Ah yes. Our beloved leader! During this first week, before anything untoward happened, and before he became aware of the presence of a Jonah aboard his vessel, he was quite a happy chappy most of the time; never more so than when out for a morning run with Jackal; it gave a whole new twist to the term 'Dog Watch.'I understand that later in the trip our very own Faith
had a minor run-in with The Beast From 2000 Fathoms, but I would like to make it known here and now that I was probably the first lissun to be 'baptised' by That Darn Dog.
I was sitting in the gunroom at the time, and chanced to pick the wee beastie up. Suddenly I became aware of a warm and wet sensation creeping over my shorts' leg and running down to the deck. Hastily lowering said animal I observed a yellow puddle that had formed around my feet. I immediately said to John Scoran, a deck-hand, who was sitting there, "Where's the mop?" "What do you want it for?" he replied. "The dog has peed on the deck here, " I said, to which Scoran answered, "Are you sure it was him?"
So on we motored on towards Bermuda, making a steady eight to ten knots, and everything fell into a fairly steady rhythm. I was sharing my watch with Doug Faunt's wife Paleo
who managed to find comfortable little nesting places to curl up in from time to time, without, it seemed to me, missing a beat or a moment of her duties.
Bow watch at night was a most amazing experience. Never very much to see except the night that the dolphins came and played in the phosphorescence of the starboard bow-wave, but the sensation of sitting in almost total silence, almost alone in the middle of the Atlantic deep into the night, with nothing to see for miles anywhere, but a full sky of bright stars above and the gentle corkscrew rocking of the Rose as she drove South sends shivers up my spine even now when I think of it.
Yes, by and large (no pun intended) I was very happy, as indeed I suspect we all were. Granted we weren't sailing, as in a full spread of canvas and no engines, and there were moments when, due to lack of sleep and so on, when I am sure that I wasn't alone in asking myself, "Why the Hell did I ever think this was a good idea?" but we were getting a very fair taste of what life must have been like in most other respects aboard a ship of the line. Watches, especially the one I was on, were exacting in terms of the timing, none of us had ever taken the helm of a square-rigger before, and no one found it as easy as we had all been led to believe. Forepeak Fred nicknamed me Spinner Tull
after watching the way that I handled the wheel, spinning it and catching the spokes with great abandon. It was all the fault of seeing The Crimson Pirate one too many times, and having a romantic notion of what it looked like. Needless to say, it did little for the accuracy of the steering -- in fact had I been allowed to keep it up we might well have eventually made landfall in the Azores. Plus my language was getting fruitier with every passing day. Our second mate Tony Arrow said that neither he nor the deckhands had even heard, let alone known half of the words that I used that first week at sea!
© 1997 
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