Shackleton and Frito Pie

Training New Mariners with Old Methods

Article by George Collazo

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As a professional mariner, I’m lucky to work with a range of boats. My day job is administering a fleet of freighters for Coastal Transportation Inc. (CTI), carrying cargo between Seattle and western Alaska. The freighters aren’t tugboats, but the same sort of cargo carriers which have plied the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea for the last 150 years—tough little ships about 240 feet long and 2,000 tons. Some of our cargo ports you’ve heard about (Dutch Harbor and the Pribilof Islands) and many I’m guessing don’t come to mind (Akutan and False Pass.)

Also part of my job: planning expeditions in a 17’ long sail-and-oar boat named
Oyster. 19^th-century stuff, with a 21^st century gloss. Tiny Oyster plays no part in our cargo operations. Her utility to CTI is subtle—she is the catalyst of a program which feeds experienced mariners into our fleet.

This is Small Craft Advisor, so let’s focus on the small craft, and later describe the program. Oyster is a 17-foot Hampden boat straight from the pages of Howard Chappelle’s American Small Sailing Craft. She was built by noted Seattle boatwright John Thomas in 1979, and completely rebuilt by him in 2024. Originally a cat-ketch, we yanked the mizzen to make room for a crew of four and all the bits-and-bobs Shackleton would have recognized—down to the pilot bread.

Hampden boats were made for the rigors of Maine fishing, by men who cared more for their lives than for racing. Like most spritsail boats, Oyster is terrible at pointing upwind, but in a blow she’s a jewel. Caught out on Johnstone Strait on the Inside Passage, it’s the work of a moment to brail up the sprit, instantly reducing sail area. And with her sail completely furled to the mast, she will forge along happily at four knots in strong winds. She has yet to dip a rail in a squall. All of this makes her ideal for a sail-and-oar training program.

As for the program, every year CTI selects students from America’s merchant marine academies and puts them to work for the summer as deckhands to gain experience before joining the merchant marine. Before shipping them out, we immerse them in a short course of industrial seamanship—hands-on stuff not taught in the academies, like driving lift trucks, lashing down cargo, and hanging bumper bags.

First, though, we need to leach out physical weakness and replace it with endurance, build up their resistance to cold and rain, and teach them to jump out of the sack at four in the morning with only one call. The beauty of our program is that Oyster does all this.

After a week of training with chain binders and forklifts at our Seattle facility, the trainees steam to British Columbia on our 65-foot long training boat Curlew, with Oyster loaded on the foredeck. Under the eyes of an experienced skipper, they navigate using paper charts and magnetic compass alone. No electronics allowed. Then, when they are far enough north that cougars and grizzly bears exceed the local human populace, the trainees sweat at cranking a human-powered crane to lift the 1,400 pound Oyster from the Curlew’s deck and splash her into the cold waters of the Inside Passage. Then they travel 120 miles through a labyrinth of tree-clad islands and saltwater channels. Just sail-and-oars. No motor, no GPS, no plotter. No cabin, no chase boat, no Wi-Fi.

The Inside Passage has a complex interplay of tidal waters with the Salish Sea. The dividing line between the two is a chain of saltwater rapids along the north end of Desolation Sound. Seymour Narrows is the most well-known; others include Beazley Passage, Hole in the Wall, and Yuculta Rapids. They mark the interchange of tidal waters between the Straits of Juan De Fuca to the south and those of Queen Charlotte Sound to the north. For sail-and-oar travel, and for the officers of CTI’s freighters, learning how the tidal currents work is key.

Oyster’s experienced skipper is aboard these expeditions to make sure serious injury is avoided. Otherwise, the trainees do the piloting and planning, and are given enough rope to learn from their mistakes. Travel by oar is an inefficient thing. A sea kayak is faster. Learning how to make use of the currents, and how to avoid them, is basic to piloting. The swift currents of the Inside Passage reverse four times a day. Errors in calculations mean extra rowing, needless hours drenched in the rain, and abject humiliation. As the sun goes down each day, the crew camps ashore in tents, nursing blistered hands and fractured egos while planning the next day’s navigation.

So on the one hand, I deal with ocean-going freighters swimming in a complex sea of CFRs and government oversight. On the other hand, I deal with tiny Oyster, under no legal scrutiny whatsoever but needing as much care and planning as her larger sisters.

Just like the big boats, myriad checklists attend Oyster’s every voyage. There are PFDs, drysuits, PLBs, an AIS transponder to check, and skippers and alternates to allocate from the company’s corps of officers. Talented experts here recruit and vet the trainees, outfit the food and medical supplies, and arrange plane tickets to make sure everyone is where they need to be when needed. These things pencil-out financially because Oyster is a tiny cog in a complex industrial machine, churning out hardened mariners who often sign-on with CTI after graduation, justifying the effort.

Part of my job is collecting statistics for our operations. Examples: Average number of crew on an Aleutian freighter: 8.5. Average gallons of fuel burned on an Alaskan voyage: 39,136. Average length of a voyage: 24.8 days. Food budget for 8.5 persons: $5,933.

We do the same with Oyster’s expeditions. Average speed under oars: two knots. Number of oarsmen at one time: two. Average size of crew: four.  Ratio of rowing-time to sailing-time: 2:1. Average crew rotation underway: 20 minutes rowing, 20 minutes as coxswain or navigator, 20 minutes rowing. This provides continuous propulsion by young healthy persons, amenable to military discipline.  It’s a beautiful thing if you want to cover miles.

Those young people need fuel—a crew consumes (among other things) 12 pieces of pilot bread, one and half pounds of peanut butter, 16 cups of coffee, three quarts of cooked oatmeal, one gallon of lemonade, and nearly 1.5 pounds of gummy worms per day. Also, tacos made from canned chorizo and fresh onions. Retort packs of spicy tikka masala served over steaming “Idahoan” potatoes. Frito pie, because it’s fun. Kraft macaroni and cheese because we’re American.

Being a cargo company, we’re obsessed with the details of packing for a voyage. The next time you read of Shackleton’s exploits, appreciate that sail-and-oar boats are made for payload or people, but not both at once. On Shackleton’s boats the rowers would have been wedged between cases of pemmican and tents and sleeping bags.

 A 17-foot open boat has little space left over after squeezing four adults into it—less room than even a 17-foot canoe. With a canoe the paddlers are seated at the ends and the space between may be packed tight with gear. In a canoe you do your paddling over the side, and there’s no reason to walk from bow-to-stern. But a sail-and-oar boat requires space to work the sail and swing the oars, and then there’s the centerboard case, so cargo space suffers in comparison to a canoe.

Each crew on Oyster gets a 25-liter portage pack for a change of clothes and toiletries and not much else. The tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, lanterns, etc. fill two waterproof duffels. Each day’s food for the crew, carefully pre-portioned, fills a single waterproof bag. Six of these are crammed in fabric “tanks” under the center thwart. The repair kits for people and boat share a single portage pack. Much of this “cargo” is carefully lashed to the inside of the gunnels to serve as additional flotation in case the boat is holed or swamps. Add freshwater containers to the mix and the boat gets pretty full.

Without GPS or apps of any kind, the trainees obsessively study paper charts and tide tables to find a way forward against wind and current. A good part of the voyage is learning how tides and currents affect navigation. The trainees also need identify the right mix of flat ground, freshwater, and secure anchorage that will serve as a decent camp for the night—an often bitter crash-course in chart familiarization that will stand them in good stead in their careers.

A big difference between a professional deck officer and a yachtsman is this: a pro’s job is making sure he has no stories to tell. Drama is an ugly word. Uglier phrases yet are lost time and financial loss. Close calls and poor planning are for amateurs. The Oyster expedition drives these lessons home hard. On Oyster, errors in tidal calculations mean fruitless hours rowing against a current, or a terrifying ride in whitewater, or worse.

And so it goes with anchoring. Oyster has to keep afloat at anchor even at low tide, so the crew can depart at any time. A mistake in chart reading could mean stranding Oyster at low tide, wasting an entire day of travel. To prevent this there’s the ordeal known as clothesline-anchoring. Using this arrangement of line, buoy, and anchor, a crew can land and unload, then pull the boat out to deep water without wetting their feet, and pull her back ashore in the morning. But if you haven’t done it before, rigging a clothesline-rode can be humbling, especially after an exhausting day of rowing. Our freighters don’t clothesline-anchor, but handling complicated rigging in the cold and rain is most definitely part of a freighter-man’s job.

With Oyster off voyaging on her own, the skeleton crew of professional mariners aboard Curlew are free to wander. To them the Inside Passage is just a road to western Alaska. They might have travelled it a hundred times but never stopped at a Canadian port. Now they can visit wherever their fancy takes them, from Sointula to Malibu Rapids, until they meet up with Oyster six days later.

At the rendezvous Oyster’s crew will crank the human-powered crane again to raise Oyster back on deck. After hot showers and a feast the crew will return to Seattle for another week of cargo operations training, and then a summer of well-paid work on an oceangoing ship.

No other maritime company has such a unique training program. The duality of what we do still surprises me—sending hardened mariners to the Bering Sea to deliver cargo, and also sending complete neophytes out in 19^th century cockleshells to learn the elemental lessons of piloting. But we like it. The industrial maritime world is all about profit. It’s a pleasure to send off a voyage that’s all about seamanship.

If a trainee joins CTI after graduation, we know the program will have molded them to our needs. If they don’t, we have the satisfaction of knowing we are sending these young sailors out into the merchant marine far more capable than when they arrived. •SCA•