Sea Control - Sea Control 453 - All Hands on Deck with Will Sofrin

Episode Date: August 13, 2023

Links1. willsofrin.com.2. All Hands on Deck, by Will Sofrin, Abrams Press, 2023.

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today I speak with Will Sofran. We discuss his book All Hands on Deck. It is a book about his experiences during an epic sail on the tall ship Rose from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Rose ultimately became a leading character in the film Master and Commander as HMS Surprise. I edited and produced this episode. Here at Sea Control we are approaching our 300th episode since our relaunch and we would like to have a show dedicated to answering your questions. If you would like to submit a question, please email us at seacontrol at simsec.org. I would like to pause here to highlight our local chapters.

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Hello, and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. My guest today is Will Sofran, and we're discussing his book, All Hands on Deck. The book is about an epic sail on the tall ship Rose from Newport, Rhode Island to San Diego, California. Will, welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Hey, Nathan. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here and talking with you about this. So my background is, I'd say, a bit non-traditional.

Instead of going to college after high school, I enrolled in an apprenticeship to learn how to restore wooden boats. And I did this in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a two-year program at the Iris School of Technology and Trades. and while I was building boats I started sailing them in the summer I was living in Newport and I was having fun and that soon led to me getting paid and once I put that together the whole idea of getting paid to sail I thought wow wouldn't this be amazing to see the world and get paid to do it on these beautiful boats and so that launched me into a career of sailing professionally where I I eventually got a 100-ton captain's license with a sailing endorsement and sailed in Europe, the Caribbean, Central America, West Coast, East Coast.

Had a really bunch of extraordinary experiences that made me the person I am today. Well, as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed here are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Will, you touched a little bit about on this with kind of how you found yourself in the sailing world. But for the Rose in particular, you know, the ship, the centerpiece of the book, how do you find yourself on Rose? So I had just returned to Newport, Rhode Island from a European sailing tour of racing a classic 12 meter yacht in the Mediterranean. This was a boat that I had restored. A 12 meter yacht is not a boat that's 12 meters long. it's a rule of formula so the one I had restored was on my us6 and she was about 70 feet long and it's a great experience and I returned to Newport at the end of the fall well I should say the end

of sailing season mid-fall and there weren't any jobs or boats boat positions available for me and I didn't have a plan that I didn't know what I was going to do I put all my focus into getting that job on one and racing over in Europe and coming back to America I was kind of like a deer and headlights going, Oh my God, what do I do? With such little opportunity, I was stuck in limbo and not really doing much in the captain of that boat. He was letting me crash at his place. And he used to be a tall ship sailor and the Rose was in Newport and getting ready to leave for California, which I did not know. And he told me one day that I needed to go down to the ship and do some day work which is where you work for a day and you get paid for that day's work and you

get a meal um when i got to the boat chief mate a man named tony arrow offered me a job actually to sail to california because they were purchased to make a movie called master and commander and um i was really resistant to the whole opportunity i didn't want to do it but i also I didn't want to be a bum. I was living on the, you know, my former captain's living in his house. So I kind of felt pressured and I talked to some people and eventually I conceded that it was the right thing for me to do, but not without negotiating a job for my friend also, so long as he came.

So you touched a little bit on why you're taking the rose to California. It ties into a lot of your writing and kind of your journey mirrors that of Master and Commander. But can you tell the listeners a little bit about how Rose got purchased for that film and what she was going to be doing in California? There's a really prolific writer named Patrick O'Brien. And O'Brien's best known for his 20 book series framed around the relationship of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Matcher during the Napoleonic Wars. and the series was a became a global phenomenon it's really remarkable and so 20th century fox acquired the rights to make the movie and they hired peter weir who's a famous director recently won an oscar for his work in movies like the truman show witness um dead poet society weir

was a huge fan of the patrick o'brien books he loved them and so tom rothman the head of fox knew that we are loved and he wanted to partner with weir and he pitched him the job three times before he said yes weir sets off to go find the starship of his movie and he goes to england and he goes to various tall ship shows and he finds out that the rose is going to be in lunenburg nova scotia for a tall ship festival in 2000 now it's really sort of a perfect pairing because in the mid 90s o'brien's publisher had hired the ship to have a big party on it for the launch of one of his books and o'brien himself had said that rose was very much like the surprise that he wrote about in his books so we're having found that ship made it a condition for him to direct

the film and write the script that fox had to buy the ship for the movie even though they could have used cgi and uh and we did actually with the movie we built a replica of the ship and the tank that titanic was shot in but we wanted that ship and so we had to deliver a rose to go make that movie speaking of o'brien like i mentioned you uh you had lots of references uh to the novels kind of woven into the story and frankly lots of striking parallels between your experience on rose and uh you know the experiences of uh the characters in the book how did you find those parallels where are you i guess you mentioned in the book early on that you hadn't read master and commander before you you know before you started sailing i guess i'm curious did your

experience foster a love for those books and is that how you found all of those parallels Yeah, I had not read Master and Commander. I'd only started reading HMS Surprise, which is the third book in the series, because that is where the ship HMS Surprise that the Rose was purchased to depict appears in the series. I didn't really get into O'Brien until I started writing this book because when I was sailing, it was such a part of my life and I was living on boats and working on them. I didn't want to read about sailing while I was doing it. But I had I retired from professionally sailing about, I'd say, 12, 13 years ago and having a land based job certainly maybe want more of that flavor and that literature. So I had gone back into reading more historical books about sailing and different personal accounts. but i wanted my book to really do o'brien justice um to do my story justice and because we were sailing to california to make a movie based on patrick o'brien books i wanted to read his books

and in reading his books i couldn't help but just fall in love with the way that o'brien wrote i mean he's such a beautiful writer with the way he composed words and the fact that o'brien had little to hardly any sailing experience. It's just absolutely remarkable how this man learned to write what he wrote about so well and so accurately. All right, so shifting from O'Brien and his work to your experience on Rose, I'm sure it's not going to be a surprise to anyone who's seen your book, but you all were dismasted during the trip. Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience was like well for starters terrifying um this mass thing a vessel is means your mass break and we had all of our sail set and we were in the middle of the caribbean sea

en route to uh panama and it was about an hour before sunset and i heard a big boom i was below deck and i came running up and you see the last thing you want to see you've got your mass broken and you've got sail up and you know that the sun's going down and there's not really going to be anyone who can come help you you've all got to count on yourselves the people that you're with and this is the sort of event that you can't train or practice for you can practice for man overboard drills you can practice for coming home too but you can't practice something like this i was tasked with going aloft and only the officers went aloft so it was it was interesting that tony the chief mate had asked me to go aloft i went up the main mast to assist the second and

third mate andy and christina and tony our chief mate went up the foremast with our ships boson and i remember going up and thinking i had a safety belt to clip in in but we would free climb whenever we were climbing and then you would clip in where you when you got to where you were going to be and i remember thinking well i don't think i should clip in because if the rig starts to go over i didn't want to be harnessed to the rig i wanted to be able to jump free from the rig but fortunately the rig did not go over and we were able to contain the damage minimize it at that point and very carefully and very quickly decide a course of action so that we could get through the evening and then come day break really ascertain what we needed to do to

continue on so we can get to panama safely and you all kind of came up with a i guess in hindsight you all came up with kind of an entertaining name for your uh your new rig what was that again it was a reckoning team that's right when we yeah when we got underway in the pacific headed for mexico we set all of our sails and we had this odd looking rig that didn't make any sense and And we called it a recantine, and Captain Bailey thought it'd be a great opportunity to throw two of the deckhands in one of our dinghies. And they went out, and they filmed with a video camera the footage of us sailing with this dismasted rig. And I'm pretty certain that this might be the only genuine footage of a dismasted frigate under sail in the world today. Wow, that's amazing.

All right. Speaking of some of the crew on board, you mentioned in the book, and I think is what we're talking about, that there is a unique mix of characters as far as the crew goes. And you go into great detail about a lot of the relationships and the personalities and how they interact. What do you think was what was so interesting and invigorating about that crew mix? well so for anyone who's listening who hasn't read the book yet we've got 30 crew 30 and you've got eight women and 22 boys and i say that because that's a we were just sort of stuck in peter pan syndrome having fun right because this isn't a naval vessel and it's not a yacht this is a a replica of a 200 year old ship and you've got a mixed ensemble you have some of these members

who wish that they were alive 200 years ago and want to imagine and sort of reenact that experience and then you've got some people like me who are giving it a go as a sailor and you kind of find myself on this on this vessel but it's not really what I want to do so I'm sort of I'm very resistant of the culture on board i i would like to be on a beautiful yacht and there's other people there who sort of similar to me and then there are some people who just had no sailing background whatsoever and we needed bodies and they were lucky enough to to get a job because they were in the right place or they were the muscle that was needed and so you take this melting pot of mixed personalities men and women living together with i mean we're all sleeping in the same living compartments

there's not the girls section or the guys section and there were decency was required we did have a women's head and a men's head but otherwise i mean you'd have uh romantic relationships you'd have people not getting along you'd have fighting you'd have sort of groups forming but and i really do comment on this i mean if anything i'd say the book for anyone who doesn't figure it out is probably a criticism of myself most, because I am very harsh and judgmental of all these different personalities in the book. And, you know, I think I'd be doing an injustice to the story if I told you that we all got along. That's just not true. You can't put 30 people together in a situation like this and have them live and work together and not get a break from each other.

But what I think is really important to acknowledge is when the moments got really hard and tough, when we had that dismass thing, when we sailed through that Force 12 storm, our differences didn't matter. The people that I didn't like, I loved them because they did what they needed to do, and we would not have achieved our mission were it not for them. So for me, the whole experience was really eye-opening because I was so harsh and judgmental at the beginning. And as I get to the end, I find myself not wanting to be a tall ship sailor, but having such an immense amount of respect for what I learned through this experience and from those people who really live and breathe the tall ship life and culture. you were you were kind of thrown into learning the rig and learning how to climb up and and reef and you know do all of the the deckhand labor what was that process like how long did that take i was a competent sailor when i was hired on rose competent enough to be hired to go race on a 12 meter yacht in europe and get paid to do that when i got onto the rose it was like greek to me i mean

it was a whole different form of sailing completely archaic i mean even one of the most i think important elements of my book is being able to describe going aloft in that big storm to to furl a sail that's coming unfurled now today on any kind of boat you don't go aloft in a storm It's all been designed out of this system. There's no reason, yeah, you're going to have your Alaskan king crab fishermen who are out in horrible weather all the time. But none of those guys are climbing 60 feet up in the air to get their job done. And for me, being on Rose meant being very humble and being very honest about the fact that I did not understand. This was not a sloop.

It wasn't a schooner. it had 17 sails. The ship had 17 sails and over 200 working lines. And to be able to operate the ship really meant studying. We had a manual when I was first hired, but that teaches you a little bit. What really taught me a lot was working on the vessel to prepare her for the journey. And then fortunately, tall ships, the primary focus today is for them to be used as team building instruments. A lot of people go on, you can crew on a vessel for a week, you work together, you learn how to sail and operate the vessel. And that training is a mechanism to teach you how to work with people. Fortunately, because of that, the officers and the other very experienced

tall ship sailors on Rose were able and prepared to teach the sailors like myself who didn't have any tall ship experience how we're going to operate Rose. I'd say to round out my answer to your question by the time we got underway in puerto rico so after we completed the first leg of the journey i had a had a great sense of what was going on how we were doing things and why so i was able to feel more confident about what i was doing and how i was contributing as i read your book it quickly became apparent that uh it was so much more than you know your journey from one coast to the other and kind of tying in the O'Brien novels. So I'm kind of curious, what is the core thesis?

What is the message that you're hoping that readers can get from your book? I'd like to say probably two messages. One is, I think it's scary when you are a teenager and you're being told that this decision after high school is going to be this final decision that you're going to make in life. And if you don't make the right decision, you're really going to, you could be messing up your life in a big way. And I think that can be true. But I don't think it, the weight that it carries is, should feel so heavy for these young individuals. So I hope that my book will inspire not just young people, people of all ages to consider the decisions that they're making about what they're going to do next in life and maybe feel a little more confident about taking a chance, following their passion, doing something different, getting uncomfortable. I think it's scary to try something new, to put yourself in an environment that you have no familiarity with and to trust the fact that you will find comfort and grow from that experience. And then I think the other thing I hope could be taken away from my book is when I was a kid, I loved watching John Hughes movies like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

And when I think about The Breakfast Club, the plot of the story is about, you know, these individuals going to this one room for detention, kind of like our ship. And you've got this mixed personalities and mixed social groups. Each character represents that. And at the end, as they get to know each other, those differences and labels melt away. And today I'm really concerned of a society where a lot of people I feel are very want to be labeled. They want to be categorized. categorize. Everybody wants to be part of something. And I hope that maybe the message that can be taken away from this book is that actually none of that matters again. I think that

maybe we could care a little less about labels and just being kind to each other. Well, I'm sorry, that's all the time that we have today. I would like to thank my guest, Will Sofrin. Will, what are you working on next? And where can we find you online? I am working I'm on an epic book tour got 70 speaking events this year and they're taking me all over I've been to Alaska, New York

I was on the east coast, I'm going to Virginia I'm going to England, I'm going to Bermuda Texas I'm very excited about, I mean I didn't know Austin had a yacht club but you can find me at my website which is www.willsauferin.com

and I'm starting to work on my next book which is going to be uh about doing research about how different people have learned to become great at what they do and their methods of success well thank you again for joining us and to the listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon