Picton Castle Temp Agency?
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
Location: 06° 30.2′N / 050° 10.7′W
What will become of us all now? In 37 days our year-long adventure aboard the sail training ship Barque Picton Castle will come to a bleary-eyed end and the majority of us will wander away with the same dumbfounded expressions as those portrayed on the faces of the “returnees” on shipmate Ollie’s show, The 4400. The Captain jokes that our lives are now ruined forever, just as his is. However, this is not made-for-TV fantasy. There is no quarantine center for displaced, world-voyaging, deep-sea sailors, and likewise there is no debriefing seminar to help us process all of the experiences and knowledge we have gained in this past year. My shipmates and I are facing the unique challenge of having to take ourselves out of this special fraternal world that we have been living in and are now defined by, and to try and relate to the people we were before this all took place.
I guess a good place to start is to take a look back at who we were in our pre–Picton Castle days. We were contractors and businessmen, head hunters and graphics designers, rocket scientists, heart surgeons, dentists, and biologists. We were students of every fathomable faculty of learning. We were librarians and actors, lawyers and editors, bankers and farmers. We were anthropologists and physical therapists, respiratory therapists and occupational therapists. We were professional poker players, bartenders and taxi drivers. We have a long and impressive list of our identities, but is there room to live a double life and split our time between being an ” ‘ist ” and being a deep sea sailor/ world voyager extraordinaire?
The good news is that we have a whole new realm of skill sets to add to our old ones. We can lift heavy things and wash 10,000 dishes a day. We are excellent problem solvers and can reorganize a 50-tonne cargo hold in a day. We are master exterminators and can sew a patch on anything. We can competently row a whaleboat and embark on overnight expeditions to unfamiliar tropical islands. We can say “Hello” and “Thank you” in ump-teen languages and can tell you the currencies and exchange rates for as many countries. We can climb high ladders and work with both hands. We are fanatic converts of the concept of “island time” and are avid story-tellers to anyone who will listen. We know now rather than simply believe (believing is sort of weak watery stuff compared to knowing) that we are no more than equal to the amazing people we have met, and maybe not quite that. We are aware that children are smarter and funnier than we are, so we are willing to step back and let them take the lead. We can crawl on our bellies in dark, low spaces, fix marine heads, and can withstand extreme temperatures. We can do any and all of these things not only ashore, but also on a rolling ship! We are the same familiar people, just now available in new and cooler models with loads of special features.
I asked Lead Seaman Kjetil (Norway) what would become of us if we retuned home and found ourselves unsatisfied with our old lives and unable to compete with the adventures we’d just had. I had a plan for when this voyage was finished and I had to walk away, just as my shipmates had plans to return to the businesses they had built up and temporarily left behind. All of our plans have changed in some way or another. I do not expect that very many of us will be discontent to return to our lives, especially now that we are capable of seeing options that before now we could not have known existed.
As Kjetil and I talked, I told him of my mental images of a mob of empty-shell people milling about, hopelessly trying to apply our willy-nilly list of fine-tuned skills. Kjetil’s response was that we have no reason to worry because we can always open a Picton Castle Temp Agency—our collective crew is qualified to do just about anything! He ran through examples that are similar to those outlined above, and then he used his classic quirky humour to relax my furrowed brow and end the conversation all at once. A Temp Agency for Picton Castle crew was the best solution for us because, he said, “Only one person needs to be competent; the rest of us are good at following orders.”
Captain says that we have no idea how truly competent we are now, but he says that “You’ll see, little fish.”
