Farewell Picton Castle, Hello Free Spirit
Rarotonga is where I said good-bye to the Picton Castle. I came down to the dock with two other crew-mates who were leaving the ship, did a lot of hugging and waving, and watched the ship slide out of port and over the horizon. Two weeks later I returned to the harbour to look for Free Spirit, a 44-ft Spencer sloop (originally a ketch) owned by Mark and Gabe, people I know from Vancouver. They were doing the "Coconut Milk Run", a route across the South Pacific that starts in French Polynesia or the Galapagos and usually ends in New Zealand. We had been in frequent e-mail contact over the week before and according to their latest message would be making landfall in Rarotonga on that day. They had, and a few days later I moved aboard to be a crew-mate for their next passage, to Tonga.
I was very grateful to Mark and Gabe for giving me the opportunity to do some yacht sailing as a postscript to my adventure on a barque, especially to see how a yacht and a sailing ship are very different. The Picton Castle is a time machine with the clock set somewhere around the beginning of the 1900s (with the exception of GPS and a water-maker (for desalination of sea water)). Free Spirit is a modern yacht where the main piece of navigation equipment is a laptop computer. However, even with these differences I was surprised at how the sailing experience of the two vessels was similar.
Of course, there were also differences: On Free Spirit I had my own cabin and bathroom, instead of sharing with 18 people. When you clean something, it actually gets clean. When you are on night watch, you are actually sailing the boat, rather than sitting around waiting for a command. The food was better, and I helped provision food items that I liked. There was hot water, and you don't wash dishes in sea water. The music was better (because of Mark's amazing MP3 collection). Sail-handling commands weren't shouted all the time, as if there were an impending catastrophe. The f-word wasn't used in every other sentence (which doesn't bother me, but it does get tiring, and there are more imaginative adjectives around). And, there was an auto-pilot, which means one person can sail, plus check the radar and other instruments at the same time.
Don't think that I am saying that sailing on Free Spirit is better than sailing on the Picton Castle, since there were times that I would have rather been on a ship than on a yacht, specifically when we were at sea. Ocean passages on a yacht are something to be endured, while sea conditions felt by the Picton Castle rarely got so bad that you were counting the hours until landfall (motoring into 18-ft swells once was pretty bad, but sailing was always fine). While at sea on the Picton Castle, we did maintenance projects, such as scraping, sanding, painting, varnishing--unless the weather was inclement, which it rarely was. However, initial conversations between yacht cruisers when meeting at anchorages are very telling: the first questions are all about how much sleep one got on the passage to the current location, whether one had enough prepared meals for the whole time, and if there were any weather-caused disasters such as torn sails or broken rigging.
A large and heavy ship doesn't get knocked around a lot by waves. It does roll, but when it encounters a large swell it usually goes through it, or the swell comes up and over the side. The effect of big seas is the occasional (or not-so-occasional, depending on conditions) wave that crashes over the rails, soaks the deck and all those who were in the way, and means that you spend a lot of time with wet feet. A yacht is light and will be picked up by a wave and tossed around. The motion on a ship still allows you to walk around, perhaps with one hand always ready to grab a railing, but never got in the way of the galley crew's ability to make three meals a day (see my description of cooking in 10- to 15-ft swells, some months ago). Trying to cook on a yacht in big seas is an exercise in frustration; everything you put on the counter inevitably flies off a minute later. Some people even carry enough dishes so they don't have to wash them for a week or longer. And despite the fact that yachts usually have hot showers, at sea they are rarely used.
All of the above explains the first thing that yacht cruisers often do when they make landfall after a challenging passage: have a shower, have a stiff drink, and crash in their bunks for a few hours. Then they go ashore and find a restaurant for dinner. The crew of the Picton Castle, however, arrived at a destination with a bag packed, ready to jump off and enjoy their shore leave.
The experience of being at anchor is where a yacht and the Picton Castle were as different as can be. The best time to be on a yacht is while at anchor. You can open all the hatches and windows, put away the lee-cloths (that prevent you rolling out of bed), and generally relax. You can go ashore when you want, or just stay on board and enjoy your boat full of books and music and snorkelling equipment and fresh food that you bought at a local market. In contrast, the minute the Picton Castle crew was cleared in by immigration when we arrived at any destination, we all took off. Something about the ship really made everyone want to get off and have a shore-only experience. This was too bad, since the Picton Castle really wasn't a bad place to spend some down time. You could sling a hammock on the fo'c'sle head and read in peace, unless someone was chipping or grinding rust a few feet away, which often was the case, which is why we wanted to get off the ship...
Well, this entry in my weblog marks the end of my Picton Castle story. It was a fascinating journey, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, with memories that I will always treasure. My top experiences, in no particular order, were: making new friends among the crew, eating dinner on the pin-rail with a view of the setting sun, walking up the stairs from the main salon for night watch and seeing the star-filled sky framed by the hatch, swimming in the open sea in 10,000-ft-deep water, standing on the fo'c'sle head on lookout duty and watching dolphins playing in the bow wake, watching the ocean from the quarterdeck on a fine and breezy day, learning shippy skills such as splicing rope and using a sextant, scanning the horizon from the mast top, arriving at each destination with no jet lag, no airport transfer hassles, and no having to get used to the weather.
It wasn't all smooth sailing, of course. Living on a ship has its inconveniences, like smelly heads (toilets) and eating off plastic dishes that smelled and tasted like bleach, but I'll forget most of these. However, there is one problem I will cite with the hope it will be rectified. The actual seamanship training, the major reason many of us were aboard, was terrible. I was at sea for 3 months and disembarked with few skills that were transferable to Mark and Gabe's yacht. Learning to read weather, to interpret a radar screen, to trim sails, to use a radio, to understand the fundamentals of anchoring--all of these were the domain of the captain and a few of the professional crew. I picked up some in that list because I already had a foundation by being a pleasure sailor and a boat-owner for more than a decade, but I wonder about my fellow crew-mates. In addition, some of the pro crew thought that their task was to turn us into order-following automatons. That might have made for a well-run ship if the ones doing the ordering were always super-competent, but they weren't. And that is not an environment I can live in.
Farewell Picton Castle. You are a fine ship, sturdy, stable, strong, with a stunningly competent master. I would sail any ocean with you. My life has been enriched by my experience at sea, and you were the portal through which I visited the community of sailors. Fair winds and calm seas forever.
2:03:30 AM 
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