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Journey
Aug 9, 2008 17:42:21 GMT -5
Post by Rook on Aug 9, 2008 17:42:21 GMT -5
Her Majesty the Queen and myself will be gone for almost the next two weeks. The next six days there will be no ability to check the boards or e-mail and limited connectivity for the week after. The Pilgrim of Dana Point will be sailing and we have the opportunity to be aboard.
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Nesslandria Haneh
Aristocrat
Countess of Wolfshire County
Loyal servant to our Lord Protector and his Queen.
Posts: 230
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Journey
Aug 12, 2008 8:17:08 GMT -5
Post by Nesslandria Haneh on Aug 12, 2008 8:17:08 GMT -5
Have a safe journey! We will keep the kingdom safe and functioning smoothly in your absence. ;D
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Gelare
Academy Faculty
Citizen of Nerianti of Wolfshire
Dean Gelare of the Academy
Posts: 138
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Journey
Aug 13, 2008 4:38:49 GMT -5
Post by Gelare on Aug 13, 2008 4:38:49 GMT -5
Hey everybody! Party at Castle Uantir while the King and Queen are gone! Wooooo!
;-)
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Nesslandria Haneh
Aristocrat
Countess of Wolfshire County
Loyal servant to our Lord Protector and his Queen.
Posts: 230
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Journey
Aug 14, 2008 19:48:28 GMT -5
Post by Nesslandria Haneh on Aug 14, 2008 19:48:28 GMT -5
Hey everybody! Party at Castle Uantir while the King and Queen are gone! Wooooo! ;-) Maybe you'd better leave the keys with me. (Psst...Gelare! I'll make the chip dip, you bring the chips ;D)
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Journey
Aug 17, 2008 21:34:29 GMT -5
Post by Rook on Aug 17, 2008 21:34:29 GMT -5
I'm glad to see you're all having a fun time without me, just make sure to mark the leftovers in the fridge so I can eat some. We are home from our sail, and it was fantastic. I'll write more and post pictures soon. I have to leave again and will be gone until the 24th, but the Queen will be here.
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Journey
Aug 20, 2008 5:00:41 GMT -5
Post by Mira O'Halloran on Aug 20, 2008 5:00:41 GMT -5
Hey everybody! Party at Castle Uantir while the King and Queen are gone! Wooooo! ;-) Maybe you'd better leave the keys with me. (Psst...Gelare! I'll make the chip dip, you bring the chips ;D) I'll bring the drinks!! I hope your majesties are having a wonderful time.
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Journey
Aug 25, 2008 23:07:00 GMT -5
Post by Rook on Aug 25, 2008 23:07:00 GMT -5
Well we are home at last, and will be staying that way for a while. The thrilling tale will be composed and posted later this week.
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Journey
Aug 28, 2008 12:00:48 GMT -5
Post by Rook on Aug 28, 2008 12:00:48 GMT -5
Our voyage upon Pilgrim and company:
First, I would like to say, a fair amount of video was taken and the edited compilation will be made available to all.
I had sailed Pilgrim once before, a year ago, so I was familiar with how things operated. Getting the ship under way was a fair bit of work. As prepared as you can get a ship the day before, the moment it's ready to go nothing is ready and everything needs to be done. We had to release the anchor chain from the dock and bring it aboard and lash it to the anchor. That's a project in itself for the each link of the chain weighs over a pound and you're dragging it by hand up the freeboard (height of the ship out of the water) of the bow which is nearly ten feet to where the anchor is lashed to the rail. This is all done with ropes and 'I know what you did last summer' hooks. During preparations we were required to bring down the bulwark for a section of the rail that we use for the gangway. That section of bulwark is about five feet long and four feet high, solid wood, and was stowed in the loft, which is the attic of our barn. We used many people and a block and tackle system to do so. The boats needed to be lifted aboard, outboard engines and all, with manual block and tackle systems. Amid all this flurry of work we're expected to report to the boatswain for our bunk assignments. You choose your bunk space depending on your ranking against everyone else according to your volunteer hours. The ship leaks, so there are long sheets of plastic provided which we staple to the ceiling to stop the water dripping onto our bunks.
Now, I must be honest, the majority of it all is very boring so what I'm going to do now is give you a brief look at the average day and then cite some interesting derivations upon the daily routine.
7:00 Wakeup call. The boatswain, or boats as we lovingly call Mr. Charlie Bell, marches through the belowdeck area where we sleep shouting 'All hands rise and shine!' or 'Wake up you sleepy heads there's work to be done!'
Seven AM is the only firm time of our schedule. The next thing we do is eat breakfast, and the time of breakfast depends on if boats woke us up at 7 or 7:30 and if the cook is behind on the cooking or not. After we eat breakfast, which I have to say was better than anything I cook for Di is an amazing cook, we haul away at the windlass.
The windlass. Every night we drop anchor, our six hundred pound anchor. Most people think that the anchor is designed to dig into the ocean floor and stop the ship from sliding away. That is incorrect. If you remember I brought up how heavy the anchor chain is. Each link is about a pound and each link is less than half a foot long. We measure how much chain we let out in 'shots' which are ninety foot increments. So when we let out three shot of chain we're letting out 270 feet of chain at over two pounds a foot. It is the weight of the chain that stops the boat, the anchor just gets the chain to the bottom of the ocean. Our windlass is a vertical capstan as it was described to me. On either side of the contraption there are two long handles sticking out parallel to the deck. When these are rotated in a circle front to back on this vertical plane it rotates a series of gears which in turn rotate the 'dogs' which is a machined round bit of metal with protrusions which grip the anchor chain and thus pull it up. So every morning we fall to the manual windlass, lay our hands upon the bar, two men to a side four in all, and crank with all our might as soon as the boatswain shouts 'heave around!' and continue to heave until boats shouts those adored words 'change out!' At that cry we are allowed to stop and rest while four others begin to heave around. But we get back in line and soon are straining again. There is a problem with our windlass though. If I was told the truth our windlass is very old. The story goes that it was recovered from a ship that sunk in the late 1840s, was kept in a museum until it was bought by the man who rebuilt Pilgrim and restored it. For that reason the dogs have been worn away and they don't grip the chain like they should. When it comes under strain every three to five links we draw up fall from the dogs and we loose two links. That's maddening to begin with but every time it skips it twists. Twists in a line or chain create haukles, which I will tell you more about later.
After the anchor is above the water line and dangling straight down it has to be hauled up with the fish tackle and lashed to the rail, which is a brutes work but fun.
Then it's time for washdown. We clean the ship every morning and your watch gets to work either on the quarterdeck, which is mostly polishing brass, on the main deck, which is a salt water deck scrub, or below decks which is cleaning the heads (toilets) and sweeping up. No one grumbles too hard about washdown, though no one likes to do it. We are all happy we're not engineers and have to deal with the toilets when they are clogged.
The usual course of action after the anchor is weighed and the ship has been cleaned is that we are set to sail stations. We report to our mast captains and prepare to set sail, which involves clapping on a harness and climbing up the rigging eighty feet to untie the gaskets which are the ropes that hold the sail up on the yards. Once we're safely back on deck we begin to haul upon the lines necessary for each sail to be set, hauling the sheets, letting away the clews, heaving at the haulyard. The exact method for setting sail is dry, so I'll happily tell anyone who's interested but will move forward for now.
After all the sails are set we are turned to our watch. We each get a watch on the ship, Her Majesty and myself were midship, the other two crews were port and starboard. Each watch consists of a Watch Officer (WO) and a Junior Watch Officer (JWO.) Ramona was our WO, I was the JWO. Personally I would describe the JWO position the same way the Richard Henry Dana Jr. described the position of second mate in his book Two Year Before the Mast: A dog's berth. You've got the word officer in your title but you're not invited to the officers meetings in the morning during washdown. You are left in charge of your crew for washdown, telling them what and where to clean which they dislike, but you have to clean with them which makes you feel less like an officer and more like a bossy crew member. As JWO you're also the bearer of all bad news from the WO as the WO stays upon the quarter deck during the watch and it is the JWO who sends the messages to the fore deck or wherever that crew member is currently working. It was also the JWO's job to decide the most dreaded duty upon the ship: night watch. All in all I didn't mind my position so badly and my crew held no animosity towards me despite being given the worst trimmings of an officer's station. I heard stories of other JWOs who fell horribly victim to the burden of their rank and were not loved by their crew.
The rest of the day then was usually very dull in regards to the excitement of the mornings. We'd have lunch, we might be called to sail stations to tack or wear, which could take the whole afternoon, then we'd sail or motor on a bit more before we doused sail and let the anchor away before supper.
There were days where we had time ashore, there were days that we had time to swim and snorkel, but the most interesting of them I will tell you about now.
One day we were sailing slowly against the current so the boat was going at almost nothing, so they tossed lines over the side and let us swim alongside the boat as she sailed. I won a swimming race with both Ted and the ship.
We had an evening ashore at Catalina island. The bar there had no good libation, which was a pity since we were a dry ship and had no access to alcohol on the boat.
While anchored off Santa Barbara island a couple of crew were swimming off the side of the boat and some sea lions came to play with them. Supposedly they felt that the sea lions were thinking hard about nibbling their toes so they got out of the water.
We also sailed off the hook one day, which was fantastic. We set sail before we pulled up the anchor chain so that when the anchor came up we sailed away instead of motoring. It takes a bit of skill by the Captain and First Mate not to run us aground or foul us of our own chain but we did it and we can all be very proud of it.
The most eventful part of the trip was the haukle in the chain. As I said earlier the chain twisted as we brought it up. The average length of chain we would use was about two and a half shot, so at the three shot mark we had this big haukle, which was where all the twist in the chain was bunching up on itself. We decided that to cure this we would work the haukle to the end of the chain, untie the chain from the boat, twist the haukle off and lash it back again. We didn't think much about the fact that we were moving the haukle through 180 ft. of heavy chain. We also didn't think about the fact that the twist gets bigger the farther you work it. So by the time we got it to the end, which took over an hour, and got us filthy to the skin through our shirts with rust, we had a bunched up twist in the chain nearly five feet long and as thick as our head. The comedy is on video and we'll let you watch it when it's edited. The mate threatened to toss me overboard if I didn't willingly jump in the water to wash myself off.
I can't think of anything else worth recounting. Lots of singing, bad jokes and sunburn.
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