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| The Robert C. Seamans in Auckland, New Zealand, November 2024 |
Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships by Elliot RappaportMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found this book while I was looking for any input about the very odd-sounding study-abroad program my college student told me she’d been accepted into. I mean, my perception of a study-abroad is a semester in Paris, or maybe Australia if you’re feeling really wild. You take some classes, you travel on the weekends, and you come back with a harmless affectation having to do with Vegemite or macarons or something. But, like… a study-abroad doing oceanographic research while sailing in a tall ship in the South Pacific? Does that honestly sound real to you? As for me, I low-key thought my kid was getting set up to be human trafficked.
Well, apparently the Sea Education Association IS real, and Elliot Rappaport captained for them for several years. So while everyone else was reading this book for the weather, which, to be fair, IS interesting content, I was reading to learn more about what life is like on a tall ship/oceanographic research vessel crewed primarily by college students.
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I love how respectfully Rappaport writes about these student crews, while still telling cute and funny stories about them. On their first day at sea, he writes about them, “Stunned and eager, they rush to help, faces bearing the telltale signs of sensory overload and the glaze of freshly applied sunscreen.” Sounds about right, especially for my student, who in her one call home from a port in Tuvalu informed me of her realization that she “really needed to reapply sunscreen every two hours to keep from burning.” It’s not as if her mother has been telling her that her entire life or anything! Ah, well--everyone knows that experience is the best teacher.
In Rappaport’s writing, you see the benefit of experience, as the students transform from seasick and hapless students to competent sailors over the course of their couple of months together, and you get the idea that even when they’re leaving frowny-face Post-its on the navigational log or asking uncomfortable questions about colonialism in the South Pacific, Rappaport appreciates them and his valuable role in their education. I was especially interested to read his anecdote about seasickness and how it’s overcome, and to learn that even Rappaport occasionally suffers from it. I enjoyed his anecdotes of atypical adventures, the cyclones and storms, the occasional medical emergency on board, the time that they came upon a ship in distress in French Polynesia and the college student who happened to be a French minor was called upon to translate, but I’m also VERY happy to report that my student claims her own sailing was wonderful but fairly adventure-free.
At least, that’s the story she’s telling her mother…
My college student sailed on the Robert C. Seamans. Rappaport has this to say about the ship:
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All of his stories and descriptions are equally as vivid as this description. I won’t lie and say that I was always following his meteorology explanations, because I really wasn’t, but his authorial voice is very real, both conversational and competent, if that makes sense. He’ll be telling you an interesting story about meeting a guy in a bar during a blizzard, and the guy telling him about being a rescue pilot and what his voice sounded like and how young he looked, and then he’ll hit you with, “On some days without warning you meet the people you most aspire to resemble, and in following can only strive after their example.”
Damn, Rappaport. That hit hard.
Even though I wasn’t reading for the science and geography lore as much as the “this is what it’s like to sail on a tall ship” lore, some proper facts did get pounded into my head. For instance, this fact I had to look up later to truly believe it: “The Hawaiian chain begins amid molten pyrotechnics at the eponymous (and geologically brand-new) Big Island and then runs northwest, farther than most people realize--a row of diminishing dots strung nearly to the 180th meridian, halfway to Japan.” There’s a really cool map on Wikipedia that shows the full archipelago! I also researched his brief anecdote about Moruroa and the nuclear weapons testing that the French did there, and OMG it’s so bad. And I found a new citizen science project in Old Weather, which transcribes old ship logs to collate the scientific data hidden inside. His section on Cook Strait also reassured me that I was justified in being miserable seasick on the ferry from Wellington to Picton, ahem. What else would one expect from “a giant funnel, set to amplify whatever wind exists into something more powerful”?
I’d love to read more histories by people with unusual career paths like this, especially sailors, which I honestly didn’t really think was still a career until my kid told me she was going to spend the semester being one. She’s an environmental scientist, and although she did proper scientific research on her trip, imagine the value of a thousand-plus years of ocean data that we’ve lost every time a sailor died without passing on their stories. The Old Weather database is unlocking the valuable information hidden in those ship logs, but imagine all the casual anecdotes we’ve missed that would have provided datasets about flora and fauna, ocean currents and weather, just from mining the lived experience of historical sailors.
In Rappaport’s writing, you see the benefit of experience, as the students transform from seasick and hapless students to competent sailors over the course of their couple of months together, and you get the idea that even when they’re leaving frowny-face Post-its on the navigational log or asking uncomfortable questions about colonialism in the South Pacific, Rappaport appreciates them and his valuable role in their education. I was especially interested to read his anecdote about seasickness and how it’s overcome, and to learn that even Rappaport occasionally suffers from it. I enjoyed his anecdotes of atypical adventures, the cyclones and storms, the occasional medical emergency on board, the time that they came upon a ship in distress in French Polynesia and the college student who happened to be a French minor was called upon to translate, but I’m also VERY happy to report that my student claims her own sailing was wonderful but fairly adventure-free.
At least, that’s the story she’s telling her mother…
My college student sailed on the Robert C. Seamans. Rappaport has this to say about the ship:
“The Robert C. Seamans is forty-two meters long, a sailing school ship built of steel and certified to carry a crew of thirty-eight on any of the world’s oceans. She has white topsides, tan spars, her gear well-kept but with the characteristic patina of working vessels. Her name is displayed on trailboards at the bow, raised wooden plaques that have from time to time been lost to the sea in severe weather.”
.jpg)
All of his stories and descriptions are equally as vivid as this description. I won’t lie and say that I was always following his meteorology explanations, because I really wasn’t, but his authorial voice is very real, both conversational and competent, if that makes sense. He’ll be telling you an interesting story about meeting a guy in a bar during a blizzard, and the guy telling him about being a rescue pilot and what his voice sounded like and how young he looked, and then he’ll hit you with, “On some days without warning you meet the people you most aspire to resemble, and in following can only strive after their example.”
Damn, Rappaport. That hit hard.
Even though I wasn’t reading for the science and geography lore as much as the “this is what it’s like to sail on a tall ship” lore, some proper facts did get pounded into my head. For instance, this fact I had to look up later to truly believe it: “The Hawaiian chain begins amid molten pyrotechnics at the eponymous (and geologically brand-new) Big Island and then runs northwest, farther than most people realize--a row of diminishing dots strung nearly to the 180th meridian, halfway to Japan.” There’s a really cool map on Wikipedia that shows the full archipelago! I also researched his brief anecdote about Moruroa and the nuclear weapons testing that the French did there, and OMG it’s so bad. And I found a new citizen science project in Old Weather, which transcribes old ship logs to collate the scientific data hidden inside. His section on Cook Strait also reassured me that I was justified in being miserable seasick on the ferry from Wellington to Picton, ahem. What else would one expect from “a giant funnel, set to amplify whatever wind exists into something more powerful”?
I’d love to read more histories by people with unusual career paths like this, especially sailors, which I honestly didn’t really think was still a career until my kid told me she was going to spend the semester being one. She’s an environmental scientist, and although she did proper scientific research on her trip, imagine the value of a thousand-plus years of ocean data that we’ve lost every time a sailor died without passing on their stories. The Old Weather database is unlocking the valuable information hidden in those ship logs, but imagine all the casual anecdotes we’ve missed that would have provided datasets about flora and fauna, ocean currents and weather, just from mining the lived experience of historical sailors.
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