Crew's Views from
Andrew Jackson

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August 1, 2000; Ode to wind, water, and gravity

We're a thousand miles offshore, skating between the isobars of a low pressure front to the west and a high to the east. Even though we're rigged down to a little storm sail for our main, we're still doing over ten knots. The high is, so far, nice and stable, but the low keeps wobbling around, and that makes Pride of Baltimore II a useful laboratory for studying the effects of wind, water, and gravity.

When these three gang up on us, we can pretty much hold our own. But when they start fighting amongst themselves, well, there's no way of guessing where the collateral damage will fall. As I sit in my galley, one foot braced against the companionway ladder, I can watch the coffee mugs swing like a chorus line on their twenty-four cup hooks, or watch the slop bucket leap up and orbit the circumference of its tether, or listen to the midships bilge gurgle like a mountain spring. There's a rhythm to the waves that move the boat, but this rhythm is treacherously syncopated. So I'll get used to listing over about 15 degrees and then flattening out again, and, after about four ordered heels, we'll keep listing over to 20 or 25 degrees. Then that handhold that heretofore seemed so secure will fall two inches out of my reach and over I'll go. Or if I have my feet planted in a wide secure stance, the boat will take an extra little jolt, just enough to dislodge my tread and send me flying into the pantry.

We caught a tiny blue fish yesterday and I stupidly stood up and used both hands to take a picture of it and boom. I had plenty of time to admire the stately arc of the digital camera, disgorging its four rechargeable double A's before we all hit the sole (deck).

The cure for the helplessness and frustration of being bounced around the galley is simply to go on deck. Then you can read the dials and make sense out of what is happening around you. Wind speed forty knots. Wind direction veering from south-southwest to west-southwest. Boat speed varying from nine to thirteen knots. Yikes! Eight foot seas, which means the waves measure sixteen feet from trough to crest.

You can watch them race over the horizon, big and fast as freight trains, but freight trains going sideways. And one will bounce off our hull and the next one will bounce into the rebounding first one, and they'll slam together and send up a curtain of spray twenty feet high. And the spray will fall into vast doilies over the heaving breast of the ocean, bone-white on top and pewter to blue roiling beneath the surface. Or a wave will uppercut one of the little platforms that hold the rigging, and make that little jolt that can send one sprawling down in the galley. Or the whole huge wave will slide under our keel, gentle and demure as a cat.

But even on deck you can't always see what's coming. One minute the helmsman is nicely adjusting his course to keep the jib topsail from luffing and the next he's up to his chest in green water, clinging for dear life and watching his chart, his coffee mug and his sou'wester floating off into the Atlantic. The waves may buffet me cruelly down in the galley, but they rarely jump on my head.

But that's all outer water. What's the inner water doing all this time? Collecting. It's the wind that blows the water below, but once it's safely out of the wind, water is a slave to gravity. One way or another, all the water on board makes its way down to the bilges. If it's in the sink, it waits for a chance to leap out, slide under the wood fiddles and drip onto our polyurethaned Honduran mahogany sole. Our sole is so smooth the water forms sheets instead of beads or streams, sheets so thin you'd never know it's flowing slowly, imperceptibly into your potato bin until the day comes you lift the lid.

It collects on the foc'sle overheads, tiny droplets that wedge between the weatherboards until they accumulate enough inertia to slide down the rafter to an unguarded bunk or pillow. We deal with this by making a sort of gutter out of duct tape and sticking it upside down on the beam, so the water will flow down and drip harmlessly onto the sole, and thence to the bilge.

And every hour somebody comes down and pumps out the bilges and enters the number of pump strokes it took in the ship's log. Back in the Chesapeake, it took about four strokes every four hours to empty the bilges. But out here it's more like 40 strokes every hour. Good thing we've got plenty of brawny cadets.

Well, that's it for now. See you next week!

Andy Jackson, Ship's Cook

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