Travel Reference
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ing spine as it cut the surface and disappeared, we screamed with the exultation of inland
people going to sea.
As with all true adventures, though, ours was to be remarkable for its long stretches of
boredom. Soon our lives became an endless series of watches and off-watches—three hours
on, six hours off, three on, six off, repeated ad infinitum—and I began to learn a bit about
the seafaring life.
Our first duty on watch, unsurprisingly, was to watch: to keep an eye to port and to
starboard for anything that might threaten to destroy us, other than boredom itself. During
nighttime watches, I would stare into the darkness and try to see anything at all. On the
second evening, tiny birds danced at the edge of our running lights, and I killed entire hours
wondering if they were real.
The next task was the hourly boat check. The Pirate King would instruct one of us to
walk the length of the deck, fore and aft, starboard and port; then to scout the belowdecks,
to peek into the thundering oven that was the engine room (we remained under engine
power even when augmented by sails); and finally to report back to him anything untoward
or alarming, with special emphasis on whether the boat was sinking or on fire.
“Thank you,” would come the Pirate King's approval, and we would turn to the main
activities of the watch: the telling of stories and the sharing of bad jokes.
I was assigned to Watch B, which I rechristened Bravo Watch. It was, of course, the best
of the three watches that made up the cycle. In addition to an official chronicler (me, self-
appointed), we had Kelsey, a recent graduate from UC Berkeley, where she studied marine
conservation; and both shipboard hipsters, Gabe and Henry, who were revealed to be old
friends, inseparable since toddlerhood; and finally our watch captain, the Pirate King him-
self.
The Pirate King had turned out to be not only a hard-core example of seafaring mas-
culinity but also something of a camp counselor. He seized every opportunity to teach us
sea shanties, to recite poems both nautical and otherwise, to point out the constellations and
unfold the mythology behind them, to show us how to splice rope and tie knots, how to
braid special twine “Turk's head” bracelets that would mark us forever as tall-ship sailors.
On watch, as at meals, as in the lounge, he would break into story or song at the slight-
est provocation. I came to hesitate before taking a nap in the lower lounge, for fear that I
would be awakened by the Pirate King, hanging upside down, splicing a lanyard with his
teeth and singing a napping-shanty in twelve verses.
On our first midnight watch, he told us his life story: he grew up poor in Alabama,
left home as a teenager, and remade himself in California. It was the tale of a young man
enraged by how the world had treated him. Only through the trials and mortifications of
