Happy Friday the 13th!

This is a contradiction, isn’t it?  What’s so happy about a day that is cursed with bad luck?  Well, I beats me.  I was just trying to be optimistic.  

Vince doesn’t believe in bad luck and thinks these superstitions, like the ones I mentioned in last week’s blog, are hogwash.  Then Vince accidentally kicked his shower kit and broke a mirror; 7 years bad luck.  That same day, he broke his toe (possible the same one he kicked the mirror with).  How can he still claim that superstitions are hogwash?  I don’t know either.  

We are sailing down the east coast this winter, trying to get to the Bahamas.  Currently, we are stuck in Stuart, Florida.  It’s a nice enough town and all.  Folks are real friendly and helpful, the marina is very nice, but the water is cold and brackish and we want to go snorkeling.  We planned to come here for a week or two to get some work done on the boat then keep heading south.  That was a month ago.  And we still don’t know when we are going to be able to leave.  We just keep getting held up, we wait for parts, we fix one thing, another thing breaks, then the weather turns, etc.  You name it.   It looks like the wait is finally coming to an end and we should be able to leave here in the next day or so.  But, despite how badly I want to get going again, we can’t leave port on Friday.  I won’t do it.  Especially, Friday the 13^th.  We can go as late as 11:59 on Thursday or as soon as 12:01 on Saturday.  But. Not. On. Friday.  Do you know what boat left of Friday and sunk?  Yup.  The Titanic. 

Which brings me back to why fishermen are so superstitious.  My theory is this.  Commercial fishing is unpredictable at best.  There’s no real denying that.  So, you are careful as can be, then just hope for the best.  And while a lot of being successful has to do with skill, a lot also had to do with dumb luck.  See, there it is again.

I mean, sometimes, your net is just in the right place at the right time.  And you load up, for no reason that you can reasonably take credit for. I over slept one morning, my ass dragging behind me.  I stumbled down to the docks, got aboard my boat and ran out to the fishing grounds, late.  The beach was crowed, as it usually is 10 minutes before an opener, so I kept running east to get on the other side of the fleet.  I stopped when no one else was to the east of me.  I thought, this is ridiculous, I’ll never catch anything out here.  But, the opener had started and if I’ve only learned one thing from fishing, it’s that if you net is not in the water, you don’t catch anything.  So I set my gear.  I had 300 my first set (which is a really good set!)  Dumb luck.  It doesn’t take skill to be lazy and over sleep. 

Which brings me to my other point.  There is just so much about fishing that is out of our control.  I mean, you get yourself a good boat, the best you can afford, take care of it, get yourself some nets, some fowl weather gear, a survival suit, and the rest is up to chance.  The weather is out of your control, so are tides, tsunamis, other boats, and the amount of fish you catch.  All these things can and have sunk boats.   Men have died on perfectly calm, blue bird days. 

Its only human nature to try to control something, anything, when we have no control over what happens to us.  So we don’t whistle on board or we’ll whistle up a storm.   

Good luck!

Superstitions

            The almost only safe assumption that one could make about fishermen is that they are all superstitious.  At least, I’ve never met one who wasn’t.  There is a slough of superstitions out there, almost as many as fishermen.  Some are more commonly known than and abided by than others.  The number one cardinal sin on a boat is to whistle, alas, one will whistle up a storm.  I almost got fired once from accidentally whistling.   I was clear out in Togiak, too and would have been screwed to find my own transportation home. 

Leaving the hatch covers upside down is another big one.  I’m not real sure what will happen but I just know I’ve never done it to find out.  Saying the word “horse” on a boat is bad luck in some circles.  I think this one came from back in the day of wooden boats that used to transport horses.  In bad weather horses scare, kick, and damage the boat.    You are supposed to replace the word “horse” with draft-animal as in “I have a 200 draft-animal power Volvo diesel engine…”

Of course, bananas are bad luck on a boat.  Everyone knows that.  This is because putting bananas next to other fruit makes them turn rotten faster.   Some folks tweak this one a little bit and say that bananas are only bad luck in the wheelhouse.  But what if you have a bowpicker and don’t have a wheelhouse?  I don’t know, but I wouldn’t chance it.

Another is not leaving the deck bucket right side up, it simulates the boat filling with water and sinking.  Coffee mugs need to all hang the same direction, though I don’t remember the direction or the reason for this one.  OMG!  I almost forgot a HUGE one; never ever leave port on Friday.  This is a biggie and I can’t believe it almost escaped me.  One other boat made this mistake and was never heard from again.  Want to know which one?  The Titanic.  Yup, left port on a Friday and look what happened to them. 

A lesser-known superstition is having someone of the opposite sex pee on your net for good luck.  I’m not going to really go into detail on this one.

Another superstition, one that came around to bite me in the ass once, a little bit, is throwing all your spare change overboard to appease the fish gods.   I only worked on one boat that abided to this one and have never heard of it since.  Makes me wonder about that skipper.

Anyhow, me wanting to be a good deckhand, I reached into my pocket as requested and sent my coins into the drink.  It was a donation to the herring gods, or so I was told, as we steamed west to seine Kodiak and Togiak. All was fine and dandy until the day I got smacked in the face with one of the metal rings on the bottom of the seine.  It gave me a big fat bloody lip and put 3 cracks in my front tooth.

The next day was a day off and our spotter pilot offered to fly me into Kodiak to have it looked at by a dentist since we were about to head out further towards the end of the earth, Togiak.

I hopped in the plane with the plan to look up a dentist in the phone book and give them a shout in Kodiak.  But, when I arrived, I had no quarters for the payphone (this was way before the day of cell phones.) In addition to bumming a ride from the pilot I had to bum a quarter, too.   Though, it was mostly all for naught anyhow.  The dentist told me there I had a 50/50 that my tooth was going to break in two.  Thanks, but I could have guessed that on my own.  Oh well, it was a pretty day for a flight and I got to get off the boat for an afternoon.  Though I did spend the next month drinking tons of milk and not biting into apples.   Fast-forward 14 years later, my front tooth still has 3 cracks in it, but is holding up just fine. 

Knock on wood.