(Yoinked fro n6tqs )

Sunk: The Incredible Truth about a Ship that Never Should Have Sailed makes for some terrifying reading (at least for me, and I gather, via conversation, most people who have sailed). The author's a UD grad student, apparently, and she seems to have done a bang-up job of outlining and analyzing the Bounty's sinking. Her description ( Read more... )

I don't recall posting this, so for the record: I passed. I am now officially CREW ( Read more... )

So, my tall ship training course is now over and I PASSED MY FINAL! Which means I get to call myself "crew." It's a long way from being an "able-bodied seaman," but it's something.

The ship, alas, is still in dock, so I'm planning to get my volunteer hours up such that I can actually go sailing. When I do, I'll fill you in.

Yesterday had other ( Read more... )

This week they started training us to actually handle the whipstaff: the tall, glossy wooden pole that served as the 17C equivalent of a steering wheel.  We practiced dodging pirates and icebergs (the usual  perils of Delaware rivers) by putting the stationary ship through its imagined paces.

This involved putting the whipstaff “in the hole” ( ( Read more... )

“Do you know why they put the martlets here?”

I was at that point lying with my belly across the yard and my feet on a very wobbly piece of rope. No I did not know.

“What I heard,” the experienced climber said, “was that in the old days, sailors were terrified of falling to the sea. They couldn’t swim and they had no life boats. So they rigged the ( Read more... )

Climbing went much better this week. For one thing, I had better footwear. For another, the tarp had been taken down, so the swing onto the shrouds was easier to make. Also, my body had gotten time to adjust to the whole “ropes will move” idea.

Best advice given to me: “Never look up or down when climbing. Just watch your hands.”

Most interesting / ( Read more... )

I am now a genuine tar. I’ve rolled so much oakum that my exercise clothes reek of pine tar. I noticed it when I went to belly dancing. It’s not an unpleasant smell, but it’s weird, like a Christmas tree  soaked in petroleum. My palms feel like I’ve just rubbed them with body butter.  And I keep finding tiny white hairs from ropes scattered over my ( Read more... )