Humorous they said

Humorous they said!      Impossible!

How can we make jokes about ships and the sea?

Glorious history ; the seven seas

Cook, Nelson, and all , Heroic. Not humorous

And Admiral Byng, for failing to engage the French

in March of ‘57, in magnificent ceremony,

shot on the deck of the Monarch,

riding at anchor in Portsmouth harbour

He was George , but there was John Byng and Richard

Admirals all, and pubs and schools and historical societies,

named after one or the other

Even as cowards, they’re famous, not humorous.

And one’s own adventures to tell,

Perhaps not across all seven

But heroically across channels, straits and rivers

around  the four corners of the globe.

Courtesy of a job with forever travel

First attempt on Acapulco Bay

Learning the ropes in San Francisco

Crossing the channel dead in the night.

Inspired by Hornblower,  Aubrey and all

Heroes who could both fight and sail

The first engagement was a hired boat,

Across the bay, with an admiring one ashore

I know not how Nelson learned to sail

But it was not by hired boat

For this one  flipped, and with me on top

started slowly drifting out to sea.

He came out when my hour was up.

The admiring one had gone to sleep,

But since then I have sailed the world,

never again astride a turned-over  boat.

Adventures galore, hours on smelly rivers

The Yumna into the Ganges

And the poisonous Potomac too

But sailing always the right way up.

Navigational  feats without number

Frobisher in the North West passage

Bligh  4000 miles in open boat

Me across the channel

La Manche; the channel at night

Rough it was ,dark, all of us a-heaving

Correcting for the sweep of tides

France on the horizon in dim light finally.

Which way Deauville?  he asks ,

Port I reply, surely half right

Frobisher must have made some guesses
Ours were just as wrong as his, 

But we at least came back.

All night. Exhausted. Next day into the pond

Tripping face first on the mooring rope

Woken at last  to the nurse’s thermometer

Frobisher didn’t have to face it like that.

Then came the first of seven

The Tasman, oh a wicked sea

Chichester around the world capsized

Only in this beast of a sea.

We tried last year, Dave and me,

Along with  Dave’s light at the time

But she got sick not far from shore

So that day we thought was not for us.

Tried once more again last month

Cautious of Chichester’s sea

Forecast after forecast , but finally the day

that was smooth & safe for Dave and for me.

So safe in fact that wind it died

And we did not sail the first of our seas

But now the boat up there sits, waiting for

the day they forecast winds the other way.

And in the meantime we sit and dream.

Of Anson round the Horn,

Drake on the Spanish Main

Or me on my second sea.