Skulduggery at Sea

[aggienaut]

   ( Beginning of this adventure )

Google maps of course won't display a course over water, so please disregard the road course here

Monday, May 29th - Myself, first mate Koriander, and Captain Lazarus (how can I change people's names when their real ones are so great??). Descend the narrow gangplank from the boat to the dock. The boat in question is the Lady Washington, a two masted brig reminiscent of the late 1700s, she has cheery yellow trim, broad stripes of brown and black on the upper hull like some kind of duck, and a white lower half. You may recognize her as the HMS Excelsior from Pirates of the Caribbean.
   The sky is heavy and grey, the air smells of fish. Captain Lazarus has grey hair but a boyish young-at-heart disposition. He exudes an easy confidence about ship-handling matters. Kori has long black hair and once when she was standing by the bowsprit at sail and her hair was blowing in the wind someone said she looked like a Tahitian princess, which struck me as apt although she is quick to correct that she's Hawaiian. She has large brown eyes, and is prone to take the world upon her shoulders and thus become anxious. She has been known to simultaneously serve as the first mate, bosun (in charge of coordinating maintenance), cook, and pursar (in charge of finances), and yet she still doesn't think she's amazing. I joke that soon she'll be able to sail the ship herself and indeed her and Daisy (the other Hawaiian girl) did set all the sails just the two of them the other day.
   "I have concerns" she says to Cap.
   "Yes?"
   "JB is coming in Coos Bay"
   "Yes?"
   "I have concerns,"
   "Well what are they?"
   "Well. It's JB!"

   JB was first mate for awhile during my time aboard. He's a bit scrawny and has a scraggly what I call his pharaoh beard. I suppose he's around my age (which is to say now mid 30s). He began with the organization as an "at risk youth" I suppose nearly twenty years ago, growing up to be an at risk adult and one of the most deeply entrenched members of the organization, having burrowed in like a shipworm.
   My captain at the time was a guy named Jimmy, who basically looked like a red bearded viking. Massive red beard. Big guy. First captaincy. So they gave him JB as a first mate even though JB has often been captain himself, to sort of help Jimmy along. But JB can be... salty. Jimmy sent him ashore for a week after he literally threw a book at a just-arrived new volunteer. The day JB returned... Jimmy was fired (and JB became captain).
   Kori has only recently gotten her master's ticket (Ie, she legally could captain the ship but understandably you get employed as a first mate for a fair bit before they just let you take the ole girl for a whirl yourself), so it's understandable that she's anxious about running into the irascible JB who can literally terminate you at will.

   Captain Laz was not unsympathetic but he kept asking her "yes? what would you like to do about it?" in an earnest attempt to solve whatever was bothering her, as we three walked to the shoreheads (bathrooms not aboardship) and back, along the gently rocking dock lined with commercial fishing vessels.
   Finally when we returned to the ship and Kori was called away while Laz and I were still standing there I commented to him "I think she just wants us to say we understand and are on her side"
   "Oh. Sorry," he said, chuckling at himself a little, "I think like an engineer: identify the problem, fix it."
   Koris are not so simple.

   While I'm on the subject and since I've already decided I'm going to have to friends-lock this, I thought I'd note that during my time aboard I accidentally read an email on the boat computer (it had been left open) in which JB was telling the office that "all the officers [of which I'd be included] are terrible except for Will Kirby [the pursar]" which is funny because Will is the only officer to later turn out to have been embezzling money and dropped the boat computer over the side to destroy the evidence, but anyway..
   Also JB very very very nearly killed me by turning on the propeller shaft while I w as working on it and by astounding good luck I just happened to be stretching when the thing started spinning. I can't believe I never wrote about either the disappearing laptop mystery or my close call with death [update 2026-03-13 decided to unlock this post and note that I did eventually write about the mentioned mystery and near death]. Someday I want to write a more thorough account of my time aboard the Chieftain with all the story arcs and interesting stories but unfortunately all the most interesting things would make someone or other very angry if publicly posted [sigh]...


Lady Washington in the San Francisco Bay in 2010

Tuesday, May 30th - There were about a dozen crewmembers all told and about a half dozen passengers came aboard either the night before or Tuesday morning. The tides wouldn't be right for departure until 9 or 10 anyway.
   Most of the crew I didn't know but as I mentioned last entry, one crewmember who had been aboard when I first sailed on Lady back in 2009 was aboard -- Daisy. In addition to being, as mentioned, diminuitive and Hawaiian, she has a lip-ring and a fondness for Pippy Longstockings. When I was aboard she'd read Pippy Longstockings to the rest of us in the evening and is known to put her hair in silly upward pointing pigtails. On my first morning while we were doing the morning brass-polishing she let me spend twenty minutes trying to polish a thoroughly green bit of brass before finally telling me that while she was just gonna let me keep polishing that thing, she finally felt she ought to tell me that we don't usually polish that it. Which might sound mean but hey who can blame someone for having a little laugh at the new guy.

   Once we got underway and out of the bay we set sail for a little while. Before we even began I was really worried that I'd have forgotten everything but it really does come back real quick and I don't think I embarrassed myself too much.
   After an hour or two we doused the sails though because hey we may have 18th century rigging but we have a 20th century schedule to keep (and a diesel engine to make it happen). It was mostly a nice day (I don't think anyone even got seasick!) with the green coastline passing along on our left. The day passed uneventfully.
   Went to bed around 9 I think, since I was on the 4-8 watch, even though at that point word was we would arrive in Coos Bay probably around midnight, so I fully expected a wake up for docking procedures.
   As it happens I woke up aware that we had evidently docked, due to the voices on deck, but the off-watch was never roused. One of the passengers had offered me a ride back to Newport (hallelujah!), but now I became fretful they'd slink off at hte night or in the morning before I caught them, so I bolted out of the forecastle like a meerkat (the forecastle, where the crew sleeps, is a small enclosed space in the front of the vessel accessible to the main deck by a straight vertical ladder through a heavy hatch), and fortunately found them right at hand and we agreed to meet at a certain time (lost to me now, 9? 8? 7?). Also I discovered we were not actually in Coos Bay but "Charleston," which it turns out is just at the beginning of Coos Bay Bay.

   In the morning I met them (it was a couple) on deck at the appointed time and we disembarked with our stuff. Looking around we found we were in a small marina filled with fishing boats, surrounded by forest. I think a lumbermill was in sight nearby. As we walked down the dock we passed JB coming down the dock toward the boat in company with Caitlin. Caitlin, slightly younger than us, plain looking, longish dark hair, recently married to some sailor I don't know, had also been on crew with me and I had found her rather insipid, known primary to spread gossip and pine after Will Kirby. She is now apparently also affixed to the organization's office like a barnacle. As I passed these two people I had crewed with, lived with for weeks, and not seen in years, we gave eachother the merest nod of recognition.

   We got a taxi to Coos Bay town where the couple had a rental car lined up, and barely had we left town on the road through the thickly forested coast toward Newport when I got a text from Kori:
   "Ken has been fired"

   Caitlin's husband was then installed as captain.

Comments

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Quite so!!