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Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2000
Location: Baltimore, Maryland

A Few Minutes With Andy the Cook

Well, here we are where it all began, back at the boatyard, taking Pride apart.

It's been a busy couple of weeks since we left sunny Puerto Rico. San Juan was sort of a blur for us since we got in on Thursday and left Saturday. I bought a ton of food and the crew painted the boat and we took a quick day off. Chris Landers and I tried to go to the cockfights at the Arena Gallistico but it turns out the chickens are molting this time of year so there's not much action. Probably just as well.

When we set off, we had to motor for the first five days or so. I've never seen the ocean as flat as it was then. At night you could watch the stars twinkle in the water. And after a day or two, the weather cooled off just enough to be perfect. How pleasant it was to sit on the jibboom and watch the still sky.

To make everything perfect, we finally caught some fish; two mahi-mahis about twelve pounds each.

And then we got our wind, but unfortunately it came from the northwest, the direction in which we were going. It wasn't too bad where we were, twenty or thirty knots, but it was strong enough to churn up the seas to six or seven feet, and since we would be crashing straight into those waves Dan decided to heave to for a while. So we delicately arranged the sails and rudder to keep us headed into the wind and turned off the engine and drifted gradually up the Gulf Stream for two days. The warm gulf stream water misted into seasmoke when it hit the air from the cold front and it looked like a werewolf movie.

We stayed hove to till after Thanksgiving and then the wind had let up enough that we could make headway, so we steamed into the Best City in the Country a day late for our big homecoming reception. It was the only time we were late for an event the whole season. I understand we disappointed thousands, but that's the schooner business. No arguing with wind and wave.

We kind of hid out in Canton for a day and then did our big turn on Sunday, November 26. Even with Ellen blasting off 36 rounds of unbleached flour out of the cannons, it was kind of an anticlimax. The crowds were of an extremely manageable size. But we still got to see a lot of old friends, and it's always a thrill being back amid the formstone and glassphalt.

Our last Open House was a similarly modest affair, no more than a couple of hundred on their way to the Army-Navy game. Then we did the Parade of Lighted Boats, shot off another thirty six charges, and we were all done. No more goodwill till next year.

But we still haven't left yet. We've got to take the topmast and spars and yards down and put a framework over the deck and cover it with plastic, take the electronics off, and so on and so forth. The plan is to be all done by December 15.

Then what? Well, Dayle is off to Pennsylvania, Ellen and PJ and Christine are staying here for winter maintenance. Brad will be going back to his first love, cabinet carpentry. Paul is signed up for the Spirit of Massachusetts where he'll meet up with our old shipmate, Super-Tuff a.k.a. Jon Mitchell. John will be running a boat for the Living Classrooms program here in town. The captains, Jan and Dan, are already conducting interviews for the spring crew and attending to the multitude of captainial duties of which we remain, for the most part, mercifully ignorant. And Chrises Flansberg and Landers cheerfully admit they don't know what they'll be doing next. E-mail your job offers to this website.

I'll be cooking somewhere around Mystic, Connecticut, looking for a job in the literary world. I suppose that may take a while, but it's what I really want to do. I'm getting too old to cook.

So on one hand, I can hardly wait for shipyard to be over, to have a bed I can sit up in, a toilet I can flush without pumping two levers and twisting a valve, and an indoor telephone all my own. And cooking for eighteen tends to pall on one after ten months. The work's not usually hard, but it stretches from 6:30 in the morning to 6:30 at night and it's difficult to arrange a day off. You moms know what I mean.

In some ways, I am the ship's mom, and it's satisfying, but it can be demanding. But then, like a mom, I get a hint of how I'll miss my shipmates who sailed the boat through storms while I slept warm and dry below, whose nightmares have awakened me, whose snores have lulled me, who carried my groceries and cleaned my galley. I've good memories of the last ten months, the last 12,000 miles we sailed, the last 44,000 lives we touched, and I don't want it to be over. I don't want to be on my own again.

We all have e-mail addresses, luckily in view of our gypsy ways, so we'll manage to keep in touch. Some of us have snug secure homes to return to, but many of us will continue to drift - another ship, another restaurant, searching for or running from we know not what. But when we leave the boat, we don't shut down the website. Watch this space for more exciting adventures, captains' logs, teacher postings, and fascinating insights into the wonderful world of square topsail schooners.

Happy Holidays!
Andy the Cook

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