Piracy

[aggienaut]

   "Is it a real pirateship??" asks the teenage girl
   "No." says I bluntly.
   "Awwww ):"
   "It's a merchant vessel" I explain
   "Could you make it a pirateship?" she asks
   "Uhhhh no we'd get sunk by the coast guard pretty fast"
   "What! Really!?" clearly she doesn't get what I'm getting at here.
   "Piracy is pretty illegal you see"
   "Oh, but is it a real sailing ship at least?"
   "well yes." (we actually get this question a lot, and joke amongst ourselves about telling them no it goes around on tracks like in disneyland)

A little later:
   "Why doesn't it have a pirate flag?" asks a middle aged man as if we've terribly overlooked something.
   "Why should we have a pirate flag?" I ask him back
   "Oh ummm uhhhh."

   It's not unexpected that everyone thinks we're doing some kind of pirate thing, but it's kind of silly, when you think about it, that any vessel resembling a working vessel from say the year 1000 until the early 1900s people immediately associate with something only a tiny tiny fraction of vessels were involved in between the late 1600s and early 1800s (and it's been experiencing a modern resurgence but people aren't associating motorboats and RPGs with pirates.. yet!). It's like people in the distant future seeing replicas of something from today and assuming it is definitely pertaining to something totally unrelated that will only occur between 300 and 400 years from now.


   We call our dock here "the fish bowl." We're moored up to a floating dock that's right beside a raised pier, so the onlookers are actually above us. All afternoon I'm liable to look up and see three cameras pointed at me. During dinner the other day I was eating spaghetti on deck because it was a nice day and while my mouth was full some guy started asking me questions about when we'd be open for tours. Simulteniously his eight year old (wild guess) son tried to board the boat, apparently assuming it was open for tours.
   All evening about every twenty minutes are so a camera flash will go off on the pier. It's like being in a lightning storm without thunder. I don't know what kind of shots they expect to get like that.


Picture of the Day

   Today we had a "battle sail" against the Lady Washington. Both boats were fully booked (43 passengers each). There was a very very light intermittent rain, though the sun shown down on us the whole time, which was neat. In this picture Pony (the bosun) fires on the Lady Washington. This shot looks to be clearly a miss. (:
   Pony and other people who have been around awhile insist that these are NOT cannons but "deck guns," but a brief search of the internet (okay I only looked up cannon on wikipedia -- "any piece of artillery that uses gunpowder or other usually explosive-based propellants to launch a projectile") does not give me any reason to believe these should not be called cannons.

Comments

[niora.livejournal.com]

*eyeroll* Stand by for questions on whether you've ever met Jack Sparrow.

(I love Pirates of the Caribbean, but...)

Вспомнился знаменитый фрегат

[aspasia-roma.livejournal.com]

Товарищ.
Отличный был парусник.

[sra33.livejournal.com]

Psssh. Being a pirate anymore is all in the costume. Indulge people's imagination sometime! :P

[gildedage.livejournal.com]

Haha, just wait till you get to Bellingham. I hearted eating lunch in the WWU dining hall and watching the Lady Washington and Hawaiian leave port to go do battle. It's pretty cool to watch them, and then imagine a time when the entire harbor would have been full of ships like that.

[technophobe1975.livejournal.com]

Being a landlubber, I always imagine cannons as being a lot bigger...

[zauzau.livejournal.com]

Well if it has cannons it is OBVIOUSLY A PIRATE SHIP.
I like that picture though, with the smoke and clouds and still water. :)

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

According to everybody (Charlie, and the other bigwigs) on the Pilgrim and Spirit, they are always called guns on the ship. I described the gun seen mounted on the rail in one of your recent pictures and one of the crew said, "Oh yes, that's a swizzle gun.

[superhappytime.livejournal.com]

those deck guns are offended that someone might see any piece of artillery from, say, 1000 to 1900, and assume that it is something that made up only a small percentage of artillery...namely, a cannon.

[fsk8ing-judge.livejournal.com]

"Oh, but is it a real sailing ship at least?"
Unbelievable . . . give me strength. No, give you strength to not strangle idiots such as that teenage girl and the middle aged man.

[phineus.livejournal.com]

yeah, you can thank the Pirates of the Caribbean movies for that, I'm sure...

though to be fair, pirates have been since the second person to sit on a floating log to cross a river. ;]
but in general folks only tend to think of the romanticised images of the 18th century pirates, of course.

[nefariousvirus.livejournal.com]

hey how have you been?

[rheyamorgaine.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed your journey thus far :)

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah we get asked where he is a lot. It's fairly easy on this boat just to point across the way to the other one and say that that's the one he was on (it was), which makes them run off to harass THOSE guys :D :D Also I like to note that I heard he gets quite seasick and no doubt puked on that very deck!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

We'll be there soon!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah they were typically more like 32 pound guns I think.. these are 3 pound guns. !

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

SO HARD to get it timed just right to get the cannon firing!!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

well yes, those are swivel guns, cause that sounds better than "swivel cannon," and I'm not sure anyone would call anything THAT small as a cannon but... For example in the Patrick O'Brian books, universally lauded by sailor types for their historical accuracy, the guns are very definitely called cannons. I'm getting really curious where this idea that they are not cannons aboard ships got started.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Lol touche

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

We get asked that ALL THE TIME!! Every time you have to take a moment, take a few breaths, and with all your strength fight down the urge to be extremely sarcastic in your response!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Good! You?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Thanks (: me too!

*waves from one of the Lady crew*

[i-id.livejournal.com]

I'm from Bham too! You a student there now?

[inertiacrept.livejournal.com]

Given your relative proximity to Astoria I marvel that more of your questions don't involve the Goonies.

[niora.livejournal.com]

It's fairly easy on this boat just to point across the way to the other one and say that that's the one he was on (it was)

What, really? :-D

Re: *waves from one of the Lady crew*

[gildedage.livejournal.com]

Nope! Graduated last year and moved to NYC! But I totally miss it! Bham is probably one of the most awesome small towns ever!

[risingtofall.livejournal.com]

Thats so awesome, I would be down there constantly taking pics of the boat and invading your privacy. And if I had, had a few drinks I'd probably be obnoxiously talking in a pirate accent and trying to get you to do the same. Thankfully for you, you're on the other side of the country.

Do those boats all kind of look the same? There's a shipyard near me and I always see a boat there that looks just like the Lady Washington. I used to think that it was the Plymouth Mayflower here to be fixed or something because that was the only boat I had ever seen that looked like that until I started following your LJ lol.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Trufax!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I think they all look the same to some people, but to the not terribly discerning eye they can have wild differences.. number of masts, number and type of sails, over time the entire hull shape changed relatively significantly so the hull on a 17th vessel boat will look very different from one from the late 18th..

[nefariousvirus.livejournal.com]

Pretty busy actually, but good! haha