HOW SAILING DASHES — AND LIFTS — THE SPIRIT
Dawn was breaking and the good ship Picton Castle, a three-masted barque, was clipping along in a fresh wind off the Cape coast. For a brief and rare moment, there was nothing for us watchhands to do, so I sat quietly by the taffrail and looked at my shipmates. There was Bruce, a spry American in his 60s, and Nicole, a writer from Seattle, looking, as she put it, “for time out of my head”. “Beamy” (her name was, in fact, Amy but there was already an Amy on board when she joined), our lead seaman and watch leader, was at the helm, making the steering look easy.
There was Jens, a German IT technician with a thick beard, and an American named Ryan who, for the week I was aboard, spent his time lying green-gilled in his bunk or retching into the sea.
And then there was the Australian dayman (a sailor who works by day and sleeps by night — nice work if you can get it), who may have been a fugitive from justice, given his unfriendliness when asked if I could interview him for the story.
He always seemed to suddenly appear, like a cat, whenever I was doing stuff like coiling sheets (ropes) on the heaving deck in the middle of the night (“What the f*** is this?”), slopping pine tar and linseed oil onto bits of the ship’s rigging
(“The purpose of the taaap is to protect the deck, not f ****** spill on”) or cleaning paint brushes (“Nah, still needs cleaning, mate.”)
Getting crapped on was a regular event during my week as a deckhand on the Picton Castle (for a while I called the ship the “Picked-on Castle”).
It’s fair to say, though, that my attitude needed adjusting. For example, I perhaps should not have snorted amusedly when I saw the second mate literally up to her shoulders in shit after she had disassembled the aft “head” (lavatory) to find out what had blocked it (wet wipes, which a dumb sailor — not me — had flushed into the system).
I also, perhaps, should not have told the Fugitive Dayman to coil his own f ****** ropes if he didn’t like how I did mine.
The thing with good ships is that they are not democracies. They are dictatorships, led by a ruler who might be harsh, cold-hearted and aloof but who also must be a salty skipper who can keep a ship and her crew always safe.
At dawn, all the watch were scrubbing the decks. Beamy washed them down with seawater from the firehose while we scoured the ship from bow to stern with hard brushes. The instructions continued: “Scrub across the seams, else you’ll ruin the caulking” and “Don’t hit the deckhouse with the broom — you’ll wake the captain’s kid.”
Then I was handed a bucket and some Vim and a sponge and spent the next hour doing “soogee”, scrubbing rust off the steel door of the paint locker. An officer saw me. “Use the other side of the sponge,” he said.
Afterwards, I started rinsing the steel with fresh water. “Don’t use so much fresh water,” said another officer, “the engineer will shit”. It wasn’t all bad, though.
One morning, standing lookout in the predawn darkness on the ship’s bow, I watched the bright light of another ship ploughing south in the velvety night. It was a moment of utter solitude wrapped in a blanket of delight — there, another vessel, perhaps with another unsalted sailor standing watch, seeing our lights gleaming faraway on a dark, unruly sea.
Standing lookout was, like the salty hands said, a cure for all else. In those moments, soogee and the officers disappeared, an ocean sunrise was coming and tomorrow was another day.
— The Picton Castle is currently berthed in Cape Town. See picton-castle.com.