Having spent quite a lot of my time around sailors lately, I’ve found myself exposed to a greater proportion of sea stories than the ordinary man-on-the-street experiences in the average year.
I’m undergoing treatment and the doctors think I’ll pull through it all right, but it’s left me thinking about the sea story genre in general, and the construction and delivery of sea stories in particular. There are good and bad sea stories, and good and bad deliveries thereof, and as with any genre, the bad ones seem to be in the majority (thus the cause of my condition, no doubt).
In the interests of furthering the cause of good sea stories, I am going to share my thoughts on the matter and hope that two or three people listen earnestly and adopt some of my proposed standards before they try to tell me one more time about that once when the dog couldn’t make it ashore and peed in the dinghy instead.
That’s not a sea story, in my book. That’s just cruising; hardship is commonplace. You were in a storm, and there were big waves? Big deal; fear and water go hand-in-hand, too. I don’t mind if you tell me, but I’ve been scared and wet a lot of times too and it doesn’t interest me all that much anymore.
You hit a whale? Now we’re on the right track. But if you just hit a whale, and went below, and everything was fine, and the whale waved at you and swam off okay, that’s not much of a sea story to me, either. It’s novel, sure, and I’m sure it was exciting if you were there, but it’s nothing that’s going to keep anyone on the edge of their seat.
Sea stories have to either be tense or funny. But the best of them are both.
What makes a good sea story for me is the humorous or casual portrayal of a deadly situation. Death isn’t funny to a lot of folks, I understand that. But in two of the most amazing hurricane stories I have ever heard told, the hurricane was just a bit player in the incident, barely worthy of a walk-on mention, quickly lost in the background of an even more exciting incident.
But this resonates with other sailors because being able to laugh at such danger is what helps us to face it.
This is good news for a lot of potential sea storytellers, because it means that folks who don’t have the presence or timbre to keep a crowd hanging on the edge of a cliff in casual conversation can at least shoot for funny as a qualifying factor. Not everyone can pull off spooky or tense, but I have confidence that most people can learn to be some sort of funny. Self-deprecating often works in the absence of anything else.
The other necessary qualification, of course, is to have some sea stories to tell. It’s not adequate to have only a handful; you’ll become repetitive and be that guy who is always trying to find a way to work his one decent story awkwardly into the current topic of conversation. I have approximately one good sea story and I’ve learned, no matter what, it’s generally best to just keep my mouth shut, even when I think that it might be pertinent to the theme at hand.
What you need is a vast catalog of stories, which will seem like a bottomless well to your listeners, which you can segue smoothly into regardless of what the subject of current discussion might be. Tendrils from any single one of your stories might themselves have enough depth and detail to spend an evening sharing them. If you can shift from a story about shopping for shoes in Venezuela to surviving a tsunami off the coast of New Zealand to your initiation into a tribe of cannibals in Indonesia in the course of a ten minute conversation, then you have exactly the catalog of which I speak. If you just have that one time when you were in the Philippines when the volcano exploded, that could be exciting or funny, sure, but you’re going to get to the end of it, and then what? Real sea story tellers always have more, or at least give you a sense they have more, just over the horizon.
The best sea stories open modestly as a small anecdote when, for example, someone happens to mention a minor issue they have addressed recently with their head and you recall something similar that happened to you once in Brazil, and your solution was like theirs, only involved uncontacted native tribes, drug smugglers, and a hurricane of some sort. You open and close with the head itself, of course; the other involved parties, as fascinating as they might seem to the layman, will be mentioned only in passing, as between seaman, who understand that a really nasty head glitch is ten times the trouble of even the most vicious drug smuggler.
The best way to acquire such a catalog of stories, from my observations, is to be poor, or have been poor at some point while out on your voyages. Rich sailors have weather and docking accidents and fouled anchors just like everyone else, but there just seems to be something about living dirt cheap and close to the locals that provokes a series of rollicking yarns. This is why Tristan Jones managed to produce a veritable library of books about his experiences, and why Fatty Goodlander can pack a conference room full and keep them spellbound for a two-hour stretch.
But the rest, I’m afraid, is just luck. Woe unto the sailor who circumnavigates without serious life-threatening experiences occurring to him or her.
Of course, this subtle method of working your sea story into an appropriate opening in the flow of conversation is not the only way to tell it. There are those few individuals who, through charisma and technique, are able to bound into a room, nod to the largest man, wink at the prettiest woman, and in the ensuing silence bellow, “SO there I was… off the coast of Borneo in a typhoon on a raft made of toothpicks lashed together with second-hand Chinese dental floss….”
But that talent is rare and unless your confidence abounds, you’re better off trying the first technique instead. The same goes for the sea chanty, a likewise venerable tradition of sea storytelling, but one best limited to the rare sailor with some semblance of musicality.
There is some debate over whether or not good sea stories should be true or not. In my view, you have no business telling a sea story if you’re not willing to embellish it a bit. They’re called “sea STORIES”, after all, not “sea documentaries”, or “sea affidavits.” No one really needs to know if you’ve polished it up a bit along the way. Half the fun for your listeners is trying to figure out if you made up the part about the gigantic python, anyway.