We left Baltimore, bound for Tall Ships Charleston, on May 13th.
While the boat is traveling, it obviously doesn’t make any sense to have everyone on deck, so it makes sense to have a structured watch system in place, that way there is always a group of professional crew with a mix of passengers awake and operating the boat. The way watches work aboard Pride II, there are three four hour watches throughout the day, and we never dogged the watch. The Chief Mate would run the 12-4 watch, the Second Mate ran the 4-8 watch, and the bosun had the 8-12 watch. When you are not on watch, you are either off watch or on standby. The standby watch will typically be called up to help with sail-handling maneuvers, and the off watch is only called upon for jobs that require a lot of hands, or during an emergency situation.
For this particular transit I was on the 4-8 watch, with the Second Mate, Engineer, another deckhand, and two paying passengers as our guest crew. Personally this is also my favorite watch to be on, because you there is an opportunity to experience sunsets and sunrises, and there is a lot of change that happens during this watch. For all the other watches you are either on deck in the dark at night, or on deck during daylight hours. Since we had the Engineer, we had the biggest watch, but it also meant that we ran the generator at 0600 and 1800 everyday.
Seeing as this was the first day of our first transit, we had everyone up on deck for the first six or so hours. This gave us the opportunity to teach the guest crew how to set and handle sail. They got a big taste of the amount of work it takes to run the ship, and the first day can often be a little overwhelming to a newcomer. We broke into watches after sailing around Baltimore Harbor, and then heading south past the bridge. I was then stood down after lunch and was allowed to go down below to rest before my evening watch. I did end up staying up on deck, because our ship’s photographer rented a small plane to fly out and photograph us passing Annapolis and headed to our first festival of the season. I thought it would be pretty cool to see, and I was hoping to be in the pictures.
The first 24 hours were pretty calm. Coming into Day 2 of the transit, my watch was on as we left the Chesapeake Bay, and it was pretty interesting getting to hear all the radio chatter between the shipping vessels entering the channel. When you’re traveling by way of boat, you really get a first hand look at the way goods are moved from port to port, and in my opinion it’s really cool to see. We did come within a stone throw’s distance of a buoy, but that was the most “exciting” thing to happen on that watch. We didn’t get called up at all throughout the day, and our evening watch was also pretty calm. We did manage to catch Mahi Mahi during our evening watch, and none of us were really fisherman... But I tried fresh raw fish for the first time, and our cook was able to add it to the dinner he was almost finished making.
Day 3, was a day spent constantly monitoring the weather as we began to approach Cape Hatteras. This particular cape is known as being a “danger zone” during every transit up or down the coast, and it has to be timed properly and well-prepared for. We were called up to help reduce sail during our off watch to help reduce sail area just after lunch. During our afternoon/evening watch we realized that we should hold off to avoid seriously bad weather ahead. At this point it was 1630 and our captain made the call for us to heave to. We were sailing under the mains’l, fores’l, stays’l and tops’l. We called up the standby watch to strike the fore, and then we backed the tops’l and stays’l, backing the forward sails like this essentially makes them act as brakes in a sense. With the sails on opposite tacks, it helps to avoid any forward momentum. We sat hove to off of Bodie Island Lighthouse, where a former crew member was able to talk about us with all of the visitors, as well as snap a few pictures of us off in the distance. We were there for a few hours. Around 0100 my watch was called up to help set the fore and strike the tops’l, and the boat continued on her merry way.
So far, this had been a pretty good first transit for a new crew learning to work together. It was a bit rough, but there were many opportunities for sail-handling in heavier conditions, providing good learning experiences. On Day 4 we passed Cape Hatteras in pretty good conditions for the boat. Nothing else too crazy happened on this transit. But that night our captain decided to take us a little farther offshore to kill time before the festival, and give us more offshore experience before we would be racing against other boats in the next leg. 
The morning of Day 5 was spent coming closer to Charleston, and my watch was called up when we entered the harbor around 1100. We navigated the Cooper River to a slip in a marina near the festival grounds, giving us the chance to be out of the public eye for a night, while we put the boat to bed, filled water and connected to shore power. We also got a chance to get off the boat and explore Charleston together with our Guest Crew.
Fair Winds and Following Seas,
Brandi Lynn
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