Sailing ships and second chances.

What were they thinking?

Before I embark on this next Snippet, I want to thank you all so much for your comments on Spunky’s story. It gives me no end of pleasure to know that he has landed in a few more hearts. Your comments, both private and shared, generated a few tears and a whole bunch of happy memories.

On the topic of memories…

Forty-one years ago, precisely at 10:00 am on a damp grey Thursday morning in September, I stepped aboard 130 feet of intoxicating wooden sail boat bliss named ‘Our Svanen’. Built in 1922 in Denmark as a three-masted topsail schooner, she had an envied reputation of being one of the faster sailing trading ships of her time. In 1969 Douglas and Margaret Havers became her new owners and began the monumental task of an extensive rebuild during which she was reconfigured as a three masted Barquentine. In 1977 she slipped her lines from Denmark and headed to Poole, England, where her refit was completed. ‘Our Svanen’ left England in the fall of 1978 on a nine month voyage to the west coast of Canada, arriving in Victoria August of 1979.

‘Our Svanen’

My first sighting of ‘Our Svanen’ was in the summer of 1980. At a time in my life when things were starting to run amok, when I felt a hopeless inevitability based on gender to succumb to an approved and accepted existence as a compliant invisible female, I saw a second chance. Arggghhh, pirate, I thought. Excellent!

Okay, it wasn’t quite that simplistic. I pestered the Havers for weeks, constantly peering over the bulwarks of their boat inquiring about crew positions. We”ll put you on the list, they kindly said. It’s a long list, they hastily added. Daily I would gaze wistfully at their boat, striving to catch their attention by madly polishing anything shiny aboard the sailing boat I was currently volunteering on. I must have worn them down a little with my daily inquiries of work, because one day the position of ship’s cook was dangled in front of me. I confess I resorted to telling outrageous lies about my experience and capabilities. Of course I can cook, I said with theatrical conviction. No problem at all.

The speed in which I made it to a call box to phone my Mom with the demand to teach me all and everything about cooking broke all records. In two short weeks I had flown back to Toronto where I had been taking a fine arts degree at University. I cancelled classes, packed up all my stuff to leave in various basements and garages for safe keeping and returned to Victoria for a crash course in bread making and meal planning. A copy of The Joy of Cooking awaited me. The reality of my pirate fantasy now included cooking for a crew of twenty-four people at sea.

I should also add that at the time I was in the Canadian Reserves (Navy) and as the boat was being chartered by the military as a sail training vessel, a female officer on board was a bit of a bonus. I was very low on the military food chain, but I had completed my officer training course (left right, left right and better be sure that bed is made well) and my sailing instructors course in Kingston. Not exactly staggering commendations for becoming a crew member, but you gotta work with what you have.

My first day on board was a disconcerting realization that I was in WAY over my head. The intricate world of standing rigging, running rigging, belaying pins, masts, booms, gaffs, square sails, topsails, main sails, mizzen sails, gangways and aft decks had only existed for me in books full of handsome swash buckling ne’er-do-wells and the occasional educational film about rounding the Horn. There was a moment of panic as I took in the number of lines, the size of the sails (beautiful, flax, and heavy as heck when wet), the height of the masts.

That panic only increased when I was handed three type written pages listing food items needed for restocking the boat. My first task was to figure out the quantities required for feeding eighteen to twenty-four people over four months. It was like reliving those horrible math problems from school. I broke out in a cold sweat and stared blankly at the pages. How much spaghetti would it take to feed a hungry crew of twenty-four? Rice? Beans? How many pounds of raisins, shredded coconut, dates? Gallons of oil, jars of mustard? Sacks of oats, flour, coffee? Bags of tea? My fear level increased when I realized spam and corned beef were on the list of tinned goods. What on earth was I going to do with those?

A fuzzy picture of collecting stores for heading to sea.

By the end of the first day I was in quite the state imagining what the Havers were thinking as they witnessed the scope of my incompetence, all my sailing dreams about to be dashed before we had even left the dock.

She’s a vegetarian? Does she know anything about cooking? She’s never made bread? She was studying what at Uni? Is it too late to chuck her back ashore? What were we thinking?

Douglas Havers gave me one beady look and told me to get on with it. I did.

Margaret Havers took it upon herself to educate me on the creative things one can do to spam and corned beef to make them palatable to the omnivore crew. The learning curve was mighty steep. I learned.

Day Two I slept in. I cringed.

Day Three the Bo’sun woke me promptly at dawn determined to be fed breakfast on time. I made pancakes.

Day Four and I was going aloft, heart racing and realizing that climbing the rigging was not exactly calming nor as easy as it looks from afar. I managed.

I had to train myself on waking not to sit straight up in my bunk as planting one’s head into a deck beam each morning can have negative results. There were three meals a day to be provided, the first one to be on the table by 7:00 am. Working out how to ride the folding bicycle on trips to the grocery store in James Bay for fresh supplies, and then negotiating the return journey to the inner harbour which was downright hazardous when the bike boxes were fully loaded. Memorizing ALL the lines, learning the history of the boat, getting to know the crew, sanding, painting, varnishing, cleaning.

Day Sixteen we slipped our mooring lines. I had a precarious hold on what was required of me and so embarked on an adventure of a life time.

We sailed first to Port Townsend, anchored in the bay and spent a wonderful week enjoying the hospitality of the wooden boat crowd and getting into the rhythms of life on board. Before we left we floated lumber out to the boat, hauled it onto the side decks, battened it down and made it secure for its journey down south. The wood was destined for replacing the foredeck once we reached La Paz, Mexico. The work would all to be done whilst at anchor with the help of two very competent shipwrights from Port Townsend. I was feeling very ‘sailor’ that week and full of confidence for the voyage ahead.

On October 10, we weighed anchor at first light and headed out to the Pacific, hanging a left at Cape Flattery. The arrival of dinner coincided with the arrival of the Pacific swell. My entry in my log book reads: how can one describe it…it’s not your basic feeling of nausea…it’s deeper than that..

I offered the sea the better part of everything I had eaten that day, slept like a log, woke to a lurching, bouncing, crashing world and emptied my stomach once again into the sea. For three days I hung over the side of the boat in utter bafflement that there was still things in my stomach to upchuck. It took all my effort to pry my fingers off the rail and get in the galley. I eventually found my ‘sea legs’ but each and every time we left port, I would struggle with sea sickness, no matter the weather.

Scrimshaw. A valued member of the crew.

When I look back at crewing on ‘Our Svanen’, I am still astonished at the experience. I managed a level of competency in the galley that meant everyone got fed, although gourmet it was not! I suspect the only member of the crew who truly appreciated my efforts was Scrimshaw who demanded his dinner at precisely the same time each day, no matter the weather, by dragging his bowl into the galley and dropping it at my feet. Scrimshaw also sometimes felt a bit woozy at sea, but he knew to keep his belly full!

My relationship with the dreaded spam and corned beef always remained awkward although those two items caused me less anxiety than some of the offerings provided by the sea. I learned to bake cakes in all sorts of conditions. Named not by their flavour, but by the angle of dangle at the time of baking. Port cake when the wind was steady on the starboard side, and Starboard cake when we leaned that way. Upside Down Cake was avoided for obvious reasons. Bread making was almost a daily thing, porridge for twenty-four became the norm. Pancakes for that number of people never got easy. I mastered the art of the Cornish Pastie albeit with the innards altered to suit my vegetarian preferences.

The crew suffered through my learning curve in the galley with fortitude and humour. There was never anything left over, but I put that down to the hunger created by working hard and the bracing sea air.

In the two years aboard ‘Our Svanen’ I experienced crossing both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. We spent time on the coast of Mexico maintaining the boat, traveled through the Panama Canal, tootled about in the Caribbean before joining the Tall Ships Race in 1982.

It really was the best of times. I had found ‘home’ and an environment that challenged and nurtured me to become resilient, appreciative, and awestruck in equal measures. I saw parts of the world hitherto unknown to me, connected to people who continue to influence me, and developed a life long love for the sea. I have four thick log books absolutely full of words from a naive twenty-year old’s perspective of life at sea. They are rather hilarious and more than a little embarrassing.

Me, absolutely happy knowing I had found a home on ‘Our Svanen’

Perhaps the biggest gift of those two years is the relationship I built with the Havers. They took a huge gamble on me, and no matter how many times I fumbled and tripped, and there were many, they stood by their initial decision to keep me on as crew. I would be hard pressed to find two humans I care about more deeply, respect and cherish than I do Doug and Margaret. Happily, they continue to invite Thomas and I to join them on their travels and we continue to have some whack-a-doodle adventures together. They sometimes even let me cook for them!

Doug and Margaret.

‘Til the next time, kristine

With the exception of the last picture, the photo quality ( or lack there of) is purely the fault of my old camera and my dubious skill in using it. Or the fact that these are photos of pictures glued into my old journals. Like myself, they are a bit more wrinkled and weather beaten than the day they were taken.