On board STV Asgard II, thoughts
Jun. 29th, 2008 01:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI haven't said much, yet, about how it feels to live in close quarters on a tallship. For the first three days, I spent entirely too much time wishing for shore, a proper bed, warmth, comfort, privacy, dryness. The damp gets into everything, you see, and it doesn't take very long. No matter what you wear, you're either too hot or too cold; on watch, when it rains, you get soaked - damp even in oilskins - and then the wind blows up, and if you're not on lookout you huddle in the shelter of the pilot house and try to stay out of the worst of it. But if you're on lookout in bad weather, you spend a whole lot of time hunched in on yourself, trying to trap a ghost of the memory of warmth - during my stint on Saturday, I swear I thought I'd never be warm or dry again. For a while I almost forgot what it felt like.
Ropes are hard on the hands: cold and wet ropes, harder still. Down below, once you get used to the fact that you're living here, it becomes a forest of drying jumpers and jackets, occasionally trousers too, hung up in whatever corner or pipe or line of twine will do. You're stuck in close quarters with nineteen other people, and by the end of the week the jokes are getting old, you've heard it all before, and god won't you just shut up for five minutes, you weirdo? Things feel cramped but friendly most of the time, although the casual sexism and homophobia among the boys was more than slightly annoying at times. You'd better be friends, because you've nowhere to go to get away if you're not: you know who snores, how they like their breakfast, who eats meat and who eats veg, who's in the heads and whether they shat or not. You're lending towels and hats and moisturiser and aftersun and borrowing the same, finding other people's dead socks in your bunk and falling over their shoes and dirty t-shirts. It's a world you can get from one end to the other of in less than two minutes, and even out on the tippy-tip of the bowsprit or on the yardarm you're still within call.
You try to stay on deck, because belowdecks there's no space to move, and after the second day, no clean air to breathe. The place is rank with the smell of unwashed people, sweat, feet, greasy hair, dirty clothes, cooking from the galley, damp. Down below you can lie in your bunk (no good if you feel even slightly claustrophobic) or sit at the mess table, that's it. Above, you have poop and amidships and fo'c'sle, rig and bowsprit, and clean air. It's more bearable, except when it's absolutely pissing rain and howling.
You get used to how fragile the world is, and how small, a world of wood and rope, twelve small paces across, that goes up and down constantly on the vastness of a sea where the horizon has no bounds. Out of sight of land (which, very briefly, we were) you could be the only people alive in the world, and only the loud broadcast of the Coastguard weather report lets you know you're not. You get used to being rank and manky, greasy and stinking of yourself and the ship and brass polish and the galley and the damp and nineteen other people. You get used to the constant presence of nineteen other people squashed in beside you, and you lose your sense of personal space. You grab their shoulders and tousle their hair and smack them upside the head when they get too mouthy at you, sitting leg on leg and shoulder pressed by shoulder at the mess table, hearing every fart, every belch, every snore, living in their body heat and the rank odour of all of you together, joking and arguing and eating and sleeping and working. By the third or fourth day you're a team, and it becomes strange and unnatural when you're ashore to be somewhere without at least a couple of other people from your crew at your back: you start to understand, too, why ships' crews drink together, go to the same pubs; why, in the golden age of sail, ships' crews were famous for brawling with each other.
Because it's your ship, by then. And your crew. And no other ship is a patch on her, or them.
And you start to understand, too, why sailors in the golden age of sail were a clannish lot with their customs and their preferences. Because it was an even harder, more fragile, more dangerous life then, dependent on the absolute whim of your officers and the good will of your crewmates and luck and fortune and the vagaries of the weather, isolated from family, from news, from the landbound world - it would be another universe, a kingdom unto itself.
The first any officer or crew would've known of changes to the world would be if there were flag signals flying when they came in to a harbour. Nothing before then.
After a while, the world feels odd when it's not moving, when you're moored and almost stationary beside a pier, lying in your bunk with no swell to rock you to sleep, no whoosh-THUNK-gurgle of the bow going up then down again on the waves; or when you step out onto dry land and walk oddly because you expect the deck - no, it's ground now - to move and you're braced to compensate, and, treacherously, it stays still and confounds your expectations. So you go about swaying slightly, with an odd, flat-footed canted walk, and more so when you're tired.
And we had it easy, harbour-hopping around the west and north coast. Transatlantic or otherwise serious sailing would be a different story entirely, and a much less comfortable one.
Ropes are hard on the hands: cold and wet ropes, harder still. Down below, once you get used to the fact that you're living here, it becomes a forest of drying jumpers and jackets, occasionally trousers too, hung up in whatever corner or pipe or line of twine will do. You're stuck in close quarters with nineteen other people, and by the end of the week the jokes are getting old, you've heard it all before, and god won't you just shut up for five minutes, you weirdo? Things feel cramped but friendly most of the time, although the casual sexism and homophobia among the boys was more than slightly annoying at times. You'd better be friends, because you've nowhere to go to get away if you're not: you know who snores, how they like their breakfast, who eats meat and who eats veg, who's in the heads and whether they shat or not. You're lending towels and hats and moisturiser and aftersun and borrowing the same, finding other people's dead socks in your bunk and falling over their shoes and dirty t-shirts. It's a world you can get from one end to the other of in less than two minutes, and even out on the tippy-tip of the bowsprit or on the yardarm you're still within call.
You try to stay on deck, because belowdecks there's no space to move, and after the second day, no clean air to breathe. The place is rank with the smell of unwashed people, sweat, feet, greasy hair, dirty clothes, cooking from the galley, damp. Down below you can lie in your bunk (no good if you feel even slightly claustrophobic) or sit at the mess table, that's it. Above, you have poop and amidships and fo'c'sle, rig and bowsprit, and clean air. It's more bearable, except when it's absolutely pissing rain and howling.
You get used to how fragile the world is, and how small, a world of wood and rope, twelve small paces across, that goes up and down constantly on the vastness of a sea where the horizon has no bounds. Out of sight of land (which, very briefly, we were) you could be the only people alive in the world, and only the loud broadcast of the Coastguard weather report lets you know you're not. You get used to being rank and manky, greasy and stinking of yourself and the ship and brass polish and the galley and the damp and nineteen other people. You get used to the constant presence of nineteen other people squashed in beside you, and you lose your sense of personal space. You grab their shoulders and tousle their hair and smack them upside the head when they get too mouthy at you, sitting leg on leg and shoulder pressed by shoulder at the mess table, hearing every fart, every belch, every snore, living in their body heat and the rank odour of all of you together, joking and arguing and eating and sleeping and working. By the third or fourth day you're a team, and it becomes strange and unnatural when you're ashore to be somewhere without at least a couple of other people from your crew at your back: you start to understand, too, why ships' crews drink together, go to the same pubs; why, in the golden age of sail, ships' crews were famous for brawling with each other.
Because it's your ship, by then. And your crew. And no other ship is a patch on her, or them.
And you start to understand, too, why sailors in the golden age of sail were a clannish lot with their customs and their preferences. Because it was an even harder, more fragile, more dangerous life then, dependent on the absolute whim of your officers and the good will of your crewmates and luck and fortune and the vagaries of the weather, isolated from family, from news, from the landbound world - it would be another universe, a kingdom unto itself.
The first any officer or crew would've known of changes to the world would be if there were flag signals flying when they came in to a harbour. Nothing before then.
After a while, the world feels odd when it's not moving, when you're moored and almost stationary beside a pier, lying in your bunk with no swell to rock you to sleep, no whoosh-THUNK-gurgle of the bow going up then down again on the waves; or when you step out onto dry land and walk oddly because you expect the deck - no, it's ground now - to move and you're braced to compensate, and, treacherously, it stays still and confounds your expectations. So you go about swaying slightly, with an odd, flat-footed canted walk, and more so when you're tired.
And we had it easy, harbour-hopping around the west and north coast. Transatlantic or otherwise serious sailing would be a different story entirely, and a much less comfortable one.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 01:50 pm (UTC)And I do believe we have the same set of CDs, there. For a while, I was listening to the discs at work...and then I got to the Good Ship Venus, and quickly turned the sound down. *g*
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 02:00 pm (UTC)Yeah... Venus's definitely a NSFW song.