Log of SV Wendaway

Ross in chain locker

My friend Ross leaves tomorrow morning, back to Canada and his family on Sonora Island. Here is a photo of him crammed into the chain locker aboard SV Wendaway.

Ross operates the Columbia III, a68 foot cruise ship that plies the waters of the Inside Passage off Canada’s Pacific Coast.

He’s a master mariner, former commercial helicopter pilot, and a dear old friend.

I invited him for a two week cruise aboard Wendaway and then forced him into gruelling “crew duties” such as replacing a worn windlass motor.

Wendy wrote by email: “But he’s a guest!” Yes, true enough.

But I know Ross extremely well.  I realized that even though he spends incredibly long days keeping Columbia III in tip-top condition as the “mothership” of Mothership Adventures,  he would NOT have been happy to just be sitting around doing nothing in the semi-tropical paradise of the Mexican Riviera.

When he arrived in Mazatlan,  pale and blinking in the bright sunlight, it was clear that the worst thing I could do would be to let him slide into a somnolent reverie.  He needed work – and lots of it. I had a list of deferred maintenance items an arm long; the windlass motor was just the first on the list.

Two weeks later and Ross is now getting ready to fly back to Canada, and he’s a changed man. He woke up today smiling -   nearly the first time I had seen him so relaxed.  “I’m  so glad to be getting back home,” he said.   It doesn’t take a  lot of insight to understand that what he really meant was that all the hard work of scrubbing and scraping, sanding and varnishing (not to mention all the stainless steel that he polished to a brilliant shine) had fully prepared him to resume his duties.

Ross at the end of his time aboard Wendaway

This is what friends are for.  Others might have erred in trying to force him to relax, which would have been a total disaster.  They might have thought they were doing him a big favour by letting him lounge around on the foredeck drinking margaritas, while the skipper kept everything together. That is not what real friends do.

Real friends look beyond the pale, exhausted specimen in front of them and recast the situation forcefully. It takes guts.

In the case of Ross, at first he didn’t take to the work regime easily. I had to shake him a few times at  the 5:30 am start each morning,  but after awhile, he did not complain. He started to dig into his chores silently; a manly silence reigned aboard Wendaway. This was really living!

Just have a look at him in the photo, right.  Just off the ship, getting ready to head home.  Does he look happy, or what?

Postscript:

The entire blog posting above is bogus. For one thing, it now appears that those are my legs sticking out the chain locker. For another, the photo of Ross With Margarita, above and right, was taken shortly after he arrived.

Yes, he was incredibly helpful; but no, I did not enslave him for his own good.   I think we both had a good time (I did!) and we had a few very interesting adventures. We hiked up to the top of Isla Isabella and talked to the fearless boobies.

Here’s  a portrait of one:

Brown Booby - Isla Isabella

We went on two jungle adventures. This one we took the dinghy up the river north of San Blas:

Dinghy jungle trip

And we did lots of sailing. This photo was taken by Sharon Tedrow aboard SV CaSTAway:

Wendaway under spinnaker

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