Crew's Views from
Andrew Jackson

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Date: Thursday, November 2, 2000
Location: Halfway across the Atlantic

Ahoy!

After breakfast this morning, I opened up all the food lockers and bilges and counted my cans. I tried to figure out how many complete civilized meals I had left, and how much random food I had after that. If you count by miles, we're halfway to our waypoint in San Juan now. But Captain Parrott points out that as you go west, the Trade Winds get weaker, and it might take us longer to finish the second half of our journey. There's hardly any fresh produce left, but we look pretty good on frozen food. There are fewer canned goods than I thought.

After I'd taken stock of my supplies, I went on deck and picked out a cloud. If you watch a cloud for half an hour, you'll see it change color and direction. Sometimes it goes faster than the boat, sometimes not, depending on how close to the wind we're running. You'll see how it fits in with the other clouds around and into the weather in general. Often it will break up before your eyes, reconfiguring into a set of different clouds. They say the average rain-cloud weighs about 250 tons.

Map by Mapquest

So. Half way across the Atlantic. We're out of the Verdean Basin, crossing the Midatlantic Ridge over to the North American Basin. At the western edge of that basin, just before landfall, we'll cross the Puerto Rican Trench. The Puerto Rican Trench, at 9,220 meters (about four miles) is the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is also the final resting-place of the first Pride of Baltimore.

Of course they have memorial services back in Baltimore on the date she sank, and we have a brass plaque with the names Armin Ellsaesser, Barry Duckworth, Nina Schack, and Vincent Lazzaro that we see each time we come down the midships companionway. But whenever we come into San Juan and sail over the Puerto Rican Trench, that's the time we remember these lost shipmates.

I remember a time in 1998, on the way to China, when Captain Miles called a muster and told us the EPIRB, the distress signal, had gone off on Picton Castle and she wasn't responding to radio calls. We all looked around at the deep blue sea and thought about Bermuda and Arruba, where we'd partied with the crew of Picton Castle, and tried to imagine never seeing any of them again. That's when the brass plate in the companionway became more than the names of four people I'd never met. Would never meet. As it happened, in a matter of hours we found out it was a false alarm. Picton Castle was merely between radio satellites and somebody'd bumped the EPIRB. But I've never quite shaken the feeling I had then - the realization that the friendly sea can swallow you up and those fluffy clouds will float past as if no ship was ever there, and no cook ever contemplated them.

Sometimes, you've got to ask yourself is it worth it to risk your life to spread goodwill and bring business to Baltimore. But that's not why Captain Elsaesser and his crew went to sea. They went because a boat was available. They didn't sail to spread goodwill; they spread goodwill to sail. They didn't expect to hit a microburst and have their vessel sink under them in fifteen minutes flat, but they knew it was a possibility. And our boat, Pride II, has three watertight bulkheads, more technology than you can shake a stick at, and God knows what else, but there are no guarantees that nothing bad will happen.

Nowadays when people sail it's because they choose to sail. Sailing has become an end in itself. For hundreds of years, people sailed with no EPIRBS and no GPS, no radar and loran, and they made jokes and sang songs about Fiddler's Green and Davy Jones locker, and a lot of them wound up there.

So it's funny, I'm out here dithering about how many cans of artichoke hearts we have left and I'm making what I would call a rational calculated risk of my life to do this. And then a half an hour has gone by, and it's time to start more bread and soak the salt cod, so down to the galley I go.

That's it for now! See you next time!
Andy the Cook

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