They gave us a schooner!

It's eleven pm, pacific standard time, and an incessant banging punctuates my nightly internet wind down time until finally I've had enough. With a muttered grumble about improperly stowed halyards, I head up on deck, monkey my way six feet up a mast and drag a line out from where it has been tied off in the wrong spot. With this menial task completed, I then leap down, swinging on the line I've just freed, to make it off in the proper location. Then I head back below and tuck myself away behind my computer once more.

Welcome to life on the schooner!

For those of you who may not know, or just like reading whatever I write, I have found myself yet another sort of adventure employment. I am shipside again, working as a Deckhand/Educator/Cook onboard an educational sailing vessel in the San Francisco Bay. While it may not be as exotic as some of my other destinations, it's good to be able to maintain my crazy office-free lifestyle while simultaneously being back in the wonderful Bay Area

What is a Deckhand/Educator/Cook you say? Why, I'm glad you asked! Essentially this means that I run around the boat trying to make sure that it sails properly and attempting not to incur the ire of my erstwhile and thoroughly hilarious captain. More or less at the same time, I also teach kids lessons about science and sailing during three hour field trips sailing on the San Francisco Bay. And when I'm not showing students plankton, teaching them how to triangulate their location, helping them set our sails or having them test the dissolved oxygen content of the water, you can find me sanding decks, cleaning bilges, and caulking seams to make our boat look nice and pretty. As for the cook bit, well, as far as I've been told, I'm in charge of feeding everyone come summer camp, which will be starting up in about a month. Can I cook for my ravenous crewmates and a pack of wild teenagers on a moving vessel? Well, I suppose that remains to be seen...

Speaking of crewmates, time to meet the crew, eh? First we have the Captain, a fun-loving, outgoing and somewhat ridiculous individual who we know fondly as Cap'n Bucket. His second in command (aka the mate) is a surfer dude from Santa Barbara who arrived in his 20 something foot Winnebago and holds strongly to the belief that microwaves murder food. I like to call him Sparky, though it annoys him something fierce. Then there's our Head Educator, who spends his time strumming on the guitar, wandering around in a straw hat and considering the edumacation of the chilluns. Grumpy at the outset, he's doomed to be known as Eeyore, though he insists that it was due to illness and not a constant state of being. Only time will tell. And finally we have the other girl on the boat, who'd really rather read and go to sleep early every night than get up to mischief and mayhem, and thus believes all the rest of us are total louts. Her position is slightly below mine (she is not cook and is Deckhand 2), and she is still in the process of learning how to sail; thus we shall call her Swabbie. Despite serious disagreements about music and rather different backgrounds in life, we all mesh remarkably well and are becoming quite the boat family. Somehow, we've managed to convince bunches of people that we're responsible adults and so they gave us a schooner! And they let us teach kids! Can you imagine?

So there you have it- an introduction to my latest adventure. Keep posted and perhaps entertaining stories shall be forthcoming. Fair winds my friends!