3.30AM. "Paul ... Paul ... Paul ... Paul ..." I hear her eventually, swimming up from the blissful depths of sleep, as she whispers through the curtain of my bunk. It's pitch black and for a second I don't know where I am. Then I smell the Stockholm tar - the whole ship reeks of it - and hear the gurgle of sea rushing past the hull, and I remember.
"I'm awake," I mutter with the conviction of someone who isn't. The soft voice whispers in Australian. "Muster midships," she says. "It's raining. And there's lightning, so wear shoes." And then she's gone.
I dress in my bunk, feeling the ship roll beneath me. "Big sea," I think, pulling on my cheapskate foul-weather gear and lacing my boots. I swing out of the bunk into the silent darkness of the salon and clamber up the companionway to the deck, trying not to fall off the ladder.
My watch - the 4am-to-8am crew - are already there, mere outlines in the rolling blackness. It is raining, and lightning is flashing across the sky. "Morning," says my watch officer. Her name is Beamy. ("Beamy?" I asked her the day before. "Well it's actually Amy, but there was another Amy when I got on board. So, Beamy ..." Right.)
"I see there's a party in your pocket," she says.
What? I look down. My stupid torch has flicked on in strobe mode. It's a sin to show white light at sea at night (to avoid confusing watchkeepers on other ships). ("No lights," hissed Magnus, the young Danish sail apprentice the night before when I came stumbling along the main deck at the end of my watch. "Never! Always off. OK?")
All the salty crew have flashlights with red lenses. I am not salty. "Sorry," I mutter.
Beamy leads us to the quarterdeck where we relieve the midnight-to-4am watch. Jens, a German IT technician with a thick, luxuriant salty U-boat commander's beard takes the helm. "North by west," mutters the departing helmsman.
"Yiss," says Jens, "north by west."
Beamy taps me on the shoulder. "Watch how he does it," she says.
We are still "steaming", moving under power, as we have been since weighing anchor in Table Bay the day before, and Jens makes it look vastly better than my attempt the previous afternoon when as soon as I took the helm, the compass card began to swing like a drunk. First it drifted lazily eastwards. I countered with a flick of the wheel, counting the spokes under my hands, chasing the needle. The card stopped. Then it swung to the west. I cursed, feeling the stern rise beneath my feet, slewing the ship off by another degree. I flicked the wheel the other way. The needle spun like a dervish.
"Ah, show him how to do it," said the ship's captain, Daniel Moreland, who had been watching my antics with little pleasure.
"Yiss," said Jens. He took the helm and the ship settled down, and the compass swung slowly back to its proper place. North by west. "Did I screw that up, Jens?"
He cracked a smile. "Yiss."
Captain Moreland has joined us for the morning watch, standing quietly at the lee taffrail, long black sea-coat dripping with rain. He's as salty as they come. He's probably sailed around the world more times than any seadog still living.
The Picton Castle is his ship. He found her, a former World War 2 minesweeper with, as he puts it, "good lines", bought her in Britain, motored back to Lunenburg in Canada, poured 30 tons of concrete into the hold to counter the weight of three masts, and turned her into a square-rigged sail training ship. Now she sails the world on long, slow voyages, crewed by a couple of paid professionals and an eager stream of paying volunteers like me, some young, some old, who cannot resist the siren call of running away to sea in a sailing ship.
I sit quietly by the taffrail and look at my watchmates. There's Bruce, a spry American in his 60s who speaks like Alan Alda in M*A*S*H and has brought his own sextant with which he takes a noon sight every day. There's Beamy, the competent lead seaman whose other life is taking kids on outdoor adventures in Britain. There's Jens and an American named Ryan who has the bunk above mine and for the week that I am at sea will be lying green-gilled on the midships hatch cover or retching over the side. There's Agnes, the Quiet American sailor with tall ship dreams and Nicole, a writer from Seattle who's been aboard for seven months since the ship called in Bali.
"I'd been cloistered in my house, living on coffee and tears," she tells me later. "I'm taking time out of my head."
And then there's a sailor we'll call the "Wizard of Oz". He's a "dayman" - no watchkeeping for him - but he's always around when I'm doing stuff like coiling ropes on the heaving deck in the middle of the night ("What the fuck is this?"), slopping pine tar and linseed oil onto bits of the ship's rigging ("The purpose of the taaap is to protect the deck, not fuggen spill on") or cleaning paint brushes ("Nah, still needs cleaning.")
When not on deck, the wizard is scarce. "No pictures, no interviews," he tells me. "Got it?"
Everybody thinks he's on the lam. But then the ship is alive with intrigue. Is one of us really ex-CIA? It is plenty to ponder as we hunch alone with our thoughts in the rain, the sea hissing past, until the captain jolts us from our reverie.
"Do you know how to judge how far away lightning is?" A brief lesson follows. We count the seconds after the lightning flashes. "About 10km and receding," he says. I am relieved - nothing like sitting on a steel vessel at sea with three great lightning conductors poking into the sky to keep you on your toes.
At 5am, I relieve Nicole on for'ard lookout. "Lookout is a cure for all ills," she says as she clambers off the fo'c'sle.
I stare into the night. There is a bright light off the starboard bow. Is it a star? I watch it for a while until I am sure, hell no, that's no star, it's another ship, a freighter ploughing south. I go tell Beamy. "Thank you," she says.
I am relieved as the grey, rainy dawn creeps over the sea. The ship begins to stir. I can hear Donald, the Grenadian cook, knocking pans about in the galley. The aroma of coffee hits the breeze. And is that the smell of baking bread?
At 6am all the watch save helmsman Jens are scrubbing the decks. Beamy washes them down with seawater from the firehose while we scrub. We scrub the ship from bow to stern, all 60m of it. The instructions continue: "Scrub across the seams, else you'll ruin the caulking." "Don't hit the superstructure with the broom - you'll wake the captain's kid." Then I get a bucket and some Vim and a sponge and spend the next hour doing "soogee", scrubbing rust off the superstructure. One of the officers sees me. "You're doing it wrong," she says. "Use the other side of the sponge." As I scrub I reflect on how I've paid the equivalent of about R10500 for the privilege of doing an hour of soogee every day.
"Some people find that Zen moment in soogee," John the sailmaker says later. John has been aboard for three years. As sailmaker he's a dayman - his soogee days are behind him - but he has some advice. "When you're on night watch on the bow, under the stars, you'll realise it's all therapeutic and this too shall pass."
Afterwards, I get a bucket and begin washing the superstructure with fresh water. "Don't use so much water," says a passing deckhand whose name I do not yet know, "the engineer will shit."
I would not want Billy the engineer to shit. I saw him minutes after I joined the ship, blue, oily bandanna on his head, silvered goatee and eyes the colour of crevasse ice, walking down the deck, reverently massaging engine oil into his massive hands. This was the man who days before had stretched the vessel's plumbing out along a wharf at the Victoria & Albert dock and there, right in front of the smug, ice-cream-licking tourists, blew seven months of accumulated fecal matter out of the pipes with a pressure hose.
Billy and I click. It might be our advanced years compared to the rest of the crew, most of whom are in their 20s. He came to tall ships for the romance. "We're the last of a dying breed," he says.
He had an epiphany during a 10-day voyage between the islands in Fiji. "We sailed under a full lunar eclipse and I realised this was what guys were doing in the age of sail, sailing along ... no lights, no towns and wondering if the next local people you meet will be friendly."
In that sense, the Picton Castle is keeping alive centuries-old traditions of seamanship, and that is why the volunteers are here. Bruce, like many of the older trainees, is living a dream, something different to fill out the arc of their lives. "It's an experience out of time," he says in a rare garrulous moment.
The younger crew - mostly Scandinavians, Americans and a smattering of Bermudans - have come to get hands-on sea time. Many will look for places on other tall ships or pursue careers in the merchant marine. "There are 200000 seafaring jobs waiting to be filled," Moreland tells me. And employers like people who've learned their skills under sail.
At 8am, we are relieved and rush to the fantail for breakfast. Ship's cook Donald Church, a veteran of cruise ships in the Caribbean, is the second-most important person aboard and I can see why: cinnamon rolls, scrambled eggs, homebaked bread and jam. And oats, always oats, for the Danes. "The Danes like oats," says one sailor. "No oats, Danes unhappy."
Minutes later I am asleep in my bunk, lulled by the Atlantic gurgling past, inches from my head.
At noon, I am roused by a cacophony of feet pounding the steel deck. I stumble up the companionway and am struck dumb: while I slept, our ship has transformed into a great white seabird. Sailors are climbing the rigging, nimble as cats. The vast canvas sails crack and belly in the freshening breeze and for the first time in days, there is no rumbling diesel, no oily exhaust. It's just us and the sea and a fine ship with a bone in her teeth. A southwester has come up and we are flying along at five knots. "Five knots!" the crew grin at each other. At this rate we'll be in Luderitz in a couple of days.
I could spend all day lying on the hatchcover, playing with the ship's cats and watching the sails spreading overhead. But chief mate Sam Sikkema has other plans. "It's not often you get to be in the engine room of a sailing ship," he says. So Erin Greig, the 25-year-old no-nonsense bosun from Bermuda, straps me into a harness and follows me aloft. I go up the ratline like a scalded cat, hanging on grimly as the ship rolls. We pause at the first platform while I try and swallow my heart which appears to be stuck in my throat.
"Pretty special view from here," says Erin. The ship rolls beneath us, masts arcing across the blue, Atlantic sky, a whitecap Tintin sea foaming past. Snatches of song float up to us - it's the young, dreadlocked Bermudan apprentice Dikembe Outerbridge Diu singing a made-up sea shanty to the tune of Auld Lang Syne.
"You'll get used to it," says Erin as I make my way like a sack of lumpen potatoes to the deck, "till one day it's all ... natural."
"You mean I'll be salty?"
"Yes," she says. "Salty."
Picton Castle is currently at sea on the notorious Middle Passage, the slavers' route between Dakar, Senegal and the Caribbean. In October, the vessel is due to set off from Lunenburg in Nova Scotia on its seventh round-the-world voyage and there are places for volunteer crew. For more information on voyages, see picton-castle.com...