Please Dry Out My Under Things

This morning, the boat seemed to be inside of this dream world. The softest fog, like feather down, covered her on all sides. I turned my head as I paddled away and saw her floating there, suspended between sea and sky. It was mysterious, and cold, pieces of white and blue ice drifting around her hull.

It rains, it rains, it rains. The rain erases the boundaries of the physical world. I feel like I could jump off of the bow and turn a very slow somersault in the sky before drifting down into the water, which would be the same temperature as the air. I feel like I could breathe underwater, that I am breathing underwater.

And, that's it. That's as poetic as I can get about the weather. Everything is wet and slippery and it requires extreme concentration to climb up and down the ladders, especially when you're trying to hold onto a cup of coffee and an armful of other people's long underwear that they want dried out. How? How do you expect us to dry your things? There is water everywhere. Water. Everywhere. 

With all that aside, we're having a wonderful time! The adventures never quit!

 But I'm sorry, all I can write about today is this insidious rain. That, and how sometimes we open the hatch in the galley and crawl down into the engine room where there is hot air blowing out from some sort of fan or level. We hang up all the wet gear down there, in the deafening, churning guts of the ship, wearing ridiculously big head phones, miming to one another since we can't talk. It's quite an operation just to dry out somebody's damp long underwear. And once, somebody lost his glasses down in the bilge, and also somebody dropped a guest's shoes down into the bilge, and once somebody poured oil all over a guest's brand new hiking boots, and really people, I wish I could just be straight with you: throw your clothes over the shower curtain, turn the heat up in your room, it will be dry by morning.  Don't give it to us, because we don't mean to, but we might destroy it.