This is my last passage at sea on this voyage, since I am disembarking in Bali. I have a totally different schedule on this passage now that I am a “dayman”. I’ve been wanting to learn more about sailmaking, so I’m now an assistant sailmaker along with Jill and Morgan. We all work with the ship’s Sailmaker, Susannah, who is a veteran of the Picton Castle’s first world voyage and who has several years experience working in a sail loft in Maine.
As a dayman, I am awakened at 0700 (although I’m usually up around 0530 or 0600, I still get an official “wakeup” at 0700), eat breakfast at 0730am and am ready to start work by 0750. Each of us has one domestics cleaning chore to do at the start of each workday (I clean the chart house), then we get into the days’ sailmaking projects. We work until 1700 with a half hour off for lunch at 1130. We may quit a little earlier when the Captain schedules a workshop at 1600 or 1630.
Once our work is finished for the day I have the entire night off; no more waking up for four hours of night watch in the middle of the night. Of course, not being on watch means that I no longer get to take the helm or stand lookout; nor do I do much sail handling – only occasionally during the day when they are short handed for bracing the daymen are called upon to haul on lines. And, since I’m no longer on the watch roster, I am not assigned to galley duty. (For those who are on watch at sea, the galley rotations are down to as little as once every 7 days; back in Lunenburg we had started with galley once every 13 or 14 days.)
Sailmaking is right up my alley. I love to sew and working with my hands on something tangible that I can see progress each day towards a finished product, such as a new sail, is far more enjoyable and satisfying to me than chipping rust, sanding and painting steel surfaces that will have to be re-done again and again. Because I have a lot of prior experience sewing with a machine, Susannah has given me a lot of machine sewing work during my first week as a sailmaker. The ship’s sewing machine, a Sailrite Ultrafeed, is very much like my Mom’s old Singer sewing machine that I learned to sew on.
All of the ship’s sails are canvas, and most have been made by crew during the various world voyages and while the ship is laid up over the intervening winters in Lunenburg. We are working on a new Flying Jib, a miter-cut fore ’n aft sail. Paulina had stitched the cloths together when she was on board earlier in the voyage, and the sail was laid out in Fiji for a “second cut.” The outer edges of the sails were marked and lines drawn for the folds to be rubbed under and stitched down.
My first job was to stitch patches on each of the clew, tack and head corners of the sail. Susannah helped me measure and layout the patches, which I cut, rubbed and stitched on. Next, I rubbed under the fold for the foot of the sail. The cloth actually is folded over twice, so the raw edge of the canvas is enclosed in the seam, which means that the entire length of the foot of the sail has to be rubbed under twice. And then it has to be stitched three times: two seams along the innermost edge of the fold, about ¾ inch apart and one seam along the outer edge of the sail. The same folding and stitching had to be done on the leech of the sail also.
For the luff, which at 57.5 feet is the longest edge of the sail, we made a separate piece called a “tabling” which had to be stitched on. Both edges of the tabling had to be rubbed under as well as the edge of the luff on the sail. Jill and Susannah worked on that while I started on a special “rainy day” project (the weather has been overcast and spitting rain on and off, so we are working in the Salon and somewhat limited by space constraints as to what we can work on)…making new bunk curtains for the 8 bunks in the Bat Cave.
As soon as the luff tabling was ready, I started stitching that on. The first seam took over two hours to do because I had to continually adjust the tabling and the sail to be sure they lined up correctly. Susannah stitched the second seam in less than an hour and I finished the third seam in just over half an hour.
Despite the on-and-off rain as we play hide and seek with squalls, the seas have been fairly calm. We are sailing downwind, going in a westerly direction, making an average of 5 to 6 knots, logging as much as 120 to 150 miles per day. The ship does a fair bit of rolling from side to side. By now we have learned to stow everything quite securely and we rarely hear things go rolling around. And we have long since learned how to walk on the rolling decks, so that we rarely need to hold on for support.
On Saturday, November 5th we had a Masked Ball marlinspike party to celebrate a belated Hallowe’en. We all made masks. There were some very creative ideas considering the limited resources we have on board – we can’t run to the store to get supplies. Catharine was a jelly fish: she tied a hula skirt (blue and green “grass”) around her head and put a shower cap on top. Becky made a frangipani flower mask; Sam put together a baseball catcher’s mask made of white plastic coat hangers (she’s an avid baseball fan); Brent shaved his hair to a Mohawk cut and made a mask of canvas; John Kemper used a black belt and cut holes for eyes in it; Greg used a lot of empty candy and cookie wrappers to make a mask; and there were a lot of masks made of canvas that defy description. I used a pumpkin colored t-shirt and canvas to make a pumpkin face mask. Many of us found it challenging to eat popcorn and drink rum punch with our masks on; mine got a bit soggy around the mouth until I finally gave up and took it off.
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