Overseas Briefing

Author: Caleigh Waldman

SEA SEMESTER - Awoken at 2:30 a.m. with a rustling of my bunk curtains and a whispered debriefing of the wind and sea conditions, I groggily throw on my shoes, grab my flashlight and a mug of coffee as I stumble up on deck for dawn watch. The next four hours will be comprised of sail handling, time at the helm, looking out for other ships from the bow and helping the science team do some deployments and data processing. Then right about at 6 a.m. is when the star frenzy begins - everyone on deck grabs a sextant and points it in the direction of some of the brightest navigational stars in the sky, bringing in the horizon with this same contraption used by mariners hundreds of years ago, and recording the degree readings that we would later use to pinpoint our exact location on the globe. I live for these 15 minutes or so when the sky is becoming light enough so that you can just make out the horizon, but still dark enough that the brightest stars are visible.

Having been landlocked my entire life, living in Kentucky and going to school in Vermont, I had no experience sailing before this past fall. My six weeks aboard the Robert C Seamans, a 134-foot brigantine sailing vessel, opened my eyes to many things I would not have imagined.

A landless horizon, for one. The first week aboard the ship I was totally land sick, desperate for just a line of earth on the horizon, yet by the end of the six weeks the sight of land made my heart sink, an unwelcome interruption to our journey across a water world.

The importance of a good wakeup. The tone of your day can amazingly be set by the person who wakes you up at some ungodly hour in the night for your next watch. The soothing happy wakeups were in great demand (especially that of our Irish shipmate, her accent just made you happy about getting up and cuddling with a mug of tea), while the bumbling shipmate caught in your bunk curtains barking an abrasive "it's 2:30, get up" made you bolt upright, banging your head in the process and inciting a strong desire to hurl anything heavy and hard in his/her direction.

How to speak the seafaring language. Sheets and halyards and clews and stays'ls and gybing and tacking and heaving to. And don't forget galleys and heads and soles.

The preferred bird removal tactic: fire hose. There was some crafty fashioning of a giant slingshot made out of science equipment used to shoot rotten limes at the birds aloft, as well as a potato gun propelled by the engineers' air compressor. The fire hose method was the most successful, but still took days to rid the ship of them.

The greatest extremes of emotion I have experienced. The highest highs but also sometimes the lowest lows. The long, irregular days, the hard work, the close relationships formed.

And this semester was all about experience. Everything we learned was by doing. And though I'm undoubtedly still a landlubber, this experience incited in me a longing to be out on the water, a place I have no doubt I will return someday.