On board the STV Asgard II, Day 0
Jun. 28th, 2008 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbThe parent drove me down to Galway on Wednesday night, across a countryside I hardly recognise, having spent so much time in Dublin. Sheep and cows and green fields and more sheep and some horses and more cows. Very pretty countryside, actually. Got into Galway around eleven that night, and slept in the Harbour Hotel, right by the docks. A very pleasant hotel, all round.
I didn't have to be at the ship until 1400 Thursday, so there was time to walk around Galway. It's a small town, windswept but well-kempt, with a tidal harbour and a lock. Modern, but with its medieval bones showing through beneath. There's a museum, which gives you a reasonable précis of its history, and a helpful man in a camera shop who sold me a disposable camera with thirty-seven exposures.
Then it was time to go over to the docks to the Asgard, a gaff-rigged ketch about 60 foot by 12 foot (guesses by eye, since no one ever told me). Her tonnage is apparently 50 tons, and perhaps one day I'll find out what that means. Five permanent crew, master, mate, engineer, bosun, and cook, and a maximum 20 trainees on board.
There were a few trainees waiting at the gangway, and after we'd been there a few minutes, the bosun - a lad in his early twenties in the last year of his qualifying course in nautical science at Cork Institute of Technology called Donal, a long tall lanky handsome bloke with a bright grin, too - told us we could come on board and stow our stuff by our bunks.
Quarters down below are close, but by no means as close as they would have been in the golden age of sail. Our bunks, mess table and heads occupied the space that in a similar ship of the eighteenth century would've been reserved for cargo. Back then, I imagine, the crew would've been crammed into the space under the fo'c'sle that on the Asgard II is used for storage. And, of course, there would've been no inside heads.
I had one of the smaller ones up foreward, six foot long, two high, two deep. The bunks down by the mess table were slightly higher and deeper, but not by much. Some bunks had lockers in the hull adjacent to the bunk, but me and three others had lockers under our bunks. I swear by all things holy and unholy, there's scarcely room to turn around down there. Forget about privacy, personal space, anything like that. You're living in each others' armpits, squishing seventeen around a mess table that can barely accomodate fourteen, falling into other people's bunks, sitting on them, borrowing from them, getting your stuff mixed in with theirs, because when you're putting your socks on, what the hell are you going to do?
But I get ahead of myself. We went back on deck to meet the people we'd be spending the next week falling over. There was Graeme, the thirty-year-old archaeologist from Glasgow. Mike, Aoife and Pat from Galway. Dee from Cork. Cormac the gaelgóir from the Arann Islands, Ronan the poser from Dublin, three Andrews (one who turned out to be seriously weird), two teenage Kevins (one quiet, one loud), a green-haired surfer boy, Brian from Sligo, and Clare and Sean and Jonathan from Dublin. There were three men over fifty, maybe eight of us between nineteen and thirty, and the rest were sixteen-eighteen. Four girls, including me.
We signed on ship's articles, which made us crew, and met the permanent crew: Captain Ro McSweeney, John the mate, Shane the engineer from Cork, Kevin O'Leary the amazing cook, and Donal the bosun. Then they divided us into our three watches, Port, Middle, and Starboard (crews are divided into three watches both for working the sails - different watches are supposed to set different sails - for standing watches during the day and night, and for emergency drills). I was in the starboard watch. Emergency drills after that: how to abandon ship and what to take with you; fire; life-jackets; the emergency alarm; man overboard drills. Then we learned knots, and which ones are used where. Reef knots, for securing the staysails; clove-hitches; slipped clove hitches for securing the square sails; bowlines for putting a loop in a rope; figure of eights for stopping a line running through an eyelet or a block; two turns and a half-hitch for securing mooring lines and fenders. We usually did up the gaskets (any short length of loose rope is called a gasket) on the mainsail with two half hitches, I think.
The mainmast is aft. The mainsail is attached to the boom on the mainmast. The main staysail is amidships, above the small structure on the Asgard called the doghouse. Its boom is attached to the foremast, but it runs on a stay up to the mainmast. A stay is a piece of the standing rigging; that is, it's a line that doesn't move (unless it's a special piece of standing rigging called a running stay). The running rigging comprises sheets, tacks, halyards, buntlines, clewlines, topping lifts, and downhauls.
Masts have three sections, dating from the period when masts where literally constructed with three different pieces of wood. Hence mast, topmast, topgallant (t'gallant) mast. The Asgard carried thirteen different sails, of which in the best sailing weather she can set a maximum of eleven: the mainsail; the staysails (main staysail, main topmast staysail, main t'gallant staysail, fore staysail, jib); the squaresails (course, topmast, t'gallant); and two other sails whose names I never learned, as we never set them. She also carries a storm trysail for really severe weather, and the fore topmast staysail, which is only rigged when the weather requires the course to be struck, because otherwise it just gets in the way of the course.
I didn't learn all this on the first day, though. The first day, I learned how to make up (make fast) a line around a belaying pin, the difference between the fife rail (semicircular rail of belaying pins fore of a mast) and the pinrail (line of belaying pins along the sides of the ship), what a shroud is, and how it's different from ratlines. And how to go up and over the mast, you know, in order to get out onto the yards (course yard, topmast yard, t'gallant yard). That day, safely stationary in harbour, was the only time I managed it.
That was the first day. We had dinner on board (the cook is justly famous), learned the watch rotation (eight to midnight, midnight to four, four to eight, eight to half past twelve, half past twelve to four, four to six, six to eight). I volunteered for the four am watch, because we'd be sailing at half five, and I wanted to be awake already. Curfew was set at twelve, watches were organised and we were dismissed. All I did, really, was pop around to the shops, buy some water and some chocolate, and come back on board to write up some notes and try to remember how many guns Jack Rackham's Surprise had carried, and how many guns a ship the size of the Asgard might have been able to fit (I'm weird that way: I never remembered Rackham's cannon, and I eventually decided a brig like the Asgard could've carried about twelve guns, with two more smaller ones fore and aft. That is, if it didn't have a doghouse).
Nine o'clock I headed to my bunk. It was awkward and cramped, and I woke up when the others came in and the watch changed, and again at half past three when someone started snoring. I just got dressed and went above early, and stayed on deck to watch the sun rise.
This has gone on fairly long already, so I'll continue in a bit.
I didn't have to be at the ship until 1400 Thursday, so there was time to walk around Galway. It's a small town, windswept but well-kempt, with a tidal harbour and a lock. Modern, but with its medieval bones showing through beneath. There's a museum, which gives you a reasonable précis of its history, and a helpful man in a camera shop who sold me a disposable camera with thirty-seven exposures.
Then it was time to go over to the docks to the Asgard, a gaff-rigged ketch about 60 foot by 12 foot (guesses by eye, since no one ever told me). Her tonnage is apparently 50 tons, and perhaps one day I'll find out what that means. Five permanent crew, master, mate, engineer, bosun, and cook, and a maximum 20 trainees on board.
There were a few trainees waiting at the gangway, and after we'd been there a few minutes, the bosun - a lad in his early twenties in the last year of his qualifying course in nautical science at Cork Institute of Technology called Donal, a long tall lanky handsome bloke with a bright grin, too - told us we could come on board and stow our stuff by our bunks.
Quarters down below are close, but by no means as close as they would have been in the golden age of sail. Our bunks, mess table and heads occupied the space that in a similar ship of the eighteenth century would've been reserved for cargo. Back then, I imagine, the crew would've been crammed into the space under the fo'c'sle that on the Asgard II is used for storage. And, of course, there would've been no inside heads.
I had one of the smaller ones up foreward, six foot long, two high, two deep. The bunks down by the mess table were slightly higher and deeper, but not by much. Some bunks had lockers in the hull adjacent to the bunk, but me and three others had lockers under our bunks. I swear by all things holy and unholy, there's scarcely room to turn around down there. Forget about privacy, personal space, anything like that. You're living in each others' armpits, squishing seventeen around a mess table that can barely accomodate fourteen, falling into other people's bunks, sitting on them, borrowing from them, getting your stuff mixed in with theirs, because when you're putting your socks on, what the hell are you going to do?
But I get ahead of myself. We went back on deck to meet the people we'd be spending the next week falling over. There was Graeme, the thirty-year-old archaeologist from Glasgow. Mike, Aoife and Pat from Galway. Dee from Cork. Cormac the gaelgóir from the Arann Islands, Ronan the poser from Dublin, three Andrews (one who turned out to be seriously weird), two teenage Kevins (one quiet, one loud), a green-haired surfer boy, Brian from Sligo, and Clare and Sean and Jonathan from Dublin. There were three men over fifty, maybe eight of us between nineteen and thirty, and the rest were sixteen-eighteen. Four girls, including me.
We signed on ship's articles, which made us crew, and met the permanent crew: Captain Ro McSweeney, John the mate, Shane the engineer from Cork, Kevin O'Leary the amazing cook, and Donal the bosun. Then they divided us into our three watches, Port, Middle, and Starboard (crews are divided into three watches both for working the sails - different watches are supposed to set different sails - for standing watches during the day and night, and for emergency drills). I was in the starboard watch. Emergency drills after that: how to abandon ship and what to take with you; fire; life-jackets; the emergency alarm; man overboard drills. Then we learned knots, and which ones are used where. Reef knots, for securing the staysails; clove-hitches; slipped clove hitches for securing the square sails; bowlines for putting a loop in a rope; figure of eights for stopping a line running through an eyelet or a block; two turns and a half-hitch for securing mooring lines and fenders. We usually did up the gaskets (any short length of loose rope is called a gasket) on the mainsail with two half hitches, I think.
The mainmast is aft. The mainsail is attached to the boom on the mainmast. The main staysail is amidships, above the small structure on the Asgard called the doghouse. Its boom is attached to the foremast, but it runs on a stay up to the mainmast. A stay is a piece of the standing rigging; that is, it's a line that doesn't move (unless it's a special piece of standing rigging called a running stay). The running rigging comprises sheets, tacks, halyards, buntlines, clewlines, topping lifts, and downhauls.
Masts have three sections, dating from the period when masts where literally constructed with three different pieces of wood. Hence mast, topmast, topgallant (t'gallant) mast. The Asgard carried thirteen different sails, of which in the best sailing weather she can set a maximum of eleven: the mainsail; the staysails (main staysail, main topmast staysail, main t'gallant staysail, fore staysail, jib); the squaresails (course, topmast, t'gallant); and two other sails whose names I never learned, as we never set them. She also carries a storm trysail for really severe weather, and the fore topmast staysail, which is only rigged when the weather requires the course to be struck, because otherwise it just gets in the way of the course.
I didn't learn all this on the first day, though. The first day, I learned how to make up (make fast) a line around a belaying pin, the difference between the fife rail (semicircular rail of belaying pins fore of a mast) and the pinrail (line of belaying pins along the sides of the ship), what a shroud is, and how it's different from ratlines. And how to go up and over the mast, you know, in order to get out onto the yards (course yard, topmast yard, t'gallant yard). That day, safely stationary in harbour, was the only time I managed it.
That was the first day. We had dinner on board (the cook is justly famous), learned the watch rotation (eight to midnight, midnight to four, four to eight, eight to half past twelve, half past twelve to four, four to six, six to eight). I volunteered for the four am watch, because we'd be sailing at half five, and I wanted to be awake already. Curfew was set at twelve, watches were organised and we were dismissed. All I did, really, was pop around to the shops, buy some water and some chocolate, and come back on board to write up some notes and try to remember how many guns Jack Rackham's Surprise had carried, and how many guns a ship the size of the Asgard might have been able to fit (I'm weird that way: I never remembered Rackham's cannon, and I eventually decided a brig like the Asgard could've carried about twelve guns, with two more smaller ones fore and aft. That is, if it didn't have a doghouse).
Nine o'clock I headed to my bunk. It was awkward and cramped, and I woke up when the others came in and the watch changed, and again at half past three when someone started snoring. I just got dressed and went above early, and stayed on deck to watch the sun rise.
This has gone on fairly long already, so I'll continue in a bit.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-28 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-28 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 05:30 pm (UTC)There's a book called The Sailing Navy, I think, which documents ships belonging to the Royal Navy during the Golden Age of Sail. A lot of the ships in my book are based on real vessels detailed in that book (which is wicked hard to find, and which I only obtained by InterLibrary Loan); the book tells how many guns and of what sort and on what deck the various ships carried, and so may help you decide what a ship the size of Asgard might have carried...if, that is, the academic exercise remains of interest to you.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 07:38 pm (UTC)The exercise still interests me, I must confess. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 08:06 pm (UTC)(Reason #445 why I am never writing a novel about the age of sail: too much learning to do)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 08:20 pm (UTC)(I am on book four for the eventual 19th century vampire novel - it's going to take a long while to get the background down - but at least all the reading I do for college will eventually find expression in some novel or other. :P)
So much work... I admire your guts for doing it. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 08:22 pm (UTC)Thinking of the research as fuel for a future fire, now - that's useful. I'll try to remind myself of that more often.