A Sea Story

An old friend sent me a picture last week that was taken when we were both young sailors enjoying liberty in Australia back in the early eighties. I had never seen this picture before because we had a hard and fast rule back then that, “what happens on cruise, stays on cruise.”

The Navy was quite different back then, carriers had all male crews and spent months on end playing cat and mouse games with the Soviets in a part of the Indian Ocean we called the “Bear Box”. I still don’t know what purpose we actually served out there, but Uncle Ronnie told us o go, so we went.

We were stereotypical sailor of our generation; we drank, swore and chased women whenever he had the opportunity. You could buy a carton of cigarettes on the ship for about $7 and the smoking lamp was lit throughout the day on most of the ship, and they gave us two beers for every six weeks we were at sea without hitting port.

Another relic from the past is the art telling a good sea story. I don’t know for sure but I suspect that the first sea story was told by one the first sailors who, upon retuning from a voyage, sat down over a tankard of grog and lied to his shipmate about the women he wooed overseas. Sea stories are virtually unchanged to this day.

An old crusty CPO once told me that the main difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that fairy tales start off with, “Once upon a time…” and sea stories start off with, “This is no shit……”.

The picture I got from my old shipmate was photographic evidence of a sea story that I’ll share with you. I’ll clean it up a bit, partially because I don’t want to offend anyone, but mostly because there is chance my wife might read this.

All good sea stories are about an event that happened at a time and place that cannot easily be verified by your audience; this one happened just outside of Perth Australia sometime during the first Reagan administration.

We had just finished about four months of mind numbing boredom in the Indian Ocean on the USS Carl Vinson (it’s no a sea story unless you mention the ship you were on), we had eight paychecks in our pockets and a week to run free in a city where women out number men 7-1; if you can’t make a sea story out of that, you’re not a sailor!

A few days into the week, some of my friends discovered a six hour wine tasting cruise down the Swan River and had bought the last five tickets available for the next morning. Apparently the cruise was sold out because a local women’s bowling league was taking the cruise for their annual banquet.

At first I was a little hesitant to board any kind of boat during my precious time off but when they told me that the ticket included breakfast, lunch, unlimited wine and live music, I bought the last ticket and turned in that night looking forward to wine, women and song on the mysterious Swan River. A true adventure!

Reality set in as soon as my friends and I arrived at the pier the next morning. We were expecting to spend the day with a bunch of hot Australian women and I’m sure the women who we watched board the boat were, in fact, hot Australian women…in 1967.  In our enthusiasm we had failed to note that it was a senior women’s bowling league and they were, essentially, our mothers but with really cool accents.

A set back but not a showstopper; we regrouped and found some good seats in anticipation of some breakfast before indulging in some serious wine tasting. Imagine our surprise when the server arrived and gave us each a cookie and a tiny cup of tea for breakfast.

We all needed something a little more substantial to help soak up the gallons of old beer that had been fermenting in our stomachs all night.

We wolfed down our cookie and were seriously reconsidering our decision to take the trip until, after what seemed like an hour, a server arrived with a tray full of wine samples. We each took one and vowed to not let a server pass without taking a sample since it was taking them so long to deliver the wine.

We were disappointed, hung over and hungry so, naturally, a drinking game seemed like the only solution to salvage the slow start to our “great adventure.”

What we didn’t know was that there were ten servers who had been in the back filling up trays full of free wine that they would be serving continually from that point forward. By the time we reached the vineyard we were “Waltzing Matilda” (so to speak) with our adopted Australian mothers.

I wish I could tell you that I remembered buying cases of wine and donating them to the ladies or jumping up on the stage in the banquette hall and leading the room in a rousing version of “God Bless America” or the nice lady I was dancing with in the picture my friend sent; I wish I could tell you that, but I don’t want to lie to you.

I really don’t remember much after breakfast that day except getting very sick promising to never drink again.  I’ve been told that I had a great time and I must have because the next thing I remember clearly is waking up the piercing sound of a woman screaming.

I opened my eyes and realized that I was in my hotel room, in my bed , with a woman who appeared to be the hotel maid, standing at the foot of my bed screaming. I don’t know if a screaming stranger has ever awakened you from a drunken stupor, but my standard reaction to that scenario is sheer terror and a good amount of screaming on my own.

So for a brief second, we were a couple of total strangers scared, confused and screaming for reasons completely unknown to me…until I realized that I was naked.

Wait…I can explain.

It turns out that a hang over, a cookie, copious amounts of wine mixed with a healthy dose of singing and dancing is the perfect recipe to turn me into a virtual vomiting machine.

Another little detail I had failed to remember was that I had gotten very ill prior to passing out that I had to be carried back to my room, thrown into the shower and hosed off after our wine tasting adventure.

The good news is that my shipmates were the kind of guys who would never leave in a mess like that and had carried me back and hosed me off, the bad news is that they were just drunk enough themselves to have placed the “Place make up my room” placard on my door thinking it was the “Do not disturb” sign.

Which brings us back to the screaming maid standing over me the next morning. Fortunately for me the maid overcame her shock and beat a hasty retreat as I scrambled to try to cover myself.

There are many things I still don’t remember (mercifully) about that journey down the Swan River, but I’ll never forget the great friends and shipmates who, not only took great care of me that day, but also kept quiet and allowed me plausible deniability for decades.

And that’s no shit…..