Okay, I just think it's never amiss to start with flowers.We'll get to the circumnavigation momentarily.
But first...
WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION!
Littlewolf took us climbing and exploring. (Here he's saying, "What's with the pictures? Time's awasting!") 
Went to Emin Muil.(Luckily, Littlewolf has an in with Tolkien, so we only had a little trouble getting there.)
It looked a lot like Mt. Hinman in the central Washington Cascades.
(That's Rainier in the background.)AND OUR TOMATOES (some of them) FINALLY GOT RIPE!
Yum.AND NOW: ON WITH THE CIRCUMNAVIGATION!
THE BOAT (Lady Washington) (The following was written in August, after crewing on the Lady Washington...)
CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE OLYMPIC PENINSULA
(THAT'S IN WASHINGTON)
It’s been two weeks. Two weeks since “the boat.” Changes are afoot. Or, I should say, afinger.
My fingers are peeling. The underneath side. Two weeks ago I had no fingerprints. None, I’m sure of it. My fingers were soft and smooth as sea foam, as polished brass, as a dolphin’s back. Palms the same. They had been sandpapered daily, by the minute, every time I touched a rope, coiled a line, hauled a brace or sheet or tack or bunt or leech or clew or halyard, or even, I think, just came near to a rope or a line. (By the way, they are almost all lines, rope being the stuff lines are made from). I might have just sat down at a rotary sander each day. Ow. They were SO SMOOTH, it was just plain unnatural. They were at that stage where all excess had been sloughed off, fingerprints and all, and the underlying calluses were just starting to think about growing their protection business into an actual corporation, in which case, they would soon become like many a good corporation: rough, hardened, and difficult to remove. Two weeks ago, my fingers looked like sausages, and my hands were red as lobsters. Today, I can get my rings off (barely), but the color is a warm pink. I’ve managed to remove the tar from beneath my fingernails. And when I wake in the morning, my hands no longer tingle when I curve them around my coffee cup, and they uncurl on command, rather than remaining cramped in a claw-like imitation of an impatient, sea-faring T-rex just about to grab a snack.
My head spun for weeks, not on the boat, but once I got off. My body kept trying to anticipate the tidal forces, to catalog and counter each lurch and roll, each pitch and yaw, but the land doesn’t lurch, it’s pretty darned stable, and my lumbering brain took a while to catch up.
Ah vacation.
We’re back from our circumnavigation, by bus, boat (I mean THE boat of course), and bus again, of the Olympic Peninsula, that part of Washington State that schmoozes with the Pacific Ocean. The bus parts got us to Aberdeen (on the west coast) and back from Anacortes (north of Seattle, near the San Juan Islands) and were exciting only in that the little puddle jumper buses out in the toolies were just that, out in the toolies, and either free, or cheap enough that you could spend your money on important things like coffee and cinnamon rolls at a Mt. Vernon café. (The Greyhound station in Seattle, however, should be an embarrassment to the city – remember Obi Wan’s line from Star Wars, “You shall never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”? We found it.)
So, the boat part. “THE boat” is our term of endearment for square rigger Lady Washington. I know “the boat” is pretty pitiful in terms of creative zing, but you must admit, it is descriptive in the fact that of all the boats in the world, of all the boats that ever were, it is THE boat, and that tells you something. And as for creative naming, I grew up in a family where straight out description was valued and highly utilized – our cats were all named “Kitty,” “Little Kitty,” “Other Kitty” (“O.K.” for short), “Stubby” (yup, no tail), and so forth. Sometimes you just have to call it as you see it.
So (I repeat), the boat part. We crewed on Lady Washington this year. You may remember Lady Washington in her starring role as the Interceptor in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie (the COOL boat that Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom steal and sail around in, and that is blown up later on in the movie). You may also remember (especially if you scroll down to previous blog posts) that we learned all our crewing-on-a-tall-ship skills last summer on the Hawaiian Chieftain (these two boats are best buddies and are usually hanging out together). The Lady is a replica of a 1700’s boat, right down to its six miles of hand-abrading line (including more than 150 individual lines of running rigging coming down to the deck – the Chieftain, on the other abraded hand, only had about four miles of line, and newer rope much easier on my tender extremities).
We spent a few harried days in Aberdeen doing battle sails, adventure sails, a fireworks sail, all the while learning the ropes and sanding off our fingerprints, and dressed in period costume to boot. Plunged into a new universe of hardy souls and fast-paced action, I was more than a little tired (okay, my arms were Jello), so when the word came that we were being allowed to watch the fireworks from atop the yards (the yards being the wooden spars that hold the square sails and make a square rigger square) – truly a privilege, considering you are never allowed to just hang out in the rigging, or even go aloft for anything other than required and requested work, and then for never longer than necessary to get the job done – so even though it was this big privilege and CHANCE OF A LIFETIME, I now found myself following the rest of the crew somewhat reluctantly, after all it was only my second day of being in the Lady’s rigging, and I was not quite proficient at climbing upside down like a monkey (I can do pretty much zero pushups – I’m talking guy pushups here, not girl pushups of which I can do at least two). Besides, it was LATE, it was DARK, and I was TIRED. But I was also determined to not show myself as the zero pushup weakling I was, so I CLIMBED the rigging, YANKED myself up over the futtocks shrouds that do this little overhanging sort of thing, and sat panting and shaking on the “top” – that’s a platform midway up the mast – wondering throughout the fireworks display how I was getting down. I noticed Raina up on the fore t’gans’l yard (the highest one on the foremast) lounging like she was born there. Marc was right over my head on the main tops’l yard. Me, I tried to control my breathing with steely mind control while star spangled showers of blue and red burst overhead. I did get down, of course, with no embarrassing catastrophes. And later on, climbing the rigging did become a treat, but really, I do need to get back to my Mr. Universe body building program.
6:00 A.M. “roll and go.” Finally, time to head for open ocean. We left Aberdeen in a thick fog, the early morning quiet pierced by the clanging buoys and our foghorn blasts as we peered ahead looking for shadows that might materialize into logs, boats, buoys, and the Black Pearl. (I couldn’t help humming the pirate song from the very beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean. Remember the fog? Remember the music? It was JUST like that!)
Crossing the bar (where the river meets the sea), our calm water became rough and exciting, and as we motored up the coast (the wind was against us – in the old days, you’d just have to wait for a favorable wind), the swells came from one direction, the waves from another, and the wind from another. Waves were inviting themselves aboard and sloshing about like annoying party guests who’ve overstayed their welcome. The main deck was awash with each pounding jolt. The first couple of 4-hour watches were a trial to just make it through: we hurled our breakfast contents, and then our intestines over the side. Okay, so that’s a little gross, but I now know where the term “hurling” came from. Very descriptive. (I was happy to see that even a few of the regular crew had difficulty with this.) We put up the main stay sail to try to stabilize the bucking bronco ride, to no effect. At one point (I don’t even remember if it was night or day) a wave poured into the main hold where we were sleeping, and Raina was almost thrown off her bunk. Exciting, to say the least.
Finally (at about the halfway point), we turned east, into the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Now the wind and swells were at our back. We raised all the sails, and made 10 knots (almost top speed under sail for the Lady). The seasickness had subsided enough that I could go below for boat checks (checking the bilges to make sure the boat is not sinking faster than it’s supposed to, as well as checking various gauges in the engine room) – still carrying a plastic bag in my pocket JUST IN CASE. I could take my turn at the tiller without needing to be relieved to go hang over the rail for a few moments. (You may not remember the tiller from the movie. That’s because they covered it and put in a fake wheel – can you imagine Captain Jack standing by a TILLER? No, I thought not. Thus the wheel.) In rough seas, the tiller was another wild carnival ride, and it would take all you had just to keep it at the proper angle to keep the boat going in the right direction – you would sit and lean your entire weight on it, holding and releasing the locking mechanism, pushing and pulling, to keep your course, watching the compass to make sure you weren’t drifting. The compass has a big bubble in it named Rolf, for apt reasons. If you watch the bubble bounce all around, you have to head to the rail. Of course, in the beginning, I had to head to the rail anyway.
So it went, day and night, for two days and two nights. On our way down the Straits we were chased by squalls, but never had more than a sprinkling on deck. Still, during our watches we were bundled in most of our clothes and rain gear (this is July?), and once, at the end of my watch when I went back down to my bunk in the main hold, I threw myself immediately horizontal (the nausea was threatening to breach the sea wall at any moment), and lay comatose in all my gear until my next watch.
I tried to imagine life in the late 1700s, men sailing a boat identical to this out on the open ocean, in any kind of weather, miles and months from any kind of comfort. Identical yes, except, of course, they had no diesel engine, no GPS or accurate maps, no Coast Guard certified watertight compartments, no automatic bilge pumps, no safety harnesses for working aloft, no running water or electricity, no heads (meaning toilets – the “head” was over the rail at the head of the boat), no option to run back to their nice warm, safe homes after a week. I tried to imagine a life where speed is counted in literal knots (a special, knotted line is tossed over the stern, let go for a 28-second run of sand through a glass, the knots counted with the extra noted as fathoms and there you have it ), a life where the sextant is a new fangled device, workman’s comp unheard of, and your low paying job potentially fatal, whether from weather, disease, accidents, or people (including fellow shipmates, pirates, privateers, or the folks you are trading with). Hmmm. I’m a lucky sea dog indeed.
On our third morning, we sailed into Anacortes. Dropping sails and pulling into the marina felt like a time warp. We were suddenly confronted with million dollar yachts full of plastic and vinyl, ladies in fancy (clean) clothes walking small dogs along the docks, and diners spending more than I can imagine to eat miniscule portions of unpronounceable food while enjoying the view of million dollar yachts and small dogs.
Another few days of battle sails with the Hawaiian Chieftain and it was time to bus back to Seattle. Raina stayed on, crewing for another week through the San Juan Islands. Can you believe we left our sixteen year old daughter to fend for herself among a bunch of tall ship sailors?
Now, (as Captain Jack says), bring me that horizon.
And the final question: What would you do?
Hmmm....still thinking....