Crew's Views from
Andrew Jackson

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Date: Tuesday, November 14, 2000
Location: Aloft in the Atlantic

Ahoy!

Since our trip is almost over, I find myself clambering around the ship more than I usually do. I'm trying to get as much out of my time left as possible. Almost every day, I go aloft and sit on the foremast cap where the masts, fore, and foretop are doubled up.

Like a good sailor, first I empty my pockets, put on a harness and a lanyard for my camera, and a hat against the sun. Then I tell the watch captain where I'm going, in case they have plans to do something aloft. Then I climb out over the lifeline and start up the weather shrouds. I don't scamper up as effortlessly as the rest of the crew, but I'm more at ease than I was back in March.

Up I go, holding the shrouds and not the ratlines, never putting both feet on the same ratline. Pamela, the bosun, does a rig check several times a week, so I'm very confident nothing is going to snap under my weight, but it's shippy to be careful about these things. About sixty-five feet up, I'm at the top of the lower shrouds and I switch to the futtock shrouds, which tilt outward for about eight rungs. Then I'm on the topmast shrouds, which get so narrow I can barely fit my feet on them, and then I'm at the doubling, about eighty feet above deck.

I lithely step on top of the mast cap, clip my harness to something solid, and sit down. About the third time I came up here, a deckhand was fiddling with the chafegear and he noticed I'd clipped onto the backstay.

"Andy," he said kindly, "if you clip onto a line that runs up and down, it's not going to do you much good if you fall."

After a few minutes of consideration, I saw what he was getting at, so now I clip onto something horizontal. Even clipped in, I keep one hand on a shroud or stay, because a little pitch or roll on deck translates to quite a stately arc aloft.

Ah, the world aloft. The mast cap where I'm sitting is a little wood platform just big enough to cover the foremast and hold the topmast. It has a copper plate in it to keep the weather out, and neat lines of shiny copper tacks along its leather trim. And there are neat leather gauntlets on all the lines that could conceivably rub against anything. With our raked masts and running stays, we have more lines chafing against each other than most boats.

It smells of tar and leather, and if there's any wind, the rig groans and creaks like it's going to pop any minute. What with all the sail, there's less visibility than you might think. Naturally, the foretopsail is rigged to the foremast, so when it's up I can't see where we're going. And the mainsail will cut off a chunk of view aft, and right below the foresail will obscure the deck. If I look down, I can't see much more than a slice of rushing blue water between the sails, with a white filigree of scud that shifts like smoke.

If I look straight aft along the black steel springstay, I see the mainmast doubling, a much more crowded platform than this one. There's the weather vane and anemometer, with a little wire leading down to the aft cabin, the two horns, looking no bigger or louder than the average trumpet, the VHF antenna, the CAPSAT antenna, the loran, and all of our 21st century satellite technology that is perched up here to commune with the heavens.

Out on the horizon, there's usually a chain of bright cumulus clouds, traditionally compared to a parade of elephants. And on all sides, ever since Madeira, we've been accompanied by flying fish. At first we had whole schools of them, ten or twenty at a time breaking the surface and zipping along for fifty or sixty yards, but as we pulled away from Africa, their numbers diminished. They're great fun to watch, especially in a calm sea, where they make a bigger splash leaving the water than re-entering it. For their brief flights, they all go in formation, determined, I guess, by the wind and the location of the predators they're fleeing. Or maybe they just maintain their underwater school discipline in the air. Sometimes they'll wheel into the wind and all of them will slap their tails against the sea and get another twenty yards of airway. At night they get disoriented and land on deck. One or two have flopped down the companionway into the foc'sle. Kind of a surprise to get up to pee in the middle of a night and step on a squirming flying fish. We put up our mosquito netting when they were thickest. Both Joshua Slocum and Sir Francis Chichester describe eating flying fish for breakfast in their respective books about circumnavigating the globe. And our European guest crew, Fernando from Italy and Friedrich from Germany, both eagerly cleaned some and fried them up with garlic for lunch. They were a little strong for us finicky Americans. We still haven't given up our dream of fresh wahoo or mahi-mahi although, frankly, time is running out.

Well, that's it for now. See you next week.

Andy the Cook

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