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Lady Washington/Two Weeks Before the Mast
I originally planned to take the train down to Ventura, but Amtrak canceled the train for several days due to the snow in Oregon. I couldn't find a way to get to Ventura from LA by noon via transit on a Sunday unless I was there far earlier than it was possible to fly in. Since I was going to have to get a hotel anyway, I figured it might as well be a hotel on wheels, so I flew to Albuquerque and caught the overnight train from there. Seemed a shame to pass up the opportunity for long distance train travel in the US, and this way I could claim my journey had been by land, by sea and by air.
Long distance Amtrak is pretty wild. There were flat, straight sections in the middle of absolutely nowhere that we were crawling along at 30 mph because the tracks were so bad. The distance from ABQ to LA was less than my train ride from Tokyo to Kagoshima, yet it took well over twice as long. There are signs warning you to hold on to the handles when crossing between cars, and I damned well did, because it was shaking so hard I wouldn't have been too surprised if the cars had separated. Don't get me wrong, I loved doing it. But being able to appreciate a "beauty in decay" aesthetic certainly doesn't hurt.
The waiting room in Union Station in LA is pretty great, at least.
The whole ridiculous trip worked, and I got to the Lady in Ventura slightly before noon that Sunday. It was then a whirlwind of signing in, getting the orientation, being assigned a climbing harness, and joining them for their last public day sail in the afternoon. By 20:00 we were on our way to Monterey, and I was standing my first night watch.
I don't have any pictures from this period, because I was pretty sick. I failed to keep dinner or breakfast down, and lunch was a struggle. The weather was fine but there was a lot of swell and Lady rolls quite a bit. It was bad enough that even some of the professional crew was having problems. Standing watch was okay -- that was mostly up on deck with a fresh wind in my face. Except the boat checks, done every hour by the watch, where we had to go down into every compartment, check the bilges, do a headcount, and record some engine readings. All that up and down, twisting around to stick my head into bilge hatches, and being in the steaming, diesel-y engine room was pretty terrible. I didn't get through one without getting sick until the second night.
(Picture from the second transit.) I really enjoyed steering the ship. Particularly when seasick, it was great. Face into the wind, concentrating on a point on the horizon. Very calming. Plus, I can now officially claim conning a ship as a skill -- specialization is for insects.
By the second night, I was feeling great. Something had clicked inside my brain and the motion didn't bother me any more. The next morning I was on the tiller as we approached Monterey on a lovely grey morning with the hillsides wreathed in fog. It was pretty glorious.
I never quite got comfortable going aloft, though I often did it 2-3 times a day. Being out on a footrope wasn't too bad, as you're pretty secure there leaning over the spar. But getting there, particularly in any amount of swell, was downright terrifying at points. I don't think I had ever literally held on for dear life before going up to furl the topgallant while underway. The ship is very much trying to shake you off at that height.
Where the sections of the mast meet, there is a "top", a platform which acts as a spreader for the shrouds. Up until that point, climbing the shrouds is pretty easy -- they're a giant ladder, after all. But to get on top of the top, you must climb the futtock shrouds which incline backwards past the vertical. There is a safety line on the left which you clip into, but you're still going to fall quite a ways before you come to the end of that and your lanyard. It must be safer than it looks because people do it all the time with very few accidents, but I never enjoyed the process.
Most of our time was spent in port, running dock tours and taking groups out for day sails. The later is how the ships are primarily funded. About 40 people at a time, for 3 hours. If it's a battle sail, our sister ship the Hawaiian Chieftain would join us and we fire canons at each other. With the right weather it can be pretty fun, but it's hard work. Particularly the battle sails, with the constant maneuvering needed to try to gain tactical advantage. But I certainly gained a better understanding of how the sails work, running back and forth hauling on lines. The ship is a giant human-powered machine for catching the wind, and gaining some mastery over how it all works was fairly intoxicating at times.
It's humbling how much harder I worked for those two weeks than I ever do for my paying job. 10 hours a day, 6 days a week of the hardest physical labor I've done since I was moving irrigation pipes on my cousin's ranch at 15. I'm glad I did this when I did -- my body rose to the challenge better than I feared it would, but that window is definitely closing.
Other days were for maintenance. It's a wood ship, and entropy never sleeps. During the first week I was a bit bummed how much of the volunteering was just modern merchant marine operations, but I ended up getting quite into it. Maybe not as romantic as the tallship skills, but still an interesting set of technologies to get to learn. Like how to get a docking line to the dock with the use of a heaving line which gets thrown over first, then used to pull the much thicker docking line across. Docking is a complicated, tense dance where everyone needs to be doing the right thing at the right time. Missing a heaving line throw can be pretty bad, as the Lady only has a single screw and just a smallboat with an outboard motor to serve as a bow thruster. I'm happy to say that my heaving line record stands at 100%.
One day we had to vacate our dock as a cruise ship was coming in and its tenders would be docking there. We got up at 5 (a roll-n-go, no breakfast till later) and prepared to move to a commercial dock for the day. Halfway there I was nominated to go ahead to be on the new dock to catch the heaving lines. This meant climbing down from the channels (the little platforms on the side where the shrouds connect) into the smallboat while underway, then be jetted ahead to the ladder on the new dock and climb out. I then waited for the Lady to catch up, chatting with the fisherpeople who all expressed concern at the terrible swell at that location and how many docklines they'd snapped there. We managed to dock there just fine, except the fishers weren't lying -- the swell was really, really bad. While we were still rigging secondary lines, primary two started to snap. Pretty scary, given how much energy is stored in one of those as it stretches out. The sea is just unimaginably powerful, even a relatively calm corner of it like Monterey Bay on a nice day.
We gave up and decided to go anchor in the bay, which had been the original plan anyway. So I climbed back down the weirdly pivoting rebar ladder into the smallboat, then back up into the Lady who had thankfully rigged the jacob's ladder at that point. We pass the cruise ship where it is anchored with all its tenders being deployed. At this point the captain finds another dock, one much more protected behind the breakwater, so we go there. Which means climbing back down into the smallboat, this time in some serious swell as we're much farther out, and zooming ahead like a Miami Vice scene, cutting across swells that are well above our heads, getting absolutely soaked in the process. I wouldn't want to do that every day, but I've got to say it was pretty fun.
The third dock is wonderfully stable and quiet. We get word that the swell was so bad that the cruise ship was dragging its anchor and gave up, so it was 4.5 hours of completely wasted effort. But the commercial fishing boats we were docked with made pretty nice neighbors, and only a bit stinky. One of the captains came over and was amusingly perplexed at how we lived. No mess table? No TV? A TILLER?! Nice guy, though. A few of us went over to tour his ship, which was like a luxury RV. He said he didn't even use the wheel much, just clicks waypoints on the computer. Wild.
I was offered the opportunity to stay on another 2 days for the transit up to Sausalito. Work didn't mind, so I jumped at the chance. I had already thinking it would have been nice to do the transit at the end of my time, when I actually had some clue what I was doing, instead of at the beginning. And a chance to sail through the Golden Gate? Hell yeah! Plus... I really liked the crew. I cared about them in a shockingly powerful way after just two weeks. I'm still kind of processing these emotions, as they are quite foreign to me. I've never been a joiner, and I've always kind of slipped out of situations where teamwork is a major component. But the crew was literally responsible for each other's lives. That's heady stuff. I think I could have easily become addicted to it had I done this when I was younger.
The second transit was only about 12 hours long, but it was great. No passengers! We set eight sails, the most I'd seen, as we didn't have to worry about keeping the main deck clear. We almost even set the fore course, but the winds never quite justified it. Everything we refurled by the late afternoon as the winds swung around.
As we approached the Golden Gate, the wind wasn't entirely unfavorable, and the crew more or less demanded we be allowed to put up sails for passing under the bridge. This was allowed, and I'd never seen people climb the rigging so quickly.
There were 3 other huge cargo shipping all passing under the bridge at the same time, with plenty of room left over. It really is an impressive span!
And absolutely gorgeous.
The order came to douse the sails as soon as we were through, as Sausalito was just around the corner. While people were aloft, a seriously high end racing yacht circled us, cheering wildly.
And that was it. Within an hour we were docked, and my adventure at sea had come to an end.
We were docked next to the Matthew Turner, a new tallship that is still under construction. It's a diesel-electric hybrid with the ability to regeneratively recharge its battery banks by using its screws as turbines when sailing. One of the other Two Weekers is a volunteer there, and the tallship community is small enough that everyone knew everyone anyway. The next day was an endless series of reciprocal tours.
The dock itself is run by the Corps of Engineers, and at its foot is the 2 acre Bay Model made in the 50s to model water flow through the entire San Francisco Bay area. It is really, really big and surprisingly detailed. Hasn't been used for real since 2000, though, as computer modeling is of course far better now, but it's kept open for educational purposes.
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What determines how many sheets you load up? I figured you put up everything you can until the ship's about to heel and call it good, but obviously it's more complicated than that.
Lady is purely square-rigged: no fore-and-aft?
I love the idea of reverse-driving with the screws to charge batteries. Have you seen the stuff about people putting up huge kites to derive thrust from higher-altitude winds and pull ships along? I start thinking about that combination and wondering if shipping could be energy-positive.
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The feeling of belonging is heady. Sometimes I manage to brush with this when I perform at a filkcon, butvthat is always one stage removed.
It was pretty awesome following your adventure!
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Next up, planning an invasion?
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