SHORT STORIES AND NEWSPAPER COLUMNS

• Boating is; “Ghost Ships.” 2004.
• By boatguy Ed

In the grand tradition of Halloween Eve week, the television has been full of gruesome movies and cartoons. Stories of supernatural phenomena and werewolves abounded but none of them frightened me more than stories about ghost ships. Anyone who has sailed offshore during the dark of night has seen them, right?

Whether you realized it or not they were shadowing your vessel up every wave and down into every trough. They might have disguised themselves as a mysterious light or shape near the horizon. You may have thought they were cloud formations or the reflection of the moon on a small patch of water, but it wasn’t. It were ghosts, Matey!

Since man first put a leaky dugout canoe on the water there have been sudden disappearances of ships and crew. There are hundreds of stories about ghost ships, so why don’t you accompany me into the dark and stormy nights of our imagination so we can dig into some of the juicier tales.

The most famous ghost ship might be the Flying Dutchman and its appearance is thought to be a precursor of impending doom because most sightings have been during extremely violent weather. The flesh and blood Flying Dutchman was lost while sailing around the Cape of Good Hope (southern tip of Africa) during an awful storm. Since the Captain refused to seek a safe harbor, the ship was lost with all hands. Legend holds that the captain and crew were forced to sail the seas forever.

In the fall of 1923 sailors spotted the Dutchman on the horizon. The ship glowed through the storm, and they were able to see a white, ghostly mist in the place where the sails should have been. Since then, there have been other sightings of this ghost ship.

The Titanic might be the ultimate ghost ship because of the nearly 1300 souls lost April 14th, 1912. A fictional book called the “The Wreck of the Titan” was about the sinking of an unsinkable passenger ship after striking an iceberg because the owners wanted to break the speed record on it’s maiden voyage. The story closely paralleled the sinking of the Titanic including the lack of lifeboats, the presence of the most elite passengers and only one third of them survived.

The fictional book was nearly never published because the editor of Buccaneer Books didn’t believe such an occurrence could happen. You see the author wrote the book 14 years before the Titanic was launched! 

The pride of the Canard Lines was the “The Queen Mary.” During WWII she was converted to carry troops to the front.  During one of these troop-carrying missions a terrible accident occurred while she was zigzagging to avoid German U-boats near Ireland. Heavy weather forced minor adjustments to the erratic courses of the Mary and her escort ships. 

The Queen Mary struck the escort ship “HMS Curaçao.” Since there were U-boats all around the passenger ship was under strict orders not to stop and 338 of the 439 sailors aboard the escort ship were lost. That was the beginning of the haunting of the “Queen Mary” and it continues today.

Even as she was being retired to Long Beach, CA the delivery crew encountered ghostly noises and apparitions. There were ghostly screams heard below deck in the bow compartments of the ship. These were described as the screams of drowning men pleading for help. There were many other bizarre incidents while the Queen Mary was used as a hotel. 

The “Mary Celeste” was a hard luck ship during its existence but nothing, including the eventual wrecking it for insurance fraud, compared with its most famous incident. Captain Benjamin Briggs purchased the “Amazon” and renamed her after an extensive re-fit. He took his wife, infant son and 11 crewmembers on a fateful voyage across the Atlantic to deliver 1700 barrels of raw alcohol. 

On December 5, 1872, the “Mary Celeste” was found sailing aimlessly near the Spanish coast. The crew from the ship “De Gratia” claimed salvage after discovering there was no one aboard. They found nothing out of place except the lifeboat was missing and a rope was trailing from the stern.

Even their foul weather gear was still onboard, and it was as if they got up from their duties and disappeared without a trace. The baby’s bed even had the impression of a sleeping infant still impressed into the mattress. The family and crew were never found, and the mystery of their fate remains today. 

The sea is a cruel and unforgiving place. All too frequently, derelict boats are still found today without their crews. Family and friends grieve and pray for the safe return of mysteriously missing loved ones. And the ghostly shapes still follow us along the horizons.

A belated happy Halloween to you all! Boat safe and take all precautions to stay among the living. Send questions and comments to boatguiEd@aol.comor this publication. See you on the Internet Boating Show. Go to http://www.gettysburgghosts.net/ghostships.htmfor more ghost stories.

Boating; Docking

By boatguy Ed

Have you ever gone to a waterfront restaurant by boat? Do you know that in a recent survey of non-boaters, they really, really envy people who arrive by boat at the restaurants? Many people have entered the sport of boating just so they can be among those who are envied.

Despite surveys pointing to boaters being happier than non-boaters, more contented than non-boaters, non-boaters slough off all that and concentrate on the simple act of stepping off a boat onto a restaurant’s dock as the reason why they might one day get into boating.

In effect, you as boaters have a duty to go to more restaurants to preserve the boating lifestyle. But a skillful landing is sometimes more difficult than it seems to non-boaters, and they often break into animated discussions about a less skillful landing where the operator misjudged wind or tide, or the speed needed to make the landing smooth.

I asked the President of “Rub-Rails-Are-Us” what is the most common mistake made when coming into an unfamiliar dock. “Overconfidence is the cause of most damage in docking at a strange place. Most boaters just rush right in and misjudge the environment around the dock!” 

I think he is ‘right on’ with that statement. I have seen many good landings, a few great landings and a whole lot of mediocre ones but only a few bad landings. A really bad landing has to hole the boat or knock down the dock. But even if the boat destroys the dock, it can still be judged to be a mediocre landing if the pilings that support the dock have been eaten away by marine borer worms.

We all want to look good when we arrive at the dock, and we are well aware of the envious eyes fixed on our boat and ourselves. There is a lot of pressure to zoom right into the open space, hit reverse and toss a line onto a piling. Whenever I see someone attempt that maneuver, I think they are transplanted lake boaters. When the lake is calm, the boat has very few forces working on it so the rapid landing can be accomplished.

In tidal saltwater there are many forces at work. Tides are the worst enemy of lake boaters because there aren’t tides on lakes. Even the Great Lakes don’t have tides but they’re so big that I always assumed they had. I would be great at docking in lakes because I’m pretty good at docking in tidal saltwater. Notice I didn’t say great because I don’t want to jinx myself.

“Doesn’t it hurt the boat to hit the dock that hard,” a fellow diner asked me after we watched a mediocre landing. 

“Naw, that’s how you’re supposed to do it! Some places even buy you a drink if you hit the dock hard enough to shake the entire restaurant,” I said.

“Oh yeah?” It took a full five seconds for him to realize that I was cracking wise. You should have seen the look he gave me.

The survey results about docking envy might be even higher if more of us did a better job at landing our boat. So how do you overcome the forces at work? 

Understanding the art of docking starts with observing the forces. A great landing begins with the skipper allowing his vessel to settle next to the slip he intends to enter. This pause usually confuses non-boaters and lake boaters. 

Stopping for a few seconds to determine the direction and speed of tide and wind is the key. The pull-up is said to be the truck drivers' best friend while backing into a loading dock because it straightens out the errant trailer. Backing out and repositioning the boat’s angle and speed of the approach may appear hesitant to the uneducated but is the docking boater’s best friend.

Sadly, the slow approach is often confused with uncertainty and many non-boaters rush down to the dock to help. It should be the other way around. They should scurry down and help pick up the passengers on the fast approach boats who were knocked off their feet by the collision with the dock. 

So the next time you make a slow, skillful landing at a waterfront restaurant congratulate yourself for creating more potential boaters. But don’t get nervous knowing all those envious eyes are watching!

Boat safe and send questions and comments to boatguiEd@aol.com or this publication. See you on the Internet Boating Show!

 Great Scott What a Lawn
  It was a dark and stormy spring night in 1975 when the multi-seat Jitney van dropped our five-man crew off at the little yard office in Lisbon, Ohio. We were employees of the Erie Lackawanna Railway, commonly known as the 'Lackamoney Railroad'. 

Our ragged band didn't wear uniforms like passenger train crews did. We were called together off the extra board, in the middle of the evening and sent to Lisbon, Ohio. Our job was to bring a a short train consisting of a diesel engine, 30 heavily laden coal hopper cars and a caboose to Nile's, Ohio.

As extra employees, we had no set hours of work and no guaranteed start times. The Erie preferred to keep their road employees working for a long shift. Some of us had been just sitting down to a meal that could have been breakfast or dinner depending on when we ended the last assignment. The pay was good, and the jobs were frequent but none of us were particularly happy about the hour or the rain. I didn't turn down calls because I was getting married very soon.

The assembly yard in Lisbon was small with tracks running in many directions from the small coal mines and over several automobile streets. Our movements would block some of them for up to a half hour. That was why we were working after midnight to mitigate the interruption to traffic on those streets. We also kept the use of the loud train horn to a minimum at the suggestion of the city Police.

We availed ourselves to a work shed, euphemistically called a 'yard office' so we weren't always out in the light but steady rain throughout the hours it took to inspect each car and put together the train. When we were almost ready, we waited for permission to leave on the rickety single track. The speed could have been 40 miles per hour but it wasn't and it wouldn’t be 25 miles per hour as the latest safety bulletin stated. It would be 15 miles per hour or less by decree of one's own common sense.

At that time Federal law only allowed crews to work 14 hours before 'outlawing' and stopping wherever they were at the end of their time. We weren't all that confident we could get to Nile's in the allotted time because of the track condition and foreign railroads mainline we had to cross. We were at their mercy and despite gentleman's agreements, we were positive we would watch train after train wiz by on their mainline before they would let us cross.

Our Conductor, Jimmy was skilled at using all the small tracks to finally end up with two sections that could be put together whenever our dispatcher thought it was a good time to go. Jim could have been a Chess Master. Still, there was no way around blocking a major road for at least twenty minutes after we put the train together. Pumping up the air brake would take time by the single diesel engine. We couldn't go without sufficient air to apply and release the air brakes.   

Finally, we got the okay to leave. The engineer, fireman and head brakeman climbed aboard the engine, and we backed the front section on to the back section. I've often noticed how time stands still while automobile drivers blow their horns impatiently. Jimmy was on one side and I on the other explaining the situation, but some drivers assumed their horns could magically part our train.

Conductor Jim and Flagman I, swung onto the caboose as it slowly went past. Almost immediately our caboose became a slow motion bucking bull, dipping side to side and front to back. Jim settled in at the desk to resort the bill of ladings again, he was very efficient. I climb up into the Cupola (commonly known to rail workers as the Cock loft) and opened a window. The rain had stopped and the temperature was somewhere around 50 degrees.   

Even though our dispatcher predicted a break in the main line traffic, we sat at Leetonia, Ohio for over an hour. The rain started again just as we were given permission to cross the main line. We were happy to be on the move and on better maintained track. In no time we were doing 25 miles per hour and the ride was much smoother.

I was still in the Cupola as we approach a small village named, Washingtonville. We were going merrily along. Suddenly we heard a distant metal screeching and a low rumble. “What the f....,” Jimmy asked sitting at the desk. Most railroaders have heard those sounds before, they foretell doom. It was during a trip on iron ore train coming from Cleveland and the subsequent wreck. I reached for the emergency brake valve as the rumbling grew louder. A loud 'whoosh' signaled that the air brakes had been applied by some other, unseen force.

“Hold on, this shit is getting bad,” I said. Our safe little home away from home rolled onto its left side and then flipped upside down. 'How right can a guy be,' I thought. 

Grass and weeds stuck through the window I had been looking out. The first thing I thought of was a television commercial popular at the time for a lawn product whose slogan was, “Great Scott what a lawn!” I thought it was funny.

Jimmy didn't laugh. He only moaned. In between moans, he pointed out that the caboose would likely burn up with us inside of it if we didn't extract ourselves. How I remembered the location of the fire extinguisher in the upside-down room, I'll never know but I did. Adrenalin can be your friend in these situations.

Jimmy tried to uncover himself from the pile of spare parts stored haphazardly within the caboose. He was lying on the ceiling not far from me. I stood on the ceiling too and helped him clear away the debris. He was a tough ex-football quarterback but no match for spare air hoses and 50-pound train coupling 'knuckles' flying around.   

My Conductor was in poor shape, and we needed to get out. I pulled up the rear door and Jim rolled out. I followed close behind with some difficulty because gravity wanted to shut the door on me. As we helped each other crawl away from the caboose, we heard an angel's voice. We looked at each other and wondered, without vocalizing our suspicion that we really were killed in the wreck. It was a very plausible assumption when we looked back at the wrecked coal cars piled up and our upside-down caboose.

Then we heard the voice again, “Was there anyone in there,” said a sweet female voice. There, standing above us on the embankment was a mother and a daughter holding umbrellas. They were in flimsy baby doll pajamas, not dressed for the weather. They assumed we crawled in to check for survivors. The pair was back lit by the trailer park from which they came. They were quite a sight to our discombobulated eyes, “Great Scott what a lawn,” Jimmy repeated!