The passage to be executed was
Seattle to Panama, of perhaps five legs in number. Given certain time constraints, and the myriad commitments of friends and acquaintances who wanted pieces of this trip, we had no recourse but to hire crew. Into a sailing magazine went a decently-worded ad for crew. Out of the ad came four sailors who we thought would “do”. Three of them “did”, and did well, for all the good and companionable virtues they carried with them onto our Morgan OutIsland512 ketch: fortitude,
On the second day, he said, “Just
about all the rope ends on this boat are unacceptable.” Indeed, many ends had not been whipped, but burnt. “Unacceptable. A wind will blow this end around and it will hit my face, and hurt me. So… I will whip all the ends of all your ropes. Then no one will get hurt.” I said, “Good, Fred,” endeavoring
hard to find a way to express gratitude toward him, yet trying to recall if I had ever heard of a head injury caused by the end of a rope.
The Crewman Who Never Was
All hands were on deck – except Fred, who wouldn’t hand steer the boat and cheated at Scrabble. I knew my interviewing process had been a little too brief.
By Daniel Millar
amiability, know-how, absence of whining. Fred did not; did all that was not good, did next to nothing that was useful, and managed to drain from the rest of us our energy, humor, patience, resources for sociability, and serenity. Our selection process for
candidates was brief: a conversation in the saloon, various questions regarding experience, explanations about what we expected, and a tour of the boat, so that each candidate could, from his or her part, decide if we were about to sail something seaworthy toward the tropics. Fred had begun auspiciously. He
had his electrolyte powder, cans and cans of it, FedExed from Seattle to San Diego, for his leg of the trip was San Diego to Ixtapa, Mexico. He brought, for the general use of all, a supremely generous amount of dark-roast coffee beans, 10 pounds in all, and said to me, gently and mildly, “Here is a coffee grinder which I give to your boat, a sign that I like you.”
48° NORTH, SEPTEMBER 2010 PAGE 62 On the fourth day, into the quiet
bliss of my 0200-0600 watch, up stormed Fred, spitting invectives and drooling snuff juice onto the cockpit sole. “RANDOM NOISE!!!!! RANDOM
NOISE!!!!! I WON‘T #*&$#^%ing HAVE IT!!!!!” He then went his way up to the
mainmast, lay down on his back with his flashlight, and in 30 minutes time examined, shook, tugged at, slapped every block, every rope and fitting, that might have bleated or creaked enough to be audible in his bunk in the saloon. “I DIDN’T FIND THE &*(&%$#%^in’ CULPRIT. HOW CAN A BODY SLEEP THROUGH RANDOM NOISE?” When he went back down, I
went forward with WD-40 and in a few minutes found and silenced the offending sheave. Sometime early in the leg, Fred
and I had a philosophical conversation about hydraulic steering. Of course, the standard criticism of this system is
that the helmsperson does not receive feedback from the wheel, and so cannot determine if there is, say, weather helm.
“But Fred, I argue that that
conventional wisdom is wrong. Here, steer the boat manually for a few minutes.” (99% of our sailing was on autopilot.) “NO.” “What do you mean, NO? I’m
asking you to see how it feels when steered manually, to tell me if I am arguing validly that, yes, indeed, there is tactile feedback in this system.” “NO. I hate hydraulic steering. I won’t steer this boat by hand. EVER.” My interviewing process had been a little too brief. In gentle winds and warm sun, a
hundred miles off Baja California, we close-reached and played Scrabble in the cockpit. Fred warned everyone that he had been playing for 50 years, and was good, and competitive, and hated losing. Laughter all around – until he cheated. He had two favorite ways of
cheating. The first was to miscount letter and word values. Our gentlest, kindest, sweetest crewmember challenged his count. He had invented the count. Then she challenged him again a few turns later. He stood up suddenly, huffed and puffed, and put his face to hers, and shouted, “FROM NOW ON YOU COUNT.” The second of his favorite cheats
was to put down a so-called word, then claim that because it was found in the American Heritage Dictionary, it was legal. This he did with “IQ”. It was my turn to stand up. “You’re
the one here who’s been playing for 50 years. Don’t you know how to play this game responsibly?” I’m not a skipper who yells, but
I was growing tired of this character. So Fred and I stood at the binnacle, shouting at each other about legal and illegal words as the ship reached in the beautiful afternoon light, as the other players sat away from the scene of the fight, uncomfortable, uneasy. And so the game was abandoned. Later, my wife scolded me for permitting steam to hiss from my ears, nose, and mouth. We almost managed to again
become pals. We shook hands hours later, and quiet and reason again
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