Tall Ships

The Blow

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The Blow

An excerpt from Chapter 23 of the new novel. The girls (disguised as boys) are sailing on Captain Swiftfoot Darkrunner’s frigate Velocity. Erin is known to captain and crew as Aaron Spotsworth; Sophie, as Michael Claude. The day after they’ve been promoted to midshipmen, the ship enters a terrible storm. Mr. MacLeish is the boatswain.

“Well done, Mr. McLeish,” Darkrunner told him.

“Oh, thank you, sir.”

“Is there anything you need?” Captain Darkrunner asked.

“Only a dozen more sailors, Sir,” MacLeish said. “But we’ll do with the ones we have. I don’t wish to give them airs, but they’re the best I’ve ‘ad the honor to sail with.”

“Good man, Mr. MacLeish,” said the captain. “But if you have a deck hand to spare, I think we need two more hands at the wheel. I fear Mr. Short won’t be able to hold her steady alone through his watch.”

“Aye, Sir.” Mr. MacLeish said before descending the companionway.

Erin shielded her eyes from the rain as she watched two men trim the foresail above. “It’s amazing they can hang on in this weather.”

“Sadly, not all do,” he said staring off at the ragged gray clouds advancing from the north. “A boy not much older than you was struck by a loose boom a fortnight ago and plunged to his death right where you’re standing.”

Erin quickly shifted from the spot and searched the boards for signs of blood.

“It was  appalling to see the lad splayed out like a broken doll.” The captain hesitated a moment before he was able to continue. “He was French — a prisoner shipmate of Mr. Petit’s until they joined the mutiny. Poor Petit scrubbed the deck furiously for an hour, sobbing like a child.”

Erin felt frozen where she stood.  She felt uneasy staring down, but didn’t want to look  up into the captain’s face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Spotsworth,” the captain said swiping his hand across his eyes. “I didn’t mean to burden you with my woes.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Erin said lifting her eyes. “It’s quite alright. I know how awful it is to lose a friend.”

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Hornblower and the Hotspur

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Hornbower and the Hotspur

For background for my sea story I’m reading Hornblower and the Hotspur by C. S. Forester.  The Hornblower series is set in the Napoleonic Wars, some eighty years after the period of my story. The characters are decidedly not pirates.  They’re the Royal Navy side of my tale.  For the pirate side I will read other books.

I read the Forester books to glean the nautical terms, the commands, the ship handling and the battle scenes which would have been very similar to the 1720’s when mine is set.

Apropos to children and sea stories, this series was among my father’s favorites.  He started reading them in 1937 at age 34, when the first two were published.  The last was written in the late ’60s.  Lord Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, was a boyhood hero of my dad’s.  Clearly he was influenced as a child by sea stories. His youth was at the time when Teddy Roosevelt and the emergence of American sea power were in vogue. You can see his stalwart nature and his passion for the navy in this precious portrait of Judge Wilmer Brady Hunt, my dad, when he was, as he would say, still in short pants.

Judge as a Tike

A few lines from my current project.

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Pettiprig's Stern

Admiral Squeamish Pettiprig raised an eyebrow. “My three ships can certainly sink Darkrunner’s one,” he said.

“But what if he’s with Nell Flanders?” Roderick asked wagging a finger at the admiral.

Pettiprig shrunk back for a moment before steeling himself once again. “I have good intelligence,” he replied. “That she’s careened her ship on the beach at Flamingo Petite.”

Minutes later Pettiprig’s flotilla sailed off in a rush to Port Left with Foppy Sniggers, who no one noticed lay unconscious on the floor of the wine locker.

A passage on a tall ship

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Lady Washington Passage HalfTomorrow, my friend Tom Ormbrek and I are sailing an eighty-mile passage from Ilwaco, Washington at the mouth of the Columbia River to Westport, Washington at the mouth of Grays Harbor.  We’ll leave at three in the afternoon and arrive at seven in the morning. Or nine, or noon depending on the wind and the seas.

We will sail on The Lady Washington, the official ship of the State of Washington.  It also happens to be the ship used in The Pirates of the Caribbeanand and many other films.  Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom stood upon it many a time.

Tom is a good friend and a very astute fellow from a lively, intelligent family.  His brother knows everything there is to know about old films.  And his other siblings are equally interesting.  His niece Layla is a writer.  His mother Virginia is wonderful women of about ninety who remembers much more than I’ve forgotten.    Tom is a tin bender, as he describes himself.  He’s a union man, making his living creating parts for Boeing aircraft.  And an expert on Northwest and general  American history, Mark Twain, the gold rush, etc.  Tom eschews commercial television in favor of PBS and C-SPAN.  And he plays a wicked harmonica.

I am going to see what life was like on a two-hundred year old ship.  The Lady Washington is a replica of one by the same name that sailed the Pacific long ago.  I want to sail on the closest thing I can to a real pirate ship as background for a children’s novel I am currently writing.

I’ll try to post from the trip, if technology allows.

So, yar!