On Sunday, Jez had invited me to attend the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend. On the ferry from Edmonds to Kingston, I finally became alert enough to notice my surroundings, and goosezilla‘s necklace.

With the super-sensitive sixth sense every woman has regarding when people are staring at her chest, Katy noted my drooling, early-morning half-lidded gaze, and hurriedly explained that the center bit is a toe. A TOE, damnit!

Our first stop was in Port Gamble, at the Sea and Shell Museum. The downstairs bit is one of those stores they have in every crappy, low-population, tourist-oriented town–full of stuffed animals and mugs with cutesy, treacly sayings. The upstairs, however, is pretty much the world’s most dilapidated museum.

The googly eyes totally make this fish awesome. I’m pretty sure that ANYTHING is made more awesome by the addition of googly eyes.

Here are a bunch of jars of preserved…things that haven’t been preserved super-well; I’m pretty sure that the fluid isn’t supposed to evaporate. From left to right on the bottom row, I’m guessing: Shark, fish, jellyfish, eel, The Blob.

When they ran out different kinds of shells to display, but still had extra cases left over, that’s when the magic happened. Shell handicrafts, shell stamps, things with shells embroidered on them…it goes on and on. Of course, the very best one is the CRUCIFIED JESUS SHELL.

This crab has a masturbation problem, and he’ll kindly thank you not to make fun of his one overdeveloped giant crab arm. He blames all of the scintillating material made available to him by Arrrdor, Inc.

As we left, Jez noted that one of the flags on the museum was upside down. Distress call, mistake, or prank pulled by the Masonic house across the street?

We arrived in Port Townsend just in time to board the good ship Adventuress; a historic schooner at nearly 100 years old, originally owned by ‘gentleman’s adventurer’ John Borden II, who commissioned it to travel to the Arctic to collect bowhead whale specimens. I was delighted to learn that this was a ‘working’ tour; we’d all be working together to haul the lines to raise and lower the sails.

Captain Kate, taking control of the ship when the Lady Washington challenged us with her cannons. For all the bragging in Pirates of the Caribbean–“This is the fastest ship in the Caribbean”; “There’s no real ship as can match The Interceptor”, we smoked it. That’s because with her square rig, she can’t sail into the wind the way Adventuress can.

OWNED. After a while, I got to play captain for a bit, steering the ship, while deckhands goosezilla, James, and Jez hauled lines at my whim. Muahahahahaha! My turn was up all too quickly, but it was said that I wore a shiteating grin the entire time I was behind the giant wooden wheel. I’ve got soft hands, city hands, so by the end of the day, I had some twinges of rope burn on my fingers, but actually helping work on the ship was incredibly satisfying. Jez ended up giving me the cd he won in the on-ship raffle, and suggested I could have it looping continuously in the pirate bathroom. This I considered to be a fantastic idea until I actually heard the cd, at which point I determined that it’s close to, if not THE worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life. There’s a whole track of SNORING. The people singing the chanties don’t actually know them, so they screw up words. People are coughing in the background on the track that talks about the ship’s history. This is an item they SELL. WOW. …Maybe I should just loop it when I’m gone, in the hopes of driving out the upstairs neighbors.