Travel Reference
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He smiled. It was a thin smile, similar to a wince. They had taken sailing in high school,
he said. Little two-person boats.
What was that feeling in my gullet? Desperation? I made my way from volunteer to vo-
lunteer, making a mental map of our skill set. We had a deep bench in watersports and the
teaching of high school science. Otherwise, it was a mixed bag. There was a boatbuilder, a
former journalist, a few students. They were all interesting, thoughtful, hardworking people
who didn't know a damn thing about sailing a tall ship.
I put my hope in the second mate, a calm, confident tall-ship sailor…who quit. After a
single afternoon on board, he told the captain he didn't like the look of things and got the
hell out of there.
There it was again. That sinking feeling.
The votes of ill-confidence started to pile up. A team of Coast Guard bluesuits came to
inspect the boat's papers. As they left, chuckling, I heard the
Kaisei
's captain say, “They'd
never seen anything like this.”
The more I learned about the
Kaisei,
the more I realized that, from a technical point of
view, she was an oddity. One evening I sat on the aft deck with the ship's engineer, watch-
ing Richmond's tugboats go by and listening to him complain. The engineer was probably
the most important person in the crew, if it mattered to us that the ship remain afloat, that
we have fresh water, and that the navigational gear function. Night after night, he had been
up late, coaxing the ship's systems into fighting shape. He was grumpy, but that seemed
like a good sign. You don't want a laissez-faire engineer.
The
Kaisei,
he told me with some exasperation, had been built in Poland, only to be re-
fitted and operated in Japan. Everything was in Polish and Japanese. And the electricity.
He shook his head. Multiple standards, in a dazzling range of voltages. The irregularity ex-
tended literally to the nuts and bolts of the ship: some were metric, some weren't, and so
multiple sets of tools were required, though none of the multiple sets on board were com-
plete.
The engineer sipped from his mug and let out a great sigh. “Excuse me,” he said. “I'm
into my cup.”
Within a few days, he, too, had quit.
We now had no second mate, and no engineer, and none of us lowly volunteers—the
crew—knew what the hell was going on. Every day of delay was shortening the mission:
in barely three weeks, the
Kaisei
was booked to participate in the San Diego Festival of
Sail, where we would blow the minds of all those tall-ship enthusiasts with our adventures
in deep ocean plastics. So every day tied up at the dock was a day we didn't spend in the
Gyre. We began to doubt that the boat would ever leave the dock. And with experienced
