The good news about the shipping blues

“Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul.”

The voice in my ear is soft, Australian, urgent.

“What?” I can hear water gurgling. My bed is at a sharp angle. The air is thick with the stink of linseed oil and damp.

It’s Shan, one of the crew.

“Three-thirty,” she says softly. “It’s raining haaard. And there’s lightning. So wear something on yer feet, OK?”

With a stab of regret, I remember I am aboard a sailing ship somewhere off the West Coast, in heavy seas, bound for Luderitz, or maybe St Helena if the skipper decides conditions are too rough to make landfall in Namibia.

The ship — the three-based barque Picton Castle — is one day out of Cape Town. I have a cracked rib from colliding with a hatch cover after losing my footing on this plunging, nightmarish, 180-foot-long bucking seahorse. I do not have waterproof seaboots. My hands are covered in rope burns. I am rubbish at going aloft, not because I’m afraid of heights but because I have utterly no clue about setting or taking in sails.

I am a new trainee, four days into this strange world. I am not salty.

Most of the crew have been aboard since Bali, six months and half a planet ago. Some signed on even earlier in the South Pacific. Still others, like bosun Erin and Billy, the heavily tattooed chief engineer, have been aboard since sailing out of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, almost two years before.

The skipper and owner, Captain Daniel Moreland, has assigned me to the 4-to-8 watch. Every day, twice a day, those are my hours.

I am just on time as I hasten to the afterdeck and join my watchmates. Shan was not kidding: there is indeed lightning, lots of it, as the vessel slices through a thunderstorm. Moments like that concentrate the mind, considering that the steel-hulled ship with its masts reaching into the crackling heavens feels like nothing more than a slow-moving lightning conductor.

Dawn is still a way off. The captain is a dark, brooding figure in a black sea coat, standing in the corner of the afterdeck, missing nothing. Beamy, the leading seaman, tells me to sit tight and watch and learn.

Arriving as a new crew on a ship full of old hands is not much different to being the new kid at school halfway through the year. While Cape Town marks the start of the final leg on the ship’s world voyages, only a handful of new hands have signed on for the run across the southern Atlantic to the Caribbean and thence home to Canada.

The Picton Castle is one of only a few ships of its kind sailing the high seas. Launched as a trawler in 1928 it was press-ganged into Royal Navy service as a minesweeper during World War 2. 

By 1991, when Moreland found it tied up to a dock, its days as a trawler were long past. He bought the ship, hired a skeleton crew and motored across the Atlantic to Lunenburg in Nova Scotia where he rebuilt it into a three-masted barque.

The idea was simple: offer berths on sail-powered voyages around the world. Seven circumnavigations and hundreds of thousands of nautical miles later, the Picton Castle is still doing what Moreland set out to do.

“We sail the trade winds,” he says, “the kind of sailing old sailors dreamt of.”

The dream: easy days in the tropics following winds, day after day, barely touching the rig.

There will be no sailing for the Picton Castle around Cape Horn or in the huge swells of the Southern Ocean on the route the tea and wool clippers used to take to and from Australia. 

Still, Moreland likes his “gang” — the crews — to read Cape Horn Breed, a terrifying account of life on a squarer-rigger bound from Britain to Chile with a load of coal.

Seventy days were spent trying to round the Horn alone, with the ship almost lying on its side day after day in screaming gales and pounding seas. Three men were lost to the freezing ocean and the ship battered and torn by the time the wind relented enough to let them round the cape and sail north.

“That’s not for us,” says Moreland.

The only things aboard the ship that would stupefy a 19th-century sailor are the modern navigation aids, the survival suits and the engine. The rest of the shipwork is unchanged from the age of sail. The ropes are all hemp, the sails salt-stiff canvas. The winches are all human-powered. When it comes time to take in sail or change tack, most hands will be aloft, in any weather, taking in the sails by muscle power alone, the mates shouting commands from the deck, urging the crew to faster, nimbler labour.

My introduction to shipboard life has been rapid and colourful. First, there was the chief engineer locked in mortal combat with the clogged pipes from the heads — maritime-speak for toilets — to the blackwater tank at the bottom of the ship.

After other cleaning methods failed, the engineer, a practical if unpopular man, simply dragged the pipes out of the ship, lined them up on the dock and blew high-pressure streams of water through them, briefly lowering the quayside’s popularity as a tourist attraction and ruining breakfast for guests at the Table Bay Hotel.

Meanwhile, the breezeway head — one of three heads for the 50-strong crew (except for the skipper who, naturally, has a private en suite bathroom) — is giving trouble. At muster the skipper reminds everyone that wet wipes are not to be flushed down the heads. Some crew stare pointedly at other crew.

On my way aft a little later to get lunch, I happen to look into the breezeway head. The second mate is kneeling in front of the bowl, one arm buried up to the shoulder. She is covered in what I later discover is brown grease.

“How’s it going?” I ask with perhaps too much breeziness.

“Wet wipes,” she spits.

Her revenge is not long in coming. Instructing the newcomers how to helm the ship, she bends to grab one of the lowest spokes of the wheel, giving the helm a full half-turn as she stands up. It looks daft, but then she is the second mate ... 

On the morning that it is my turn on the helm, Beamy looks at the compass card and gives me a course correction. “Bring her bow up a little,” she says.

Doing like I’ve been taught, I bend and grasp the lowest spoke of the wheel and swing the helm around. The skipper, who is in his usual place in the corner of the afterdeck, watches in horror as the ship swings wildly off course.

“Show him how to do it,” he says in disgust. Somewhere on the vessel, the second mate smiles.

My watchmates, all saltier than the ocean itself, are patient with me. It turns out that the 4-to-8 is the best watch on the ship. It means seeing the sunrise over the Atlantic when the rest of the ship is sleeping. 

The first job is to tighten in halyards or sheets that have slackened during the night. Meanwhile, two crew will tour the ship. They check the water level in the bilges, shine a torch into all the dark corners of the engine room and the cargo hold. 

At 6am, the watch turns to cleaning — swabbing decks and washing salt off the steelwork. The wooden decks love saltwater, the steelwork doesn’t.

After that it’s time for “soogee” — cleaning rust patches off the steel with a sponge and Vim. Some people hate soogee, the first mate warns me. “Others find Zen in it.” I try for Zen. 

The best part of the morning watch, though, is standing forward lookout, before the sun rises and cleaning starts.

There is always someone standing watch in the bow from sunset to sunrise. For Nicole, who joined the ship to clear her head after writing a tough memoir about growing up Mormon, standing watch as the ship hisses through the sea, is where everything is perfect.

“Forward lookout cures all ills and heals all wounds,” she says. “It’s that moment of being the only person on the front of the ship and you’re under the stars and the Milky Way is laid out in front of you in a way that you cannot imagine. It’s hypnotic and as romantic as any imagining of it ever could be.”

It is on forward lookout that I have my own Zen moment. My rib still hurts. My hands are broken and the second mate still thinks I’m the wet wipe criminal. But the captain has come to tolerate me as long as I’m not on the helm. I have gone aloft with bosun Erin and acquitted myself. My soogee is the best on the ship. I am, despite the grime and the damp, the showers as icy as the second mate’s stare, the minuscule bunk and the sweet, all-encompassing smell of Stockholm tar, happy.

Shunted up the coast by the howling southwester, we are at sea for less than a week and power into Luderitz where I disembark.

Months later a postcard from Nicole arrives from St Helena. “Paul,” she writes, “your bunk turned into a sail loft about five minutes after your departure. The ship closes in over everyone after they leave.”

Now, as another storm lashes Cape Town, the Picton Castle is in the Caribbean, heading for the Panama Canal on its eighth circumnavigation. Sometime in 2024, it will dock at the Waterfront, where Billy cleaned the pipes and where tourists will gather to stare at this apparition from another time, and sign on new crew. 

You should go.

• A berth costs $17,000 for each leg of the voyage with each leg taking around three to four months per leg. Flights not included. See www.picton-castle.com.