Thanks to Ken Fonville who stepped aboard Saturday afternoon the 13th, to pump the Forecastle bilge after no one else had signed up. Bryan Oliver showed up the previous Wednesday afternoon ostensibly to evaluate the effects of the week's rains, before he departed for St. Louis and Father's Day. Good thing too. It seems that the slippery overhand knots he used to lash the rolled up awning along it's guy line, had loosened, leaving the unraveling awning flapping in the breeze, not very shipshape,, so lesson learned,, "highwayman's cutaway".
So, without much else than that to relate, it's a worthy moment to share a couple of very worthy books..
If you're following this blog you've likely a more than passing fancy of the world of "Tall Ships".. I sure do.. like since 6th grade. But even if you're not at my extreme end of the spectrum, if you have a curiosity for more insight into that world, the mariners who sail them today, and in recent past, the trainees, student's who crew them. What's the attraction? What are they really like? Why do they still exist? What's their justification? Aren't they risky? Why take that risk?
Well, I found the most articulate, literate, inspiring answers to those questions, and more, in a book, ironically, about Tall Ships that sank.
Daniel S. Parrott, late Captain of the topsail schooner(-Baltimore Clipper-Privateer) "SSV Pride of Baltimore II", wrote this book, published waaayyy back in 2003. It's an unvarnished amazingly detailed historical record of the sinking of five Traditionally Rigged Sailing Ships, from 1957 to 1995. One of them, "Albatross" was dramatized in the feature movie, "White Squall". He vividly re-creates each final voyage and then explores the roles played by ship stability, structural integrity, ship-handling, weather, human error, and standards of risk in tragedies at sea. Finally, the lessons-learned.
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| Available on Amazon Books and other resellers |
My copy will be on board in the Saloon library for a limited time, should any of you care to peruse. You'll be getting excerpts anyway,, like this one.. If you're a sailor, you'll take a deep breath:
"There are moments all sailors store in a sort of communal emotional archive bound up with the physical sensations of sailing. There is the alarm when one first feels wind fill a sail. The boat beneath comes suddenly alive with heeling and speed, as if one were astride an unpredictable beast. Even on a pond left by a retreating glacier, the ecstasy of acceleration and the fear of capsize co-mingle in an instant of triumph and panic. Then there is the storm, often anticipated with gusto by the neophyte and less so by the seasoned sailor. In a building sea and a rising wind the bow lifts and smashes into a curled wave, pounding downward with a violence of purpose that buckles the knee and sends torrents of green water aft and into your seaboots. If one is possessed of a constitution disinclined to feed a perfectly good dinner to the fish at such moments, the jarring exuberance suggests that this is life as it should be lived: rigorous, exhilarating, bare-knuckled.
There is also a catalog of more sublime moments that weave rapture with achievement: sunsets followed by the green flash, plotting a passable celestial fix, quiet anchorages, crossing an ocean, island landfalls, trade-wind passages, and dolphins lunging under the bow mere inches from the surging stem as the ship muscles through the seas with athletic vitality. And then there comes a moment, perhaps aloft beyond the sight of land, beneath the stars as night relieves twilight. Out on the footrope one feels at once solitary yet in communion with the vast splendor of sea and sky and creation, alone in thought, yet part of a community of shipmates as an organ is to a body. You pause with a fistful of canvas and glance back at the rail of phosphorescence roiled to life by the turbulence of the keel scribing its way across miles of latitude and longitude like the blade of an ice skate traversing a small round pond..
..These ships always did transport more than cargo. Whatever ostensible purpose they served in the past, sailing ships are vehicles of human experience and dreams, and not only for sailors... We cling to them through art, literature, museums or by actually going to sea.."
It goes on..
Coming UP: Stories of the Seaborne Underground Railroad. and how vessels like Spirit of South Carolina played a part.
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