are 200 000 seafaring jobs waiting to be filled,” Moreland tells me. And employers like people who’ve learned their skills under sail.
At 8am, we are relieved and rush to the fantail for breakfast. Ship’s cook Donald Church, a veteran of cruise ships in the Caribbean, is the second-most important person aboard and I can see why: cinnamon rolls, scrambled eggs, homebaked bread and jam. And oats, always oats, for the Danes. “The Danes like oats,” says one sailor. “No oats, Danes unhappy.”
Minutes later I am asleep in my bunk, lulled by the Atlantic gurgling past, inches from my head.
At noon, I am roused by a cacophony of feet pounding the steel deck. I stumble up the companionway and am struck dumb: while I slept, our ship has transformed into a great white seabird. Sailors are climbing the rigging, nimble as cats. The vast canvas sails crack and belly in the freshening breeze and for the first time in days, there is no rumbling diesel, no oily exhaust. It’s just us and the sea and a fine ship with a bone in her teeth. A southwester has come up and we are fly- ing along at five knots. “Five knots!” the crew grin at each other. At this rate we’ll be in Luderitz in a couple of days.
I could spend all day lying on the hatchcover, playing with the ship’s cats and watching the sails spreading overhead. But chief mate Sam Sikkema has other plans. “It’s not often you get to be in the engine room of a sailing ship,” he says. So Erin Greig, the 25-year-old no-nonsense bosun from Bermuda, straps me into a harness and follows me aloft. I go up the ratline like a scalded cat, hanging on grimly as the ship rolls. We pause at the first platform while I try and swallow my heart which appears to be stuck in my throat.
“Pretty special view from here,” says Erin. The ship rolls beneath us, masts arcing across the blue, Atlantic sky, a whitecap Tintin sea foaming past. Snatches of song float up to us — it’s the young, dreadlocked Bermudan apprentice Dikembe Outerbridge Diu singing a made-up sea shanty to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.
“You’ll get used to it,” says Erin as I make my way like a sack of lumpen potatoes to the deck, “till one day it’s all . . . natural.” “You mean I’ll be salty?” “Yes,” she says. “Salty.”