LANDLUBBERS MUST ADJUST TO BOATING LIFE
Fred Dyson – Dyson's Starboard View – Messing About in Boats
Welcome aboard and welcome to the wonderful world of boating, adventure, seasickness, liars, thrills, beautiful shorelines, and sea stories.
Boating is different and landlubbers are going to have to make some adjustments when they go to sea. Here are a few things to watch for:
Boats move, or at least most of them do, and that can cause the dreaded 'Mal del Mar.' The more common term is seasickness, feeding the fish, selling Buicks, and some other terms that even today are not suitable for a family newspaper. We will devote a future column to prevention and cure.
In addition, when the boat rocks, everything that isn't lashed down will be thrown around. Last year my gillnetter was rolled up its side in the surf off Smokey Point Bar, and every drawer and cupboard was instantly emptied onto the cabin floor and into the bilges. Three weeks later I was still finding lost tools, fittings, and groceries.
Boats have no square corners. Square, boxed, and hard suitcases are difficult to stow. Experienced seamen put things in sea, or duffel, bags. The beds (bunks) are small, seldom rectangular, and never level. We will deal with the various strategies for staying in your bunk in a sea way (when waves are big) in a future column.
Cooking is different. All real maritime cook stoves have a railing around them to keep pots on the stove when the boat rocks and pitches. Believe me, it's no fun trying to pick your dinner up out of the bilges (bottom of the boat) or to clean mashed potatoes out of the bilge pump screens.
Without lots of refrigeration space, storing food is different, too. Good stores in seaports will have a great variety of food that will keep. People in the bush are familiar with these items.
Good cooks at sea are generally gifted athletes who can nimbly balance in the galley (kitchen) with pots sliding on the stove, a cup of coffee in one hand, a spatula in the other, and a cigarette hanging from the lips, without spilling a drop. We will deal with cooking on the water and some good recipes in the future.
Sanitation. No garbage cans and no garbage trunks. Small or non-existent bathrooms and very little privacy. Dealing with garbage is a hassle on a boat, but common decency and federal law require that you not discharge it overboard.
During World War II, the Japanese obtained significant intelligence from U.S. warships. Now your garbage will just litter our shoreline and perhaps foul someone's prop or net. If you throw your garbage overboard, you deserve to be keelhauled or flogged around the fleet. We will define those seagoing punishments in the future.
On boats, the toilet is called a 'head' and my father maintained that the funniest things have to do with heads. Most good marine toilets have some provisions to allow the user to hang on and remain in 'position' while pursuing the 'necessary business' at hand. I discuss some of these hilarious misadventures in other articles.
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