By Katie
My time on the St. Lawrence II has passed more quickly than I’d ever imagined. Once again, I find myself struggling to write down everything that I’ve experienced here, and so I’m turning to small memories and experiences in the hopes that it will serve as an exemplar for my days here.
SL2 looks like the dim blue light that floods the wardroom at night, the main throat halyard that I tried to set by myself every time I got the chance, the Inuktitut alphabet that four trainees taught us, the five point harnesses we used to climb aloft and on the headrig, and the note in the secret tea cabinet in the kitchen that encourages the reader to “slay the day away”. It’s the view from the camera lenses Bev and Wilhelm lent me and the way Lake Superior glitters from up aloft, the small circular scuttles that showed the lake submerging our belowdecks.
It sounds like the combined bell and whistle during C.O.W. (change of watch) every four hours, the waves crashing over the bow (and drenching anyone who dares to sit too far forward), the conch blowing to greet other ships, and the screams during sunset. Any time of day, you could hear laughter from the crew as they make jokes and puns— laughter that hurt my stomach from how intense it was—, the creaking of the floorboards in the galley, or the music that was softly played at the helm when seas were calm.
My life on the St. Lawrence II tastes like the cake our cook Wilhelm baked for a trainee’s seventeenth birthday or the chocolate chip stash Miller kept, and most of all of the copious amount of maple syrup that each wardroom member kept as their own secret stash. It smells like sea and sweat and the sunflower seeds that made their way into both of my lockers (and the head, somehow).
It feels like the pull of my hair as it’s French braided (perfectly in sync with half of the rest of the crew), the tack line scraping against my hands as I hold it in high winds, the cool metal of the divider as I measure distance on a map, and the tea our bosun Davison gave me. It’s Cochrane’s Hawaiian shirts, Miller’s innovation, and Bev’s quasi-communal jacket combined with quiet chats behind the deckhouse, pancakes left out for me in the morning because I slept through breakfast, cuddling with crewmates to fend off the cold, and the loud hum of the engine just a wall behind my head as I go to sleep. It is all of these things, all at once. I will miss it dearly.
You can follow along with Katie and the Tall Ships America team on Instagram and Facebook @tallshipsamerica. You can follow St. Lawrence II @tallshipsl2 and at www.tallshipexpeditions.com . Photo credits Katie Moore.