OOM: Pearl Repairs

[politestpirate]

The sky is cool, grey, and occasionally misting, but that just means when you are working hard you can keep warm enough.

And there is certainly plenty of work to be done. The deck of the Black Pearl has been cleared off, with debris and pieces that are large enough to reuse stacked carefully. All over is the gleam of cut and exposed wood, the splintered edges cut and smoothed in preparation for patching sections. One mast has been cleared of charred and torn sails and rigging, the canvas and rope set in one area to work on before it can be sent back up.

One of the current priorities, however, is fixing the stern section of the ship, the back wall of the captain's cabin, that took some of the worse damage from the kraken-

Scottish autumn nights can start to get chilly, afterall.

Party thread style, slowtimes more than welcome.

Comments

[scourgeofpiracy.livejournal.com]

Norrington is no skilled carpenter, but he can do basic ship repair well enough.

And it keeps him occupied.

[aj_crawley]

There's a large dark shape flitting about overhead, high amongst the remaining rigging - has been for a while. Mostly silent, except for the odd warning that floats down a little in advance of anything to awkward to be lowered by hand.

Now, however:

"Little help?"

Crowley's perched above the fore topsail, one arm around the mast, and eyeing the yard on which he balances with some small amount of concern.

"Could use a hand up here," he calls.

And after a moment:

"Someone light."

[gonna_live]

She's not any great shakes at carpentering --

-- carping? --

-- but Kaylee can build, a little; and do simple repairs.

Right now she's in the captain's cabin, having just transported a few freshly sanded boards. (One by one. Carefully.) She's got a toolbox, and a tape measure. (Digital.) Now it's time to start seeing about repairing the back wall.

[v_knidh8er]

Do you hear that?
That...noise? It's like a tapping.
Not random, or slow like the sound of shallow waves hitting the bow.

No, this is more rhythmic.

Onetwothree
Onetwothree
Onetwothree four fivesixseveneight

It's not coming from behind that deckside cabin door, is it?

[river_meimei]

There's a lot of work to be done yet.

No one's given River anything specific to do, though -- Jack hauled the raft over with a gold-toothed grin and a wink, gave her a hand down off the railing with exaggerated swaying courtliness, and then scurried off in alarm when someone called out a question about the barrel of rum in his cabin.

So she's wandering, barefoot and dreamy, pausing every now and then to inspect something.

[pirate_jack]

He's not one to stay still at a single project -- he's the captain, after all. He's been from the bilges to the bowsprit over the last little while, seeing people settled in their work and bundling oilcloth into the cabin for the windows, at one point.

(It'll do until the plexiglas arrives.)

Be that as it may, at the moment, Jack Sparrow's set himself up in a cleared space on the quarterdeck, one with a good view of the decks and the water approach. A patch-rack's braced nearby, and canvas is being stretched on it and treated for use on the sails.

Jack himself is going over a sail, with a length of heavy, oiled silk attached to a canvas-needle held in his teeth.

[seeks-sixfinger.livejournal.com]

Even before he was a pirate, Inigo knew ships. You don't spend as long as he did travelling the world without picking things up.

He's currently kneeling in front a gap in the railing, a small pile of salvaged wood nearby as he sifts through it, looking for pieces the right size to be used in repairing the gap.

[prone-to-panic.livejournal.com]

Archie's up on the main deck, catching a bit of fresh air before plunging back into the depts of the gundeck. And so, he's sitting on one of the intact bits of railing, sleeves still rolled up, looking out over the lake, trying to decide what he wants to tackle next. Company is more than welcome.

[mercurialist]

Mercer's been enlisted to take on the snarled ropes and sailcloth dangling from the mizzenmast. He's whistling as he balances precariously on the cracked stay, alternately untangling and cutting the knots as he goes.

The tune's unidentifiable, and yet, somehow, it still manages to sound off-key.

[merrimanlyon]

Repairing a ship is a good deal easier when the vessel is in dry-dock. Out of the water, it is easier to spot cracks and loose boards and other problems with the hull, and offers the chance to clear out the accumulation of foul-smelling bilge that can be found in even the best-made ships. But Milliways has no dry-dock for a vessel the size of the Pearl, and that makes work on the hull rather difficult...but not impossible.

This line of thought would explain why Merriman is slowly walking around the perimeter of the ship, carefully examining the hull for cracks and holes near the water-line.

If the fact that he's walking on the surface of the water is at all out of the ordinary -- well, he doesn't seem to be troubled by it.