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Mercantile
Day 1: Camden to Brooklin

Ben McCanna

(page 1 of 3)

    May 19, 2008

    I'm sitting on a park bench on the edge of Camden's inner harbor. It's a fine spring morning; the kind of day that's difficult to dress for. A t-shirt is too sparse in the breeze, but whenever the wind lies down and the sun feels too oppressive, I take off my foul-weather jacket and drape it over my knee.

    In the middle of the inner harbor, Captain Ray's crews scramble atop his three windjammers — the Mercantile, Grace Bailey, and Mistress. On the Mercantile, they're making last-minute preparations for our four-day cruise.

    From the quarterdeck of the Mercantile, the deckhand Matt Epperson shouts my name. It's time to go. I pick up my dry bags, and teeter uneasily across the dock floats as I step toward the gangway and onto the ship.

    As the crew readies the Mercantile for departure, I stow my gear in my cabin. I feel a little over-prepared in the midst of Captain Ray's crew. Matt and the first mate, Andy Gardiner, run barefoot up and down the length of the boat; both wear t-shirts. Suddenly my dry bags and foul-weather gear seem silly in the face of all this bravura seamanship. These are the cool kids, the ones who sit at the back of the bus, and I feel as though I've stumbled upon their fringe society wearing a Cub Scout uniform and neatly parted hair. I'm a poindexter on a ship of cool. Belowdecks, I reassess my wardrobe. I'm not about to go barefoot, but I ditch the foul-weather jacket for a simple sweatshirt and go topsides for the show.

    This is the first trip of the season, and all but two of the Mercantile crew is green. Andy's been sailing with Captain Ray for three years, Captain Ray’s been sailing schooners since I was in grade school, but this is the first cruise for Matt Epperson the deckhand, Alison Jones the cook, and Holly Takashima the messmate. As such, the departure is a little rough.

    Piloting a ship is similar to piloting a jet in that the two most difficult aspects are leaving land and returning to it. Captain Ray's three ships — known collectively as the Green Boats — are rafted together in the middle of Camden's inner harbor; the Mercantile lies at its center. This is an unenviable position. Disembarking the Mercantile from between the other two ships is like extracting lunchmeat from a sandwich without rumpling the bread. It's an all-hands-on-deck situation for the Mercantile, Grace Bailey, and Mistress crews. Plus, once the difficult task of removing the Mercantile is complete, the other two vessels must be rafted together to close the gap. To facilitate this, Camden's harbormaster and another schooner captain have been enlisted in support craft.

    To complicate matters further, the Mercantile — like many ships in the windjammer fleet — doesn't have an inboard engine. Instead, the Mercantile has a yawlboat. Andy's job is to push the Mercantile out of the menagerie with measured thrusts from the relatively puny yawlboat. This means that one of the two experienced crew members won't be on the boat during the departure, which leaves only Captain Ray, his green crew members, and a bill of flummoxed passengers.

    The wind, in the meantime, has picked up substantially.

    Captain Ray gives the orders, the mooring lines and the gangway are cast off, and Andy throttles up the yawlboat. The Mercantile lurches forward for a few feet then grinds to a stop. The gangway somehow became entangled in the starboard rail and the Mercantile threatens to drag it out to the Bay. Matt springs from the Mercantile onto the dock float and struggles to unfoul the gangway — a substantial length of extruded aluminum--while Andy uses the yawlboat to ease the Mercantile back to her original position.



 

Posted on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 in Permalink