FRED BAILEY has steered a meandering wake through the sea of life as an aviator, cowboy, logger and tractor salesman. Bowing to his passion for the sea, he has been a beachcomber, a diver, a tugboat deckhand, cook, engineer and mate. He has served as engineer on fish packers, worked in shipyards, refitted several offshore sailboats of his own and lives aboard ‘Seafire,’ the motorsailer in which he will spend the balance of his days sailing in pursuit of stories and adventure. “Not all wanderers are lost”. Throughout history the yarn, the poem and the song are quintessential to all nautical endeavours; Fred revels in helping continue that tradition. “Life is an adventure, you can’t write passionately about it if you don’t live it with passion.”
Presently, home port is Silva Bay on Gabriola Island in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia. After a working life on the Pacific coast and its backwaters and backwoods, he remains passionate about wilderness, open ocean as well as the people who make their lives there.
He has written two novels of nautical fiction, ‘The Keeper’ and ‘Storm Ecstasy.’ Other books are ‘The Water Rushing By’, an anthology of nautical prose and poetry, and ‘Sins Of The Fathers’, an essay on surviving a dysfunctional childhood. Continuing to expand his catalogue of poetry, short stories and photographs; several new works are in various stages of completion. Published in many nautical periodicals Bailey accepts writing and photography projects on a variety of topics. He enjoys presenting his work in public venues such as the FisherPoets Gathering. He maintains a web and blog site at www.seafirechronicles.com.and can be contacted at svpaxboat@gmail.com
Presently, home port is Silva Bay on Gabriola Island in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia. After a working life on the Pacific coast and its backwaters and backwoods, he remains passionate about wilderness, open ocean as well as the people who make their lives there.
He has written two novels of nautical fiction, ‘The Keeper’ and ‘Storm Ecstasy.’ Other books are ‘The Water Rushing By’, an anthology of nautical prose and poetry, and ‘Sins Of The Fathers’, an essay on surviving a dysfunctional childhood. Continuing to expand his catalogue of poetry, short stories and photographs; several new works are in various stages of completion. Published in many nautical periodicals Bailey accepts writing and photography projects on a variety of topics. He enjoys presenting his work in public venues such as the FisherPoets Gathering. He maintains a web and blog site at www.seafirechronicles.com.and can be contacted at svpaxboat@gmail.com
AUDIO
WRITINGS
I’d Rather Be At Sea
I’d rather be at sea than be alone
Nothing ashore feels at all like home
If water under the keel is money in the pocket
Then miles from the beach is pay in the bank
If you don’t understand that
I can’t who say needs the sympathy, you or me.
_______________
Peeling Onions
He stands in a contorted Picasso pose
leaning against the galley sink
legs bent against the ship's roll to starboard
then holding back for the lurch and plunge to port
and in between the pistoned motions
the deckhand peels onions for the noon day soup.
A wooden spoon skewers the cupboard door handles
to keep then from puking out their contents
someone opened the lockers on the wrong roll
a bottle of soya sauce and one of Pinesol flew out
breaking on the galley sole
a foul brew of fumes and broken glass
just the kind of mess to start a man retching
especially the one who is stuck peeling onions.
Pots slide a slamming dance across the stove top
the hiss and stink of spilled coffee on the hot steel
lunch is two hours away if anyone cares to eat
he does his best to stand his watch
so no-one will say he didn't do his job
he stares down into the suck and gurgle of the sea plungering in the sink drain
wondering what brought him to this,
peeling stinking onions in a storm.
Then it's time for his turn to steer
give the officer of the watch a break from his dull routine alone in the wheelhouse
ship's business finished for the morning watch
ain't life a bitch,
and he manages his way along the side-deck
between the breaking, boarding seas
only one foot gets wet
making it to the wheel house
before the next green lump would have soaked him to the waist
he takes the time-worn spokes of the wooden wheel in his hands
and notices that they stink of peeling onions.
Now he sits alone steering into the broad, burning band of the morning sun's reflection
an undulating, dappled slashing, joyous blanket of brightness over the translucent seas
their foaming tumbled tops breaking in hissing spray
rainbow hues in their mist and blowing foam
rolling stacks of life and death
mountains of impassioned molecules waiting to surround him, invade him, drown him
and claim him as just a bit more detritus, if only he makes one more simple mistake
like the one that has brought him out here
to cook and clean and steer and spend his goddamned mornings peeling onions.
Bitching is just an unspoken part of the job description
and if he really didn't like it
he would not keep coming back for more
he's been so many places, done plenty of other things
between the gutters and the ivory towers
he knows that everything is just a way to make a living
and there is a price to pay for every tradeoff
and here it is simply
the brass-eyed tears that come
from peeling onions.
_______________
Together
Hand in hand we swim
naked in clear warm water
flesh glowing pearl bright
within the blue abyss.
Serenely trespassing among
drowned ruins of ancient metropoli
we glide through schools of bright darting fish.
Broken, fluted columns lean
In dancing pillars of light
over long-untrodden cobbled streets
smiling sphinxes toppled with
shattered statues of forgotten nobles
discarded amphorae
some perhaps still full
are tumbled in silent evidence
of a great cataclysm.
Silently we fly
together in fragrant skies
among throbbing stars
and bursting comets
above palm-lined, froth-fringed shores
glowing in platinum moonlight, dancing auroras
and the knowing gleam of the Southern Cross.
We have coupled our minds
and entwined our bodies
in the holds of brave old ships
on rope-bound bundles
of glowing silk and rich carpets
a vigorous perfume of mingled spices
citric fruit, pine tar, exotic wood,
spilled wine and blood.
Softly through the rumbling sails
a tropic light reflects on our glistening skin
and all the while of our intercourse
we can hear the ship’s cook raising lofty chants
from the hearts of unexplored continents
foetid dark jungles, frozen mountain plains
shimmering deserts, and winding fiords.
He sings an adagio of our secret territories
lost beyond the fogs of desire
and is accompanied with the desperate cries
of caged exotic birds.
Visions of moments past, or future,
Warm me in another endless night
As I lay in my tiny surging bunk.
Poised between sea and sky,
light and dark
my fate riding the crest of the next wave
this moment all I have
the nearest land two weeks behind me
or five miles beneath my frail keel
the bow leans into my quest
ever in pursuit of the westing moon.
In my amazement and anticipation
I trace the arc of my swinging oil lamp
wondering that I know these things
from this life, the last, or next.
I marvel that I know you
and how we travel forward together.
_______________
Just Another Day
A tug arrived in Powell River this morning, tied up its tow of two barges and steamed away to the next dispatch. No one noticed. It is not an unusual sight. It is just another day.
The gray dawn outside was bleak, cold, stormy and wet. I had been peacefully asleep in my bunk after two long days with our boat hauled out in a shipyard. We were finally under way again late last night. I climbed up to the wheelhouse to find the mate quietly grim. He had listened to a man’s last words on the VHF radio.
In the small hours of the stormy dark night we had passed a tug and tow bucking its way northward before a southeasterly gale. A short while later a frantic call crackled over the radios of every listening boat in the Southern Strait. A young, terrified voice from that tug we had passed, the Manson, reported succinctly that he had lost the steering on the boat. Then there was silence. There was not another word, no reply to the repeated terse calls from Vancouver Marine Traffic Control, the Coast Guard, and other boats.
We were already an hour away. There was nothing we could do. Two other vessels much nearer commenced a search. Little was found. A life ring with its attached, flashing strobe light, an empty life jacket, some minor debris and the barges with a flaccid tow line hanging straight down. Somewhere below them lay the tug with two bodies trapped inside, perhaps still warm, so recently alive.
All day the wheelhouse VHF has been busy with speculation on what happened. Was the full towline out? Had the boat’s engine failed? Had it sprung a sudden and impossible leak? Had the barges somehow passed, or girded, the boat, rolling it over and capsizing it? We’ll never know. All the guessing only cheapens the loss of two lives. No one knows what they would have done in the same situation.
Our mate ruefully speculated that he should have called back in reply to that panicked last transmission and suggested aborting the towline. Allowing the vessel to steam free of its deadly encumbrance is standard procedure for tugs which become overwhelmed by their tow. It is easy to speculate and impossible to know what happened from that last desperate call in the darkness of the night. What if, what if?
After lunch, I made my regular rounds as this vessel’s engineer to ensure that all was shipshape and that no apparent mechanical failures were imminent. It’s the best you can do. Then I retired back to my bunk, alone in the darkened foc’sle with the insistent drumming roar of the engine just a few feet aft of the bulkhead at my feet. I lay awake recalling moments of terror when the fate of my boat and its entire crew lay within the consequence of a snap decision. Turn the wheel to port, or starboard, release some tow line, reduce power, shine a spotlight just there, sound the horn, wake the off-watch crew. Each act, small and inconsequential as the flick of the wrist on a car’s steering wheel, yet entirely relevant to all that may, or may not, happen ever after.
I lay in the thundering blackness waiting for sleep and imagined what it would be like to momentarily awaken to feel the boat yawing wildly then rolling and the suddenly racing engine as its propeller came free of the water. The clatter and slam of objects falling out of the lockers, the suddenly silence of an abruptly stalled engine, the dark, burning-cold rush of water. Would there be screams or curses, would there be a struggle in the disoriented, suddenly-inverted alien world of the cabin? Would death come mercifully quickly? Would it take hours of entrapment within the overturned hull, the cold and stale air slowly eroding the last of this life’s sensations? Would you meet your fate with quiet resolve or with whimpering horror? Only the dead know.
At some time after dawn today it became obvious beyond hope that there were no survivors. I imagined a deckhand going aboard the derelict barges still afloat on the storm-wracked sea. I envisioned him sawing free the towing gear which had been rigged only hours earlier by living hands. I could see him heaving into place his own boat’s towing bridles and cautiously, and gratefully, clambering back aboard his own boat. I imagined the ringing of a wife’s telephone early in the morning. The sleepy, questioning hello and then the awkward, pregnant silence. The black knowing before any halting measured words began.
Life goes on, it’s just another day.