All Hands on Deck by Will Sofrin

Author:Will Sofrin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Work-party resumed the following morning, Monday, January 14. A thorough inspection of the ship revealed significant damage sustained up near the bow. The pounding we took in the storm caused a structural failure, allowing the bowsprit to press back against the forward watertight bulkhead, flexing it inward. The fore-aft tension of our rig was dependent on the resistance that could no longer be provided by the bowsprit. The stability of the entire rig was compromised.

The plan was to be in Puerto Rico for three to four nights, giving us two solid working days to fix the problem when we arrived. When I say “we,” I mean Todd and me, with some assistance from Jon. Lucky for the ship, I had gotten accustomed to performing intense bursts of hard labor in short periods of time. The undertaking was going to be challenging, requiring a coordinated effort, so Todd and I immediately set to planning the sequencing of the repair. The rest of the crew would deal with the rigging and preparing the ship for the next leg of the passage to Panama.

Much effort was put into creating an intense storm scene in the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. In that scene, HMS Surprise is pushed to her limit, causing the mizzenmast to break, which results in the death of a crew member. Peter Weir says, “A painting of the British frigate Prompt dismasted in a storm became a major inspiration for the storm scenes.” To create the scene, Weir’s team pooled a number of elements together that were a mix of actual film footage taken at sea and computer-generated imagery (CGI). In an interview for VFXWorld Magazine, visual effects supervisor Nathan McGuinness described first shooting test footage from a boat in the ocean. Then, knowing it would work, Fox sent a film crew out on the replica Endeavour for a passage around Cape Horn. The footage taken from on board Endeavour was then used in combination with the full-scale replica of HMS Surprise built in the same tank used for the filming of Titanic, various CGI models, and the twenty-five-foot miniature models of Surprise and Acheron. Richard Taylor, the founder and creative director of Weta Workshop in New Zealand, personally supervised the build and shoot of the museum-grade models. The result was a scene that felt all too real.

We spent the afternoon work-party sitting up on the bow, formulating the repair. We also spent a fair amount of time reflecting on the storm and all we had been through together in the past year. I had not spent much time with Todd since leaving Newport because of our different watch schedules. I didn’t understand why Todd even came on this trip with a wedding in his near future. I knew he was nearly forty years old and was under the impression this passage was to be his one last adventure before settling down. Then he told me the engagement was off and he was on board to take a break.

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