Aspects of safety have quite literally been drilled into us over the past week. I didn’t quite realise the irony in how dangerous safety gear can be until I managed to slice open both my finger and the top of my thumb while retrieving the fire extinguishers during a fire drill on Tuesday followed by some admirable grazes on my shins from slipping into a life raft box while releasing the rescue boat in a man overboard drill on Wednesday. This was, nevertheless, outweighed by the joy of kicking ass at pulling off the exercises competently by working quickly and effectively as a team. Ordered chaos is a beautiful thing. Safety is a critical feature on any ship, however after the loss of a rather prominent Canadian’s daughter on the Picton a few years ago, a highly critical eye is cast over its procedures and controls by the viewing public and it undergoes a voluntary safety check once annually by the powers that be in Canada. This took place on Wednesday and the ship and its crew (including me) all passed with flying colours. Even the ship’s cat, Chibley, who has sailed on all of the Picton’s voyages since its inception in the late 90s, was found and rescued on every occasion. Although in the photo below, the man overboard looks somewhat like a drunk dude passed out in a trolley, it is actually a safety drill dummy weighing in at 160lb. The crew’s quick actions and response to the situation allowed us to retrieve it from the water using a rescue boat in just over 2½ minutes. Go us.
But before we congratulate these endeavours too heartily, let’s take a step back to the start of the week. After spending practically all of last Sunday scratching my head, rubbing my beard and staring at the wall in contemplation of my intellect’s return after the excesses of Saturday night, ship work recommenced on Monday morning at 8 sharp. The day wasn’t overly burdensome. I spent the morning sorting out flags for the places the voyage will take us before an afternoon of practical safety training involving life jackets, life rafts and immersion suits.
What I didn’t mention in my post last week is that we had already attempted the training session at a pool in Lunenburg the previous Tuesday. Our group was greeted by some distinctly murky looking water of which the bottom was all but invisible to the untrained eye. The curious looking liquid was indeed so green that it would have put an algae infestation to shame.
Assuming that all nonetheless was well, and that strangely green and opaque swimming pools were merely an unspoken feature of quaint Canadian fishing villages, we persevered with the training and donned our immersion suits. These effectively are thick jump suits which cover the whole body, keeping it free from water and in the process helping you to stay alive in colder climes for substantially longer than you might otherwise (see photos below). They are a pain in the ass to get on, and even worse to take off. Your face and hands are still uncovered, and after one of us jumped in the pool wearing the suit, the proprietor wandered over and asked nicely if we could keep our faces out of the water during the session while they tried to determine the source of its somewhat abnormal properties. Needless to say, the ship’s boson stepped up a gear on hearing this and instructed us all almost immediately to take off the suits and prepare to leave. The poor bloke who jumped in was advised to get out promptly and shower thoroughly. Luckily his face and skin has not detached from his body in the days that have followed so we may have been safe to do it there after all.
This week we instead took a van to the nearby town of Bridgwater (the other pool was still out of bounds) and knocked the training on the head there. Floating around in the pool in immersion suits and dragging ourselves into a life raft was a hoot. One does, of course, hope that we will not need to do it again any time soon. On the plus side, the immersion suits come equipped with an inflatable pillow at the back which, quite frankly, would be more comfortable to sleep in than my bunk. The life rafts are cosy but practical and I noted they have interesting fixtures to capture rain water and can detach and self inflate from the ship if it sinks too quickly for someone to release them. The trainer told us stories of mariners who had lasted months at a time waiting to be rescued in these things, including a Japanese man who endured 180 days. I think I would have gone well and truly mental by then perhaps thinking, due to the life raft’s shape, that I were really an Inuit living in some kind of floating fluorescent igloo.
On the request of a shipmate celebrating his birthday that day, we later headed en masse to the town’s bowling alley for a spot of ten pin smashing fun. When we arrived, however, we were surprised to discover that the setup there was just a little out of the ordinary. The whole thing appeared to have been designed with midgets in mind. The lanes were shorter than normal and the scores were tallied with pen and paper like in the good old days. The pins looked like they had been fashioned by primary school children using balsa wood, Tippex and red marker pen and the bowling balls were so bizarrely tiny, they wouldn’t have felt entirely out of place in an average gent’s scrotal sack. I had personally never seen anything like it before, but was helpfully advised by a Canadian friend that this curious genre of bowling was not all uncommon in the country and quite popular with local people.
Many of the town’s folk were in attendance cheering and playing in the first match of a seasonal tournament and in keeping with the hallmarks of real men’s sports such as pool and darts (bowling being no exception), crumb laden facial hair and T-shirt stretching beer bellies were on full display for all to enjoy. In our own match, the girls were unstoppable and put all us lads to shame. “We’re well equipped to deal with smaller balls” said one of them cheekily to me when I asked what their secret was.
The following day I was invited to participate in an interview with an actor on board with us who is filming a documentary of the voyage. He is in the midst of tendering the idea to TV networks in Canada and beyond, so fingers crossed I may get my mug on a telly near you some time soon, although knowing my luck I will most likely be caught green faced and/or hanging over the side of the ship barfing my lunch up after failing miserably to attain my sea legs. The bloke filming the documentary, Ollie, had actually been to the Isle of Man and stayed at the Grand Island Hotel in Ramsey. He described Ramsey’s only hotel (which has since closed) as the Manx equivalent of Fawlty Towers. I personally had never thought of it in this way, but to be honest he really hit the nail on the head! He was on the island as he had a starring role in the movie “The Brylcreem Boys”. All you guys on the Isle of Man will recognise this as the movie that essentially kickstarted the island’s film industry after a sixty year moratorium. Small world.
I continue to enjoy a steady flow of new injuries on a daily basis working in and around the ship. Indeed four lumps appear to have become a permanent feature on my head from where I continually bang it while moving around. I am starting to believe that the Picton might just have been designed by the same midget lovers who conceived the peculiar bowling alley we encountered on Monday night. For the first time in my life, I find myself cursing my height and wishing I were a foot or two shorter. The lumps occupy consistent but spaced out positions on my head and each corresponds to a different part of the ship where my noggin gets a pasting in passing. Each lump usually has enough time to heal and recede at least a little until I come a cropper and reperform the injury yet again (usually first thing in the morning). Said mishap is almost always announced by way of a loudly broadcasted expletive greeted by unsympathetic giggles amongst my shipmates elsewhere on board.
For working aloft, we have to don a harness and I also wear a belt containing a knife to cut rope and something known as a marlinspike (the derivation of the wacky attire alluded to in my previous post). The knife admittedly has its uses and I have since shortened the lanyard to which it is attached noting the possibility after a few near misses of it falling directly onto my toe. The marlinspike does have its own uses but my own personal endeavours have thus far led it no further than stirring the sugar into my coffee each morning. I like to think myself resourceful at least for this.
The continual banging of the head, slicing of flesh and accumulation of splinters are slowly hardening me into the able bodied seaman I am destined to become. Sometimes I feel like I only have to scratch my backside and I am greeted by seventeen new splinters on my hand. Not that my rear end is laden with unsanded wood, but splinters are just a big part of life on the ship and are found everywhere. I must have suffered a hundred of them already, but I am grateful to be blessed with a trusted shipmate with long finger nails who is shit hot at removing the most cumbersome of the blighters.
On Wednesday, we broke into watches which will remain in place for the next four weeks at least. The crew of the ship is split into thirds and assigned to sit a watch between certain hours both during the day and at night time. I have been assigned the 12-4 watch meaning that I will be on duty both from 12am-4am and from 12pm-4pm while we are at sea. The time in between is my own. The great thing about being on a 12-4 watch is the fact that getting up early in the morning ceases to exist. Also when performing ship work such as painting and varnishing, which follows standard day time working hours (i.e. 8am-6pm), it means the crew before you set everything up, and the crew after you pack everything away. You just do it without having to clear up any of the mess. Watches also entail taking the helm of the ship and keeping a watch for anything in the ocean. You might remember those two guys in Titanic freezing their asses off and keeping watch pretty badly right before she struck the iceberg. Good job we’re heading straight to the Tropics.
While in port, each of the three watch groups actually works full days to maintain the ship and alternate so that one watch covers each day. This means that you have one day on and get two off. So two thirds of my time in port will be spent doing landlubberesque sightseeing. Sweet.
Thursday was spent loading the ship. Excuse the French, but it was fucking hard work. One hundred 50lb sacks of cement, two spares of each sail on the ship (i.e. a lot of sails) and enough books and school supplies to keep half of French Polynesia happy for the next few years were lugged into the hold before being stuffed into any and every gap we could find. Sweating my ass off in the midday sun carrying this crap around, my only solace was found in the fact that it was inevitable I would soon find myself built like a brick shithouse. Bring it on.
The departure date set is looking increasingly likely in spite of the fact that the beautiful weather we enjoyed earlier this week is unlikely to hold on till the weekend. All being well, the ship will leave in the presence of the town’s mayor, local dignitaries and well-wishers from near and far at 1400 on Saturday. Our scheduled time of arrival at the much famed and anticipated Panama Ship Canal is early on May 28. We can’t be late. We have our spot in the queue booked and I hear these babies are more sought after than doughnuts at an obesity convention.
For now, at least, settling down in my bunk at the end of each day laden with cuts, bruises and splinters underlines the hard work I am putting in and leaves me with a masochistic sense of battered satisfaction before I close my eyes and promptly drop into a deep sleep. Blood, sweat and tears. But the more my time here passes on the ship, the more I realise that coming on this voyage is up there with the greatest decisions I have ever made in my life. I am immensely happy and feel privileged to be a part of this. A few days from now, I will be unfurling sails with nothing but the sun, the wind and the ocean to keep me company. Incredible. See you in Panama.
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