As I write this on Sunday, November 13th, we are passing through the Torres Strait between the northern tip of Australia and Papua New Guinea. We are about halfway from Vanuatu to Bali. There is very little wind and we have been motoring since yesterday; the weather is hot, even early in the morning. By late afternoon the Salon was so hot and stuffy, with very little air moving through, that I knew I would have to sleep on deck.
After dinner we played some backgammon in the Salon, and it was too hot even for that non-strenuous game. About 8 pm I set up my sleeping pad, sheet and pillow on the cargo hatch; even though I wasn’t tired enough to sleep yet, if you don’t get there early, the limited space fills up quickly. As it was, there were only two spots open by the time I got there and I took one. With my headlamp on I was able to read for a while, then watched the stars and nearly full moon until I fell asleep. Stargazing was a lot better when I woke up at 3 am and the moon had set. It had cooled down quite a bit and I even put on a long sleeve shirt because my arms felt chilly.
Our second week at sea started out with more of the overcast, intermittent rain and squalls that had kept the sailmakers working in the Salon since the previous Thursday. In fact, Monday night and Tuesday morning we had very heavy rain and the sailmakers were called out several times to help with sail handling and bracing the yards. There was no point in changing to dry clothes that day because we would just get wet again. The “rainy day” project that I had started the previous Thursday, making curtains for all eight Bat Cave bunks, kept me busy right through the end of the week until Monday afternoon. With the leftover material I was able to piece together a spare curtain for the heads.
After that I joined the other sailmakers seaming by hand the cloths for a new lower topsail. With the weather continuing to be squally and in hopes of finishing all 23 seams (each double stitched) on the lower topsail before we get to Bali, all four of us sailmakers stitched seams all day Tuesday and Wednesday, along with occasional help from someone on the duty watch. We made good progress and by the end of the week had 15 seams completely finished. Tuesday afternoon, during a brief sunny interlude, I took my stitching up to the quarterdeck. While I was working there, the Captain sat down next to me on the sailmaker’s bench with his sailmaker’s palm and showed me how to do the seam more “seamanly”: smaller stitches, closer together and pulled tighter.
By Thursday we had left the squalls behind us, the sun was shining strong and Susannah decided we could safely carry the new main foresail up to the quarterdeck where all four of us could work on sewing rope grommets in place along the head of the sail. This sail has been a long time in the making: it has gone around the world two or three times already and it has never been bent on because it still is not finished. It is nearing completion now and we hope to send it aloft soon.
Since I was inexperienced with grommet sewing, Susannah asked me to do a practice one on some scrap canvas. It’s a good thing she did, because my first one was terrible. I forgot one very important step: pulling each stitch down super tight from behind the canvas so that the grommet actually gets snugged down into the layers of canvas rather than sitting on top of it. My second practice grommet showed definite improvement, but it still wasn’t quite right and I had to do a third practice one before I “graduated” from grommet trainee to grommet sewer and was allowed to stitch them onto the foresail. By the end of the day my grommets looked ever so much better!
All day Friday and Saturday morning Jill and I sewed grommets on the luff of the flying jib, the sail that I had stitched seams by machine the previous week. This is another new sail (laid out in Mangareva, earlier in this voyage) that we hope to bend on very soon as we keep a close eye on the current flying jib which has required a couple of emergency patches recently and is due for an overhaul. By the end of the day Friday my grommets were looking really good and I was able to sew one into place in about 40 minutes, down from almost an hour when I first started. Saturday morning I seemed to be constantly struggling to keep the four strands of thread straight and flat, the end results did not look quite as good to me, and I was feeling frustrated with grommet sewing. Perhaps I can go back to seaming next week.
Our work days were cut short by an hour each day as the “Picton Castle University” got into full swing. We had workshops scheduled each day at 4:30 pm: Rules of the Road 101 on Monday and Wednesday; Coastal Piloting 101 on Tuesday and Thursday; and Seamanship 313 on Friday.
Thursday’s class was pre-empted by launching the ship’s skiff to take photos of the ship under sail with all sails set including the stunsails. Although we have frequently disembarked from the ship to the skiff and re-boarded the ship while at anchor in a relatively calm harbor, we have much less experience doing it at sea. We’ve done it while hove to at Pitcairn, although then we were transferring to and from the Pitcairn longboat which is a lot bigger than our tiny skiff. And a few people have gone out in the skiff during man overboard drills, while the ship is stopping and hove to.We’ve never done it while underway with the ship moving at 4.5 knots.
Although the seas were relatively calm and the swells appeared to be very small when standing on the ship’s deck, it looks a lot different when going over the side to a small boat that is bouncing up and down four to six feet or more at any given moment. And pulling away from the big ship in the middle of the ocean, just 7 or 8 of us in a small boat with a 30 hp outboard, gave me a whole new appreciation for the enormity of the ocean. Add to that a view of the ship that we normally don’t get to see – what she looks like under sail from the water – and it was well worth the edge of nervousness that accompanied the experience. Later the Captain informed us that this was part of our advanced seamanship training.
Thursday’s Coastal Piloting class finally took place on Saturday afternoon. Friday’s class was pre-empted by a marlinspike “Farewell to the South Pacific” party which was a disguise for a surprise belated birthday party for Keith, our doctor who joined the ship in Rarotonga. Somehow his birthday had escaped Kimberly’s (and everyone else’s) attention; Kimberly keeps the master list of birthdays and tells Joe when to bake a birthday cake. It was a great party, which we hope made up for being late, with lots of music and dancing until almost 10 pm, which is the official lights out and quiet time on board. Keith is an avid Lindy dancer, as is Sam, so she put on some Lindy music and they did several dances together while the rest of us watched. Then we all started dancing on the cargo hatch. It’s quite a testament to our ability to balance when 20 or more of us can dance at one time, after imbibing quite a bit of rum punch, on a rolling “dance floor” that is limited in size, and nobody falls off. Fortunately, that was the same night that we set the clocks back an hour so we all had some extra time to sleep and recuperate.
With calm seas and sunny skies prevailing, and ship’s work to be done Saturday afternoon, Kimberly opened her haircutting salon in the breezeway on the port side of the galley house. I was her first customer; she trimmed a couple of inches of dry dead ends off my hair…nothing drastic. John Kemper, Margot, Kathleen, JD, Becky, Mike and Andrea all had haircuts, too. There may have been others as well.
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