was only able to do one leg, but hey, someone had to be there for our daughter Kate's High School Graduation! Swallowing her great disappointment she and her daughters Kate and Siobhan,
complete with video-camera (yes folks, there WILL be a Rose video available soon through this site, and priced fairly moderately, I assure you) stood on the dock and waved us off at the dot of 8:30 pm or 20:30 as it should properly be called. Sue's place on the outward leg of the voyage was taken by a friend Michael Graves.
Poor Michael! His doctor didn't tell him to take anything against seasickness before departing, only if he felt sick later. Wrong! Despite Bailey's assurance that he personally had never known anyone be sick for more than eight hours, Michael managed somewhere between thirty-six to forty-eight. I don't want you to think that I was at all worried, but at least twice I went below to check his vital signs!
And so off we sailed -- or to be strictly accurate, motored -- into the evening fog that was growing in the harbor and its environs. In fact we had been extremely lucky only to have fog. A thunderstorm had been forecast as well, but we were spared that.It was during this departure that some of us discovered that we had been assigned the 12-4, or Hell Watch. Little did any of us suspect what that would mean to us Old F*rts!Here I should note that the Bells were never used; there was one clock in the Galley that struck them, but it would have been much too much for us poor Trainees to have to deal with on top of everything else. Plus Hunter 
, the Sea Cook, doesn't exactly welcome visitors to his galley!
And now the first piece of magic happened. As we moved slowly but majestically through the darkening harbor, out of the fog came The Bounty, and for several moments we two were the only vessels visible out there. It was for me an absolutely spellbinding moment, as though we had somehow been transported back some two hundred and fifty years! And now our dauntless Captain did the only right and proper thing. He unlimbered a gun and fired on Bounty! She immediately lowered a boat and returned H.M.S.Rose the lifebelt that she had apparently been holding.
That was enough excitement for one evening, and, being acutely aware that I was on the midnight to four watch, I retired to my cosy bunk,
the inboard starboard side bottom of a set of Navy three-ups inherited from the U.S.S.Intrepid and located in B Compartment on what would have been the orlop in a ship of the period. Very snug! No ventilation at all apart from what floated down from the open hatchway to the Gundeck, and came with two sheets, an 'incontinence' undersheet of which more will be said later, and a pillow. I spread out my sleeping-bag, crawled in and went out like a light. It was the last night -- night!? -- of comfortable sleep that I was to enjoy.
Well, we certainly got pitched right into the fray, so to speak. Even without the wind we went straight into our regular days. Watch from midnight to four, muster down at four, into bunks by 4:15, woken again at 7:45 for breakfast, then up on deck for class or back to bed if possible, although it was now getting warmer down there, woken at 11:30 for lunch, then on watch until 4 pm,, back to sleep if possible, except by now the conditions in the Compartments were becoming positively equatorial, dinner at 6:30 and then time off until we started the whole rigmarole over again!
Actually, that is grossly unfair to Hunter and his superlative cooking; I liked to refer to it as 'Food You Wish Your Mother Had Made.' He's a meat'n'potatoes sort of guy, and that certainly seemed to be alright with us! There were very few leftovers, and what there were, were always snapped up when they appeared again cleverly disguised.
From here on in I will have to start describing the journey in a much more general way since one day tended to meld into the next with little or no sort of differentiation, but I think that is true when you are living in any situation that is as regimented as life tends to be aboard a Tall Ship. A friend of mine said years ago that it was one of the things that he hated most about being in hospital, the ease with which one falls into the rhythm of the place, and surrenders one's own will to that of whoever is in charge.On the other hand I must hasten to say that for me, and I sincerely believe for most of us, that was part of what made the experience so wonderfully different and thrilling. Add to that the total lack of telephones, radio and television, and one's life became so much easier in some ways,although to say that we had no radio is to belittle the enormous contribution made to the welfare of all of us by Faunt.
of whose singular accomplishment, more anon!
