between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I woke up at 0311 Thursday morning, when four people were having what sounded like a snore-off. Had the news from the people on watch that there'd been ructions about the curfew, with some people not in until nearly an hour late, and people signed in who weren't back and all sorts. Apparently they got a right bollocking, and I slept through it.

(There'd been showers in Bangor, but I was too tired to take advantage. I regretted that, when we got into Belfast, because although I couldn't smell myself I felt so greasy.)

Graeme and I on watch: about five thirty, we had to wake the duty officer (Shane the engineer) because the boat had slipped from the fenders and her hull was rubbing against the pier. So fifteen minutes spent getting that sorted, and then it was nearly time to wake F. and quiet Kev (neither of whom wanted to wake up) for their watch. Graeme went back to his wide deep bunk, and rather than go back to the snores and stink of feet below, I curled up in the doghouse and got about another hour's solid kip, waking only at breakfast.

We had cleaning stations in Bangor, and left the pier around ten. Had about four seasons in the one day, sailing around Lough Lagan: sunshine, squalls, fierce rain, sunshine. We had to be in Belfast by four to get the berth, so while there was more tacking and hauling on ropes than I'd experienced yet - the mainsail got a crease in it while they were trying to reef it, and there was a lot of heaving and slacking at peak, throat and topping lifts while Donal and John and the captain tried to fix the problem. (Crease in the sail, apparently, can result in the sail ripping if the wind hits it wrong.) - we weren't out for more than four or five hours.

Hard work, though.

Belfast is a shitty little city surrounded by pleasant green hilly countryside and nice small towns. It's all dock and industrial shite, with a few awkward-to-get-to places of historical interest, and I wasn't impressed with the people, or the berth. (Neither were the permanent crew, for that matter.)

Belfast was going to have a maritime festival that weekend. The Jeanie Johnston came in after us and moored foreward - a big ship compared to the Asgard, if not compared to the ferries we passed on the way up the docks - and there were a few other tallships on the far side of where we were moored. Apparently the Jeanie doesn't sail that well, and Donal wasn't impressed with the upkeep of her rig - but they use the traditional 19th century rig and tar the shrouds and ratlines, unlike the slightly more modern Asgard which uses wooden ratlines and rope-wrapped wire for the shrouds.

We had dinner and I begged off watch, having been on-watch every night we had watches apart from my night off due to galley duty. Many peoples repaired to the pub thirty seconds away, the Rotterdam. I went for about half an hour, sat swaying with tiredness as well as too much seatime, and came back to the ship, where I wrote up notes. Apparently the others went on to a music session in a pub called the Duke of York later.

Slept until one am, when peoples tripped in from the pub. Kev comes in, staggering, "Jesus Christ the boat's moving!" and I stick my (annoyed and sleepy) head out of my bunk to say, "No, Kev. Just you."

"Oh," he says, and collapses into his bunk, while Cormac, coming in behind him and now down to his boxers, stumbles so I'm staring right at his arse and manky underwear. (Close quarters. What the fuck can you say?)

"Nice arse, Cormac, but I really don't need to see it!"

"Sorry," says he, and clambers up into his own bunk. "Oich' mhaith."

And then silence, save for snoring, and the ship is disconcertingly still.

Breakfast call is 0800. I'm up at 0730, but no one else wants to wake up. It's a slow breakfast and a slow start to the day, but we're at cleaning stations by nine fifteen, with our gear packed and out of the way on top of the doghouse. Clean below, scrub decks, polish brasses - freaking hard work after seven days - and then we're done. We have a whip-round for the crew by way of thanks (enough for three rounds each, at least, and quite possible five), signed off ship's articles, and crammed into the mess for the captain and permanent crew to give us a brief post-mortem of the trip: roughly four hundred nautical miles, three hundred mostly under engines, and Wednesday, one hundred under sail. Captain said more things had gone against him that trip than any other trip in the last five years (high winds, engine prop, anchor, no wind, more high winds, a freezer melt-down) but hey, we're all alive and uninjured, and unlike some trips, all welcome to come back.

And then I walked off through ugly Belfast to find the train station, an ATM, and lunch: made the train station at 1130, waited for the 1230 train to Dublin, which some of the others were also catching - we were so loud, all of us, having spent the week practically shouting to be heard over the sound of the ship, the wind, the sails, each other, that we'd forgotten how to speak normally.

I got off the train at my stop, and the rest you know.

I'll definitely go back and do that again sometime, though. I think a leg of the 2010 tallships race runs from Istanbul to Greece: I have my eye on that one, but yeah, definitely go back. Despite the smell, the damp, the chill, the heat, and the close quarters, and the icky itchy grimy feel of going more than three days without a shower, it was fun. It was a good crew, even if a couple of people were mysteriously absent when work was to be done, quiet Kev was painfully shy, and the weird Andrew from Louth turned out disturbingly, annoyingly weird.

It was fun.

Previous entries in this series, which has now topped out around ten thousand words' worth of talking:

Day 0
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Days 4 and 5
Day 6
more general thoughts

And, you know. I'm perfectly happy to talk some more about this if anyone wants me to. :)

Breakfast at 0730, on watch at 0800. Because of Tuesday's freshwater scrub, cleaning stations weren't much on deck, and it was too damp to do brasses.

Good sailing weather, with a nice fresh wind down the lough. See this flag? It was flapping quite loudly. We set the mainsail, and the captain had Donal reef it - you reef the mainsail on the Asgard II by using a lever to roll the boom so that you wrap part of the mainsail around the boom (the boom is on a kind of pivot at the mast), and yes, slacking and hauling at peak, throat and topping lifts goes on during this - set main staysail, main topmast staysail, fore staysail, jib, topsail and course. View up to course and main topmast staysail from amidships.

We sailed around the head of Ireland, passing the Giants' Causeway - I got to steer under sail - and entered Rathlin Sound, where the tides make a current of four knots. The hull speed of the Asgard is nine knots, I was told: at lunch the captain came through the mess and said as he moved, "Ten point seven knots!"

After lunch a squall blew up: we were all on deck, and the ship had heeled right up on her port side, with her course yard only about two metres from the water, and water rushing in over the lee rail, wind howling and gusting and sails and ropes flapping, and the guys on the lee side wet up to the knee. The mate shouts, "Strike the course!" and the bosun shouts, "Strike the course!" and the freaking engineer's on deck shouting "Will ye ever fooking heave on those fooking ropes baiys!" (Cork accent) and I'm hauling on the clewline with Andrew M. tailing shouting "Two six! Heave!" because the bosun isn't and the boys on the bunts are standing with their fucking hands in their fucking pockets as though the world hasn't tipped up on its freaking side and god, boys, if the sail rips or the boat tips further or anything happens to the rig we'll be in fucking trouble then, won't we?

So we get down the course and strike the jib and the main topmast staysail, and the world goes back to being only moderately bouncy. (Apparently the wind gusts reached fifty knots and the ship was making thirteen knots at one point.) It was an interesting few minutes. Because we've struck the course, Donal gets us to get out the fore topmast staysail, and we rig it on the foredeck, ropes whipping around, us bouncing and wobbling and clinging and everything feeling quite dangerous, thank you. Run it up its proper stay, and then the burst of hectic activity - sailing is periods of boredom interspersed with manic activity - can die back to normal operations; ie, lookouts and watch, since the captain's on the wheel.

Crazy stuff there for a while, though.

After things calmed down a bit and we headed round the top of Antrim (see pictures one and two - sadly, my last exposure) with the Mull of Kintyre less than twenty miles away and Rathlin Island. Then we turned south, and I stuck my head into the charthouse to find out where we were (a bit above the top of Lough Lagan, I think). Donal took pity on my interest and demonstrated navigation by GPS, longitude and latitude, and radar. Apparently the US can turn GPS off any time they feel like it, and did on Sept. 11, which worried a lot of ships, so the backup method when near land is to find the shape of a headland or island by radar and match it to the chart.

The afternoon was fairly lazy. Was off watch after lunch, so apart from the interesting moments in Rathlin Sound, or when hands were needed on ropes or bracing stations, which was seldom, a bunch of us just sat on the lockers around the doghouse and enjoyed the day. The sun came out, and spray would occasionally wash inboard and wet us, and for a while we were told to make sure we clipped our harness to something unless we were moving about.

The evening was hard work. Had dinner, then on watch, and then during the watch we came into Bangor, needing to strike and stow sails and flake out mooring lines on deck (long zigzag coils) for ease of use. Lost the button on my trousers when on the foredeck hauling down the fore staysail, and spent the rest of the time using my safety harness to help keep my trousers up. Didn't go up the mast, although I wanted to: I went in the RIB to the quay to help the mooring from there.

We moored at Bangor pier beside another tallship, a privately-owned schooner by name Ruth out of Penzance, and had ourselves an audience for stowing the sails (sitting on the bowsprit to stow sails, still hard work, still fun), including an American woman who wanted to know everything. Then set up the gangway (the long gangway rather than the short one, and wasn't that fun to go up and down of, with a drop of a couple metres at low tide) and re-stowed the fore topmast staysail in its bag on the quay.

It was after ten pm before we got shore leave, with a curfew of 0030. I just walked out to find a payphone and back: nice people in Bangor, especially the guy in the Salty Dog pub at the end of the pier who gave me friendly directions: thanks, man, you saved me getting lost. Very much a pretty town in the neat British-seaside-resort mode, though, although you can see some of its medieval bones showing through even still. I'd've liked to see it in the daylight.

(There's a twee little song about Bangor, incidentally.)

Went to my bunk then, since I had to be up for the four am watch again, and with the Ruth moored alongside us starboard and the pier to port, I needed to be awake for it. I think that watch is technically part of Day 7's adventures, so I'll talk about it then.

That was the seventh day.

Being clean and around mostly clean people was great, I tell you that for nothing. We headed out of Clare Island at 0500 Monday morning, scheduled to sail all day and all night and a good bit of the next day to reach Greencastle, Co Donegal, since the wind was due to come about southwesterly Tuesday night, with winds of Force 7 and 8 expected Tuesday night and Wednesday, and the captain wanted to get us in an area with decent harbours before that happened.

Also, because of the anchor problem at Clare Island, we were, let's say, running slightly behind where he would've liked us to be.

All hands call to set sails was 0600, but Monday was a boringly calm day. We had main and main staysail and fore staysail set, and briefly the two lower squares, but mostly we were under engines. Without the need to set and strike, the watches had it easy, with only cleaning stations, steering and lookout necessary, keeping an eye out for lobster pots and boats.

This is me on lookout, coming out past Achill Sound. Note the fabulous goofy-looking floppy hat. We went up Donegal Bay, passing for a couple of hours out of sight of the mainland, if not rocky islets like this one. I was on galley duty, so I got to go below and get bruised and dizzy falling around helping serve and clean up lunch (and dinner, and the next morning's breakfast, but it meant I could sleep through the night watch of midnight to four, sailing in the cold dark, so I was perfectly happy). Intermittent sun, but mostly pale cloud.

In the afternoon, we learned how to splice a rope, since Donal had to fix one of the lines they'd snapped trying to get the anchor up, and decided to make it a practical demonstration. We also were talked through what the various lines on the midships deck do, again, and on the poop.

Engineer got pissed off when the heads blocked five times that day.

That was it. Turned in after dinner, and slept well, rocked by the swell and the comforting swoosh-THUNK-gurgle of the bow through the waves. Had galley call at 0730, cleaning stations after breakfast. My sunburn had at this point started to heal, and was peeling badly; and my lips had started to get quite nastily chapped.

It was a cool day, and cloudy. Mostly under engines, but a bit of sailing up around the northwest tip of Donegal. Pictures one, two, three. Some very stark coastline.

Greencastle is on Lough Foyle (I like this picture for the lowering clouds and the windy chop: it gives you a real feel for the day). Interesting place, Lough Foyle, with headland and lighthouse and County Derry across the way. It was raining in Derry: you could see the rain falling on the hills across the lough.

Coming up on Greencastle, I got to go out on the bowsprit with Donal and Jonathan and Alan and learn how to stow the jib and fore staysail. It's cool out there, bouncing up and down, folding the sail across itself like a concertina, making straight lines and clean creases, balancing and overbalancing and grabbing on. It's hard awkward work, but fun.

Also got to help stow the main staysail, which was also very cool.

Got in to Greencastle after midday. Helped moored the ship - flaked out mooring lines so they'd run easily, etc - and helped sort out the gangway. There was fresh water in Greencastle - apparently it's Kevin O'Leary's (the ship's cook) home port (though he had an American accent), so brushes were handed out and the deck was hosed and scrubbed. Afterwards drew numbers for showers: I was number sixteen, so had time to find the shop and the rest of the town. There's not much in Greencastle: three pubs, the National Fisheries College, and a maritime museum. We brought the nightlife with us when we came and took it away with us when we left.

(I ended up with two pint glasses from the Ferryport Bar, Greencastle, even though I never went in: the bar gave them away to a couple of people who decided they didn't want them.)

In the mess, waiting for showers. You can see how small it is down there.

Most of the others were showered early and went off to see what there was to see in town before dinner. Being still there, me and a couple of the guys were drafted to help decorated a cake by the cook - it was Cormac's seventeenth birthday that day: chocolate fudge cake, with a very wobbly "Happy 17th B'day, Cormac!" on it in green and red icing and other strange abstract decorations - then had my shower: half a minute in water, turn water off, soap up, half a minute's water to rinse off. We impressed Shane the engineer, I think: twenty showers from the tank which (he said) normally only gives eight or so.

A tasty roast dinner, with fudge cake for desert (anyone who put their bowl down was asked, 'Are you finishing that?' and if the answer was 'No,', three forks would descend at once). Then I was on watch, eight till ten: the others went to the pub, and I went to my bunk, woken at half past midnight by dancing and singing and giggling as Cormac and surfer boy Kev from Lahinch and Clare came in and wobbled into their bunks (across from and above mine, respectively).

(Cormac, incidentally, was a very nice lad and a good musician, far and away one of the least annoying people on the ship even if I do think the dead socks I found in my bunk one afternoon were his: his stuff tended to spill all over the place.)

At dinner, we were told we'd be sailing at 0830 in the morning for Bangor, where the captain had booked a berth. SW winds of Force 8 expected. We were also advised that we were sailing in luxury, with showers at Clare Island, Greencastle, and probably in Bangor: some cruises had none.

That was the fifth and sixth days.

Breakfast on Saturday was eight o'clock. We had cleaning stations at half nine - a damp day - and more Scrabble and cards before lunch. At that point we knew the story: we were staying at Clare Island all day because the winds didn't do the expected, the permanent crew were waiting for low tide at two to try again with the anchor, and also, they really needed some sleep.

So after lunch Donal ran us across (the RIB takes loads of six) to the pier in batches, and we had an afternoon to sightsee.

A tiny island, isolate, green and grey and hilly and windswept, but very interesting. There are about twenty-five, I think, recognised national heritage sites on the island: a bike rental place, a campsite, a B&B, a quay, a community centre, a hotel, and a Blue Flag beach.

Clare Island was one of the holdings of Grace O'Malley (Gráinne Mhaol Uí Mhallaigh) in the sixteenth century, and an O'Malley stronghold for a while before that. Still today, apparently, O'Malleys, O'Gradys, and another O (O'Day, maybe? can't recall) are the main families on the island.

You come off the quay - the hill in the background, amusingly enough, is called Glen - and on your left, you come upon a tower fort, allegedly Grace O'Malley's summer residence. It's a square blocky building of about three storeys, solidly defensible. Passages for access to the upper storeys and upper storey rooms run between the outer wall and the inner wall - it's, basically, a large square with a slightly smaller square inside it. You could get inside it: this a view of the interior looking sort of up, and this is a view of the main (only) groundfloor rooom with hearth, looking in from the entryway.

Walked with Graeme (who also wanted to find a shop) up to the community centre to inquire for directions. The others mostly rented bikes and headed to the far end of the island (6km uphill) to see the abandoned lighthouse. Graeme and Jonathon also rented bikes, and headed in the direction of the shop, 3km west towards the Atlantic side of the island. I, on foot, had a good headstart on them, and arrived on slightly behind them.

Clare Island has: sheep, cows, lambs, calves, donkeys, gorgeous fluffy friendly collies, friendly if laid-back and not too outgoing people, hills, and a green smell of ferns. That day it also had fairly frequent rain showers.

At the shop, Jonathon, who'd been to the island before and knew about a medieval church with original fifteenth-century wallpaintings, asked the (Dutch!) woman behind the counter if it was open. She said no, but ask the neighbour, he has the key. So Jonathon goes and gets the key - by this point Mike and Andrew, also on foot, have come up by us. The medieval church, beside the modern church and graveyard, is right across from the shop and post office.

this is it. It supposedly contains the tomb of Grace O'Malley. Part of it was re-roofed during conservation work by the OPW, but the bit with the wall-paintings has an original roof. The wall-paintings are red and yellow and black, hounds and wolves and deer, a harper and hunters and archers and men making war, on plaster that by some miracle has mostly survived the last five hundred years. They're somewhat fragmentary, of course, but it's astonishing they survived at all, over the walls and ceiling. There's a variant of the O'Malley coat of arms, with ships, a boar, and some other things (I would've taken pictures, but the OPW had a sign asking visitors not to), and the legend Terra Maria Potens, and beside it in the wall of the nave a canopied tomb.

Another view of the exterior. A Clare Island donkey.

Mike and Andrew and I headed back down to the quay, where we met Clare and Dee, who'd found the community centre had pay-as-you-go showers and stopped right there. So we all repaired to the community centre's tiny bar, where the cyclists joined us, and Cormac got out his accordion and Pat his concertina, the sixteen-year-olds found a dart board, and we basically took over the place until it was time to go back to the ship for dinner.

After dinner, back to the island, where the boys headed for the showers and I headed for the beach, because by god I wanted to be clean without having to pay for it. In this shot you can see most of the beach: I swam just out of the picture - well, got in, got wet, scrubbed off, and got out again, anyway. The water was wonderfully clear but goddamn fucking freezing; the wind, which had felt chill to me all day, felt warm when I got out.

After swimming, went by the showers to see if any of the boys were clean, and headed up to the hotel bar with them, where we found the permanent crew save for the captain, and all sat at the bar swaying slightly. There were twenty of us and five locals, and later on Cormac and Pat got out their instruments again and Kevin the amazing cook got out three juggling balls and did some fancy juggling tricks in time with the music.

Got back on the ship around midnight. I'd volunteered for the four am watch again, since we'd be sailing at five and I wanted to be awake before then, and I was tired enough that Ronan had to call me twice to get me up.

That was the fourth day.

I woke before all hands call again at Inisboffin, stiff and aching from the tiny bunk. The sun came up behind the island; we set mainsail and main staysail and motored out of the harbour, then set the two lower squares, main topmast staysail, jib and fore staysail.

The wind was northeast, and the Asgard II can only sail sixty degrees to the wind. I'm not sure what the captain's plan was originally: force six, force seven winds were expected that day and evening, and I believe after that the wind was expected to swing around to the southwest. Between Donegal Bay and Rathmullen, apparently, there are no good harbours to wait out gale force winds.

Our initial heading was north, under motor and sail, with the lookouts on watch for lobster pots (very dangerous if they get wrapped around the engine prop) and other boats. Small craft warning in effect; gale force warning in effect: we all got very used to the hourly, "This is a repetition of the sea area forecast, Mizzen Head to Malin Head," sounding loudly from the radio in the charthouse. By nine o'clock the wind had gotten up; by ten people were being ill over the side again. Lunch was a miserable rocking affair: curry, which few people could eat, and the twelve o'clock sea area forecast revised expectations for longer, stronger winds.

Sometime around lunch we wore ship, I think, and headed in towards Achill Island. (I know we wore ship at one point, and it might have been the previous day. We definitely tacked Saturday, though.)

The afternoon was a miserable affair of rain and high winds and howling and trying to shout loud enough to be heard, the ship heaving first up one way, then up the other, fore and aft, port and starboard. Being miserably wet and freezing cold, and hauling on ropes, and noticing that the bosun and the engineer had run safety lines amidships port and starboard from the poop to the fo'c'sle, and needing to use them to get around, and clipping in to those lines when hauling on ropes, and trying to keep your balance in the wind and the up and down miserable heaving, and seeing water wash in amidships every time the bow whoosh-thunked down from a wave.

I couldn't give you specifics of what we did. I was too wet, too cold, too miserable, too queasy.

Around four in the afternoon we tacked ship, I think - you haul in the mainsail and the main staysail to the centre of the ship, first, then move the preventers on their booms from one side of the ship to the other. Then you tack the jib and fore staysail, make up the lines - but no time to coil the ropes: you have to run back to bracing stations and brace the squares around, otherwise the ship could get caught in irons or taken aback, which puts an unpleasant strain on the rig, apparently - and headed in for the back of Clare Island, to get out of the worst of the wind and the chop.

It took half a cold forever to come around the back of Clare Island to the quay. We didn't get in till around half five, and we ended up going in and out and in of the harbour (the captain'd thought we could berth at the end of the pier, but the ferry was still there, and not leaving, of course). At six the permanent crew sent us below to eat while they kept moving around looking for a decent mooring.

So we're all below, just finishing dinner, and we hear this shout from the engine room, "Out of gear! Out of gear! The prop's caught!" and the engine cuts out. A minute later, we hear the rattle-rattle-clunk, rattle-rattle-clunk, rattle-rattle-clunk-boom of the anchor going down to keep us from drifting onto the rocks.

Long story short: us trainees stayed below that evening, playing Scrabble and Monopoly and cards and reading - those of us who'd brought a book. Above, the permanent crew and a diver from the island got the prop uncaught - prop was fine - moored the ship on a buoy, and tried to raise the anchor.

No go. The anchor, now, was caught. So while we took it easy below, the permanent crew were at work until five in the morning, when they finally gave up to wait for low tide and daylight, trying to get the anchor uncaught (at four am, all of us foreward woke to rattle-rattle-clunk, but they didn't manage to raise it that time).

That night, we really started to notice the fact we hadn't washed since Thursday morning.

Map. We didn't go very far, all told, Saturday: Inisboffin to Clare Island is a trip of about four miles.

I 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.

Before I start, pictures from Day 0:

Ratlines, lines and shrouds at night; Foremast by night. Day 0 write-up here.

Galway docks have a lock, which only opens for four hours at high tide. All hands call was just before six, and we got talked through casting off fore and aft and taking in fenders. Then we motored out through the lock and into Galway Bay.

Once through the lock, Donal talked us through setting the mainsail. On any ship, the bosun's main responsibility is the rigging (both maintaining it and the cleanliness of the ship, and seeing that it's set to the captain's and the mate's orders) and the training of the hands, apparently. So we divided by watches, Starboard Watch to the starboard side of the poop deck, Middle Watch to the aft of the poop, and Port Watch on (you guessed it) the port side. I will now abbreviate the watches to their first letters, since I'm going to talk about setting the mainsail.

First, two or three (can be as few as one) get on the roof of the pilot house (also called the chart house) to undo the gaskets holding the mainsail to its spar (gaff). S stays starboard on the peak, M is aft on the sheets, and P is port on the throat.

You undo the peak and throat halyards from their belaying pins. The halyards run through blocks on the deck already, but now the ends of the halyards are then run out through blocks on the edge of the poop deck near the rail, and back aft by the rail, where two or three people hold onto the line, ready to take up slack as it comes through. This is called tailing the line. Two people grab the line above the first block, ready to haul straight down into the block. You do this by holding the line and taking all your weight off your knees, so your entire body pulls down the line.

The bosun calls, "Ready on the peak, ready on the throat," and you're supposed to call back, variously, "Ready on the peak" or "Ready on the throat". Then he calls, "Haul away together, two six*!" You shout back together, "Heave!" and haul, and the tailing guys take up the slack. Two six! and Heave! alternate until the bosun calls, "Hold the peak, hold the throat" (depending on how much has been hauled by one side or another, it can be either or both, and some more hauling on one side might go on for a little bit). You don't raise the gaff very far at the moment.

So then someone (it was usually Donal, since he was the one who knew what he was doing) makes a stopper knot around the halyard, just above the block, and calls, "Ease to the stopper one step forward!" This is the signal for the line of tailers to take one step forward to see if the stopper knot holds. If it does, the first tailer takes hold of the line between the blocks and shouts, "Ready to come up? Come up!" which is the signal for the tailers to drop the line and the first tailer to rush forward and make up the line around its belaying pin while the one behind him or her pulls slack through the block.

This is only the beginning. Next you go to the topping lifts, which on the Asgard were on the first pin on the rail on the poop deck. You undo the line until there is one turn left on the underside of the pin and the same division applies. Two people grab the line above the pin, and the others take up the tail. Since this lifts the boom, S and P need to haul away together, or nothing will move. And because the boom is fucking heavy, you have to sweat this line, which means you have to throw your weight backwards - aft - and then swing in towards the pin.

(Basically what ends up happening is you're crotch to arse with the other person hauling the line, pressed along the line of their body, sweating down together. No time to be shy.)

So the bosun calls out "Two six!" and you shout back "Heave!" and haul (I was mostly hauling and sweating, because it might be more effort, but it's less boring than tailing). We fucked it up most of the time, at least until the fourth day, and he kept saying (very patient lad, Donal), "Haul together".

So when your hands are sore from hauling and your arms hurt, the bosun calls out, "Hold," and "Make it up". So the first tailer shouts, "Ready to come up? Come up!" and makes up the line around the pin.

I don't know what M were doing during this. Something to do with sheets and downhauls, presumably. Next time I do this sail training thing, I want to be in Middle Watch so I find out.

Then S and P go back to peak and throat, and do some more hauling until the mainsail is mostly set. Same drill. Then you go back to the topping lifts and slack them off a little, so that the boom is pulling down the sail fully. Then make them up again.

And that's the mainsail set. Middle Watch had responsibility for the main staysail, so I never learned properly how that was set (I know how it's tacked, though, but that's another day's learning). After the mainsail, you set the main staysail. Then the jib (Port Watch) and the fore staysail (Starboard Watch). You really only need a couple of people to set these sails though; you could probably do it with three or four, rather than the eight or ten that the mainsail needs.

The jib and the fore staysail are basically the same, just the halyards and the sheets are on different sides of the ship. Someone steps out onto the bowsprit (we had harnesses with ropes to clip on to a metal bar, so safety rules) and undoes the reef knots holding the sails stowed. Then you pull the ropes with the eyelets for the sheet one on each side of the stay, run one end of each of the sheets through an eyelet and make a figure of eight knot to keep it there. Then you slack the downhauls and haul the sheets (hand over hand at first, sweating them down into the pin when it becomes necessary).

I'm forgetting stuff, I know I am. I tried to learn as much as possible about that ship in the eight days I had, and I didn't learn enough. You'd need at least a month to learn your stuff properly.

Then we have cleaning stations. Cleaning stations are organised by watches: the deck watch on the eight to twelve-thirty watch cleans the deck: scrubs it down, polishes brasses. The watch who has the next watch cleans the trainee mess and the heads. The watch who had the four to eight watch cleans the saloon and the passageway outside permanent crew quarters (which means polishing the woodwork, hoovering, and sweeping. The captain's saloon is kind of really nice) and then, because that's the easy job, ends up on deck helping with the brass work. (You can only clean the brasswork when it's dry, so we didn't get to clean it again until Belfast.) Hard work, and dirty, man.

At this point we'd hit some Atlantic chop and I was feeling slightly queasy. Bright sunshine, but a chilly breeze, and some people starting to get sick over the lee rail. Not yet ten o'clock, though.

They set the main topmast staysail, and Donal asks who wants to get up and loose the square sails (square sails viewed from the fo'c'sle, after they'd been set and then struck again and ruck-stowed, my favorite picture from the trip). So I volunteer. Four people go up to the starboard side of the course yard, and three people and me to the port side of the course yard. And I get up there, last on the line, closest to the mast, and you have to step across a foot and a half's worth of gap from the ratlines to the footrope beneath the course yard, and I get one foot and one hand on the course yard and then I look down.

Oh god oh fuck oh god. That's a long way down, and you can't clip on to the safety rail until after you step onto the course yard completely. That gap's a fucking leap of faith; faith in your arms and legs and balance, and (oh fuck oh shit) I can't do it.

So I come back down, and they loose the course, topsail, and t'gallant without me.** (This is only time we set the t'gallant on the whole cruise.) It's not set yet: before we set it, Donal has to talk us through bracing the yards. So everyone goes back aft to the poop, which is where bracing stations are.

So we braced to starboard, which meant S had to haul, while P got to slack (we still hardly knew each other at this point, but all the work meant we were starting to shake down as a team, and nearly everyone felt queasy, even those who didn't get sick). You take the lines off the pins, leaving one turn underneath the pin (t'gallant brace, topsail brace, and furthest aft, course brace), one or two people haul, and someone has to tail. It would, I assume, be perfectly possible to do this with only six or seven people, if you didn't actually have people at the port rail slacking the ropes by hand, just left them off the pins. The bosun shouts, "Two six!" and we shout, "Heave!", and look up and haul together, and when the yard reaches the mark, shout, "T'gallant at the mark!" or "Course at the mark!" or "Topsail at the mark!" and then make up the lines.

Then you go amidships, haul on sheets, slack bunts and clews, raise and lower the t'gallant and topsail yards by halyards, and when captain and bosun are happy, you have the square sails set.

At this point, we were working in our watches. Two people on the poop, one each port and starboard, on lookout for other ships, lobster pots, etc. One on the steering wheel (supervised a lot of the time by either Donal or John the mate) when we weren't either maneuvering or sailing in dangerous winds - mate, bosun or captain steered then.

Shortly thereafter, the wind died, so we struck the square sails and the jib. Picture. And spent the rest of the time when not on watch lying on deck trying not to vomit. (Went below for lunch, which was pizza, and the roll of the ship down there with no reference points on the horizon sent me right back up again. Only about five people actually ate anything, I think.) Or sitting on the bowsprit enjoying the breeze.

I gave myself the worst sunburn ever lying on the deck too queasy to want to move for hours, staring up at the sun. I was already sore and red that evening.

We were under motor. Later that afternoon, on watch, I got to steer. As it was explained to me, the compass stays still. The ship moves around the compass. The captain or the mate gives you a heading, say 060 (zero six zero, sixty degrees off north) and you have to keep that line on the compass in the general location of the leadline on the ship. When under motor, she likes to bounce, but you don't need to use more than five degrees of rudder either way (port or starboard). In wind, she carries weather helm, which can be anything up to twenty degrees either way. You still don't really use more than five degrees of rudder around that point, though, to keep her on course.

(We also raised and lowered the RIB that day, which is hard work, but I'll only tell you about that if you ask.)

We had dinner on board (fabulous, now that the chop had calmed enough to eat) and that evening we made harbour in Inisboffin, after about seventy nautical miles (according to the captain). As we were at anchor, rather than at harbour, only three people were required to be on watch that night, one for each watch.

Inisboffin has a slightly amazing natural harbour (Views from a hill on the island, which I walked up for mobile phone reception, here and here. Inisboffin has also many sheep.), with a natural breakwater of rocks across the harbour mouth. It's tidal, so a ship like the Asgard can only get in and out during the two hours at high tide (around seven o'clock Friday night and six Saturday morning). There's an interesting-looking fortification on the headland, and a couple of interesting natural features inside the harbour. It looks like it would be a good place for diving, and indeed I saw scuba gear at the quay.

Shore leave was eight thirty to eleven. One of the islanders came out to us in a giant RIB (very nice people, islanders) and took fifteen of us to shore, and the ship's RIB took another few. The giant RIB was really cool and really fast: apparently it can make about forty-five knots.

The sunset was fantastic. If I hear back from the other people who actually took pictures of it, I'll post links here.

I stayed outside the pub, mostly, being queasy because the land wasn't moving. (Graeme said later he thought he was going to be the first person ever to be landsick.) There was plenty of drink going on, and a couple of pool games, and craic and camaraderie getting going. No sodomy jokes yet: those only really started Saturday.

At half ten, the ship's RIB started running us back, and we turned in. All hands call was going to be five o'clock in the morning, and we were all tired.

Inisboffin - the islands entire, in fact - are the kind of places I'd like to go back to, if I had a yacht and could take my time hopping from one to another. They're pretty cool people, too.

And that was the second day. Saturday we had a small craft warning and a gale force warning in force, and winds of Force 6, Force 7. So I'll write that up probably tomorrow.

Last picture of day one: me on deck, one of the rare occasions I was without my crazy floppy-brimmed tan-coloured hat.

*'Two six' apparently goes back to the days when ships had cannons, and number two and number six on the cannon crew were the hands who did the hauling, so Donal said. At least, he thought that was it.

**I am going back. I'm not going to let that mast beat me. I figure next time, I'll know what it's like, and not to look down (looking down fucked me up every time).

The 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.