Page 56 - MN

56
blocked up in a field. It was covered with a mildewed tarp and the hull was moldy streaked with dirt. I knew it would never sail again. Damn.
Epilogue Two:
In the bridge club here in Chiangmai I met Mike Williams who moved here from Whidbey Island near Seattle. Yes, that Whidbey Island where I almost put my boat on the rocks. It turns out he was a sailor too. When he graduated from the University of Washington, he and his friends bought a 50-foot schooner and sailed it around the world. My little adventures pale in comparison. He wrote a book about it, called "The Chronicles of the Schooner Lusty 1" and it's a great read.
Epilogue three:
I learned the true power of the ocean on a Seabourn cruise ship east of Greenland. Usually cruise ships are very good at avoiding storms but now and then one changes path and the ship has to deal with it.
The old Seabourn ships, the Pride and the Spirit, were very small cruise ships and I can't remember which one I was on, but we hit that storm and it was a big one. The ship was handling it well, with the captain angling into 30-foot waves, and everyone on board was hanging on to something. You know what is really dangerous on a cruise ship? Pianos. Pianos are huge, heavy, and if they start rolling around a dance floor they can be lethal. Ours were chained down always, so that was not a problem. You know the term "loose cannon"? It's the same thing. On the old fighting ships, if a cannon broke loose in a storm it could roll around the decks and kill people.
On this ship, up in the bow was a water-tight door leading from the deck into the cabin area. Water-tight doors are those heavy steel doors that you lock by turning a large wheel which inserts heavy steel bars into the bulkhead of the ship. Those doors are very, very strong. Well, a huge wave crashed into that door and bent it. I didn't believe that was possible. So now there was an opening and the ship was taking on water through that opening.
Our Norwegian captain got on the loudspeaker and explained the problem. He warned us he was going to have to turn the ship around so the stern faced the waves and the crew could weld a patch on the water-tight door. It was a really tricky maneuver, where he waited til the ship climbed up the face of a wave and then he cranked it hard and gave it full power to make the turn on top of the wave. It was a superb piece of seamanship and once on the new course the crew was able to repair the door. Then he had to duplicate the turn to get us back going into the waves--the safest course for a ship in a storm.
There are amateur sailors like me, and then there are seamen. I am well aware of the difference.