Things that go BUMP in the NIGHT

Something about tall ships and traditional sailing vessels is irresistable to drunks, vagrants, and ne’er-do-wells of all kinds. We asked our readers to recount their experiences

Richard Bailey:

I could tell so many stories about what a nut magnet Rose was in her early Newport days...

After the bars closed one night I spotted two drunks slithering up one of the stern lines. They took no heed when I told them to go back, so I cast off the line and dropped them into the harbor.

Or the time some guys climbed in a gunport to steal stuff, but lost one of their wallets on the way out. Or the drunk girl who got wet sneaking aboard, so she stripped down and then fell asleep naked. The naked girl was found by tourists who went off the ship to tell John Millar at his ticket booth about her. They asked if she was ‘part of the exhibit.’ That story made Yankee magazine.

Then there was the time I was up on the main top with a lady friend and we felt the shrouds shaking as some neophytes tried to climb the rigging. I quietly slid down an adjacent backstay, stopping just above their heads to yell,

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THIS BOAT?”

They didn’t fall out of the rig, but they went down faster than they came up.

At first I would confront intruders with “What are you doing here?” The typical nonchalant answer was invariably, “We’re just looking around.” I’d ask them where they lived, what street, what number.

“So if you wake up at 2 a.m. and I’m in your living room ‘just looking around’ that would be OK?”

I lived aboard and finally got tired of getting up at night to confront drunken intruders with my less-than-formidable presence, so I’d sleep with a six-foot oak capstan bar placed vertically next to my bunk. When I woke to footsteps on deck, I’d slam the baulk of timber into the overhead a few times and yell, “You better get the hell off this boat before I come up there and break your legs!”

Never failed to result in the scampering of fleeing feet.

Miriam Rosenberg Rocek:

I was with Kalmar Nyckel in Hampton, Virginia for a pirate festival of some kind, and some drunk yacht bros snuck onto the ship one night.

What they did not know was that, due to the heat, our youngest shipmate, who I believe was 14 at the time, was sleeping out on the foredeck, with the “spear” he had made out of a big stick, and wearing the furry viking hat with stuffed-animal horns on it that someone had bought him as a joke. He popped up, horns and all, raised his spear and screamed “WHO GOES THERE?” causing the drunk bros to run away up the dock, dropping the gun bucket they’d stolen just a few yards down the pier.

Peter Bailey:

My first night on the Black Pearl, tied up in LA, where she had been hired for some re-shoots of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3. I arranged to stay aboard, so I’d have a short commute for our 6 am start times. Ship was not plugged in yet, no lights or machinery. I came aboard in the afternoon and found a bunk; we were starting up the next morning.

At 2 am or so I hear girls giggling and a guy’s voice, and see some reflected light from a flashlight. Sneaking close in the dark, I get my best bosun’s voice up and yell “WHO THE F*** IS ON MY SHIP?”

Screams, running, people stumbling in the dark!

I go on deck and the culprits are paddling away, three in a two-person kayak.

Had to call security, and security called the police, so of course I had to fill out paperwork and didn’t get any more sleep that night.

Paul DeOrsay:

I was mate and then captain of Gazela Primeiro from 1976-79, when she was owned by the Philadelphia Maritime Museum. Our berth was at Penn’s Landing, a public park on the Delaware where we were open as a dockside attraction and served as the stage for folk music concerts on the weekends. We were highly visible and accessible.

As the only full-time employee on the ship, I usually slept on board. Needless to say, we had plenty of evening visitors, especially Fridays and Saturdays at bar-closing time.

One very early morning, something awakened me in my bunk, and I rolled over sleepily and propped myself on an elbow to figure out if something needed my attention. With a shock I discovered a disheveled-looking woman standing in the cabin doorway, about two feet from my face.

Once she saw that my eyes were open (I suspect with plenty of white showing) she demanded: “Where’s Bruce Lee?”

When I failed to respond with anything but a baffled look, she continued more insistently: “Where’s Bruce Lee? I’m supposed to meet him here. This is his boat.”

I explained politely that she might be mistaken, this was not Bruce Lee’s boat, and I worked for the real owners.

“This here’s Bruce Lee’s boat, and I’m to meet him here. Where is he?”

I concluded that a simple explanation was not going to extricate me from this situation, the complexity of which was starting to sink in. There I was, in bed, in my underwear, at 6:00 AM, with a crazy lady I had to somehow get out of my cabin, up on deck and across the gangway, while she was convinced that I was an interloper on her movie-star hero’s private yacht.

Somehow I managed to get my pants on and, explaining that I had not been advised of Mr. Lee’s plans, managed to talk her back up on deck and, ultimately, off the ship to await Bruce Lee’s second coming.

I spent a couple of nervous hours as she sat on shore and watched the ship and me, but ultimately, after she explained her mission to two Philadelphia cops, she was escorted out of the park.

Rachael Zoe Miller:

On American Promise in Providence, RI, 2012. 0200. Woke up to one familiar and two unfamiliar voices. By the time I rolled off my upper bunk, found my glasses and made it to the main salon, I saw the back end of two people leaving quickly and my education director just standing there. While five of us were sleeping, two interlopers, a man and a woman, made their way down below and into the main salon. American Promise is more of an around-the-world sailing yacht than a tall ship and has sole-to-ceiling supports, some of them stainless. The phrase that got our ed director out of bed was, “Look, they have a stripper pole!”

Our crew agreed we were thankful that Rebecca woke up as early in the incident as she did, because we felt we dodged a very awkward scene that might have been about to happen on our dining table!

"Clyde"

Jamie White:

I would like to introduce a gruff wizened shellback named Clyde. Clyde was a bit of a mascot aboard Bounty while we were in Long Beach, California at Shoreline Village, and spent many a long night standing watch at the main fife rail to discourage folks from boarding uninvited. He is a creation of that most talented and eclectic Jack Tar, Steve Johnson.

Jim Strebeck:

When I was running Hindu my first season in Key West I was awoken in the small hours by the sound of a number of spring breakers stepping aboard. I rushed up the companionway to tell them to leave, neglecting to put any clothes on. Hindu is a warm boat to sleep on, and it’s not like I expected to rush to the deck when I went to sleep.

Naked captain bursting onto the deck got them to leave pretty quickly.

Perry Davis:

It was in the middle of the night and we were tied up in Liverpool England aboard the British three-masted bark Kaskelot. I am a light sleeper, and something woke me up, so I went up on deck to investigate and found four or five locals boarding the ship.

I being still partly asleep told them to keep it down, since the crew is sleeping, then started back to the foc’sle. Once back in the foc’sle I stopped, and now fully awake, realized what I had just done.

I turned back to the deck and told the trespassers that they needed to leave. They didn’t seem to understand what I said and with thick accents they started asking me questions. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I told them they had to leave and this whole scene repeated itself.

At this point I told them that I couldn’t understand what they were saying since as an American I only was fluid in bad English and was going to need a translator. I went back to the focsle and woke up the bosun — an angry, excitable Irishman who might be able to help me persuade them to leave. Now we were both out on deck along with some of the other crew. The crew were getting more worked up and confrontational, and these locals kept calmly asking questions like a tourist would at a dockside tour. Only this was around 0300.

Well, eventually the trespassers left and I asked the crew what they were saying since I could not decipher the words through that accent. The crew told me they were speaking Scouse and therefore they couldn’t understand them either. Turns out Liverpudlians are known around the rest of the UK as Scousers, and they speak Scouse, which is a thick accent peppered with local slang no one else understands.

And that’s just one of the fascinating things I learned in our stop in Liverpool.

Mike Rutstein:

We’re docked at a private marina in downtown Salem, and although there are 11 berths, rarely does anyone sleep on board. The marina gates are locked, and for years we had no problems with security. Then one morning we showed up for work to find that people had been on board during the night, drinking our beer and eating our snacks!

It happened once, and I shrugged it off: “Kids!”

It happened again, and the trespassers had dropped and broken a beer bottle in the focsle and simply left the broken glass. I hung a NO TRESPASSING sign on our boarding stairs, and informed the dockmaster.

The third time, a rumpled blanket in a focsle berth indicated that the nocturnal activity had gone beyond mere drinking & snacking. I alerted the harbormaster, who in Salem is part of the police department.

Luckily, there was public access to a security camera on a nearby building. I began checking the live feed each night before I went to bed, and each morning as soon as I got up.

With a week, I got up early one morning, checked the live feed, and was treated to the sight of a young man and woman lounging on my foredeck, drinking my beer! In a hot minute I was out the door and jogging toward the marina, generally a ten-minute walk, and on the phone with the harbormaster. I reached the gate at the same time the patrol boat came surfing down the channel and we trapped them on the dock: a defiant young woman with a lot of ink and a terrified young man who pissed himself.

I hear she turned out to be a “person of interest” to the Salem PD, but on the advice of the harbormaster, we did not press charges and left matters up to them.

Never had a problem since.

Anne Beaumont:

On Tenacious in 2014, we were tied up in Bruges and some curious visitors from a Travellers camp across the road pinched a few things from the ship in the night, including most memorably, the “crew only” sign from the gangway.

One December we were having a regular maintenance Saturday at the Seaport and Santa Con was happening in the neighborhood. One Santa tried to board Peking, another climbed aloft on LV-87 (our lightship) and yet another barfed on one of the anchors on the pier near the woodshop.

Doug Faunt:

IIRC, one of the crew on Spirit of South Carolina found a couple going at it at the helm.

Corey Roy:

On Virginia I went into the focsle one morning during winter maintenance to retrieve something. I noticed one rack curtain was in a slightly different position than it had been the day before, and the smell in there was slightly different than normal — maybe like dirty feet? I didn’t think anything of it, though, and headed aft to do my work.

That afternoon, a homeless-looking fellow walks into the main salon from up forward. My jaw just dropped because I realized why I had noticed those things earlier.

The guy said, “I didn’t touch anything... How do I get out of here?”

I just pointed to the hatch dumbly and he left.

Now there are locks on the hatches.

Dennis Gallant:

I am constantly amazed at the number of people that walk on Angelique when she is tied up. My crew will politely ask if they can help them and the reply is usually “Oh, we just want to take a look”. Seriously? Please ask permission before you just walk on and we will be happy to show you around if we are not busy.

It was so bad I put a “No Trespassing” sign up on the door this fall (the cover is on the boat) after several people walked on.

Barbara O’Brien:

Anyone from Picton Castle remember Uhu [Island, in the Solomons] where all our shoes were taken and the First Mate had to go to the Chief to get them back?

Beth Landers:

I definitely interrupted a date. Woke up to the sounds of someone on deck, despite there not even being a brow out. He was trying to impress his lady friend by acting like the ship was his. You know, this ship docked at this museum, behind chains and fences he didn’t have a key to? Then after I informed them they were, in fact, trespassing, they were struggling to get back off the ship with no brow rigged. I was unsympathetic and let them figure it out for themselves. It was far easier to step off than on anyways.

I don’t know if he succeeded in wooing her. I went back to sleep.

Aaron Paolino:

The worst was on Spirit of Massachusetts in 2006 on Nantucket. A crew member of a nearby yacht snuck on board with a friend and was swinging around in the rigging, fell, and his friend dragged him onto the dock where the ambulance picked him up. Some of us woke up when the ambulance arrived, but otherwise we had no idea he was even on board!

Dirk Aurin:

During a Great Lakes tour on Providence 30 years ago we were boarded in the night. Our first night dockside in Toledo, we had a group of kids climb aboard and try to pull the brass running lights out of the rigging and the swivel guns off the rails. It was harder than they thought. We poured out of the hatches making a racket and easily startled them off. The following nights, we slept on deck with belaying pins under our pillows, which was probably overkill.

“Flash” Johnson:

Final night at our second-to-last port aboard the Gulden Leeuw in Horta, Azores, 2016. A drunk Aussie transit crew were returning to their sailing yacht docked across from us. Probably seven or eight and they took to wanting to climb our rig.

Our gangway watch were two of our smaller trainees, who did their best to deter them but were unsuccessful. So they pulled the fire alarm and woke the entire ship’s complement of 57.

These trainees were nearing the end of nine months of open-ocean sailing and had more than 23,000 nautical miles behind them.

The Aussies didn’t take kindly to an ever-growing number of crew and trainees telling them “no” and started swinging. It went very badly for the Aussies, and ended when the yacht captain ran over to get his crew. Our lanky 6’4” Dutch captain wearing nothing but his tightie-whities threatened to cover their yacht in 1200 gallons of black water if he didn’t get control of his crew.

Horta police asked if we wanted to press charges, but aside from some bloody knuckles, none of our crew got hurt, so we called it even.

Bonus: As we were slipping lines the next morning for Amsterdam, two of our trainees jumped the gap with their arms full of shoes. It’s weird how people just throw away perfectly good, expensive boat shoes by lining them up along the dock.

Matt Friske:

Tied up at 2 am in Fells Point, Baltimore, after a long hard cold transit, put the boat to bed and went below. Within half an hour a group of 20 teenagers were on deck, within three hours myself and crew had to tell at least five separate parties to please get off our boat.

Kevin Porter:

I was skippering Talofa in the ‘05 Pacific Tall Ships Challenge. In Channel Islands Harbor we had a stray dog sneak aboard, tear into our t-shirt supply and build a nest. Ruined a fair amount of merchandise. The owners were not happy, to say the least.

The dog was pretty bummed out when we put her off onto the dock and she kept coming back. We suspect that she also went for a dip in the ship’s hot tub — ‘cause all of a sudden the water was a pool of dirt & hair.

If you enjoyed this story, hunt up the one we did on the dreams (and nightmares) we sailors share. And contribute to our next crowd-sourced story via the Marlinspike facebook page!