A night of wet dreamers, doomed crews, fast cash and other ‘Stories of the Sea’
May 8 2009 in Currents, Life Afloat by Deborah Bach
As a child, Wesley “Geno” Leech would pore over a globe of the world at school, craving adventure and thinking about all the places he wanted to see.
He hit the road at 17, hitchhiking around the U.S. One day he got a ride from a merchant marine who told him about his experiences at sea. Leech was sold. He began fishing on a merchant ship out of Seattle in 1969, collecting decades worth of observations that he would later spin into wry poems about life on a ship.
On Thursday, Leech’s poetry won him top honors and a $300 prize in the 9th annual “Stories of the Sea” competition at Seattle’s Fisherman’s Terminal. His poems included “Stick and Stay,” about choosing to tough it out on a fishing boat. With his eyes shut, swaying in rhythm, Leech spoke in a deep, gravelly voice, sounding uncannily like the actor Sam Elliott.
“Well stickin’ and stayin ain’t straddling the fence/. It ain’t flippin’ a coin. It’s a bloody sixth sense/ 0f when to keep grindin’ away, anchor or drift,/ or make a run for the bar and run away from the fish./ Well, stickin’ and stayin’ is bettin’ the red or the black/. Are you gonna stay and hardnose it, or mosey on back?/ So you take your ass-kickin and roll out your guts,/ stand on your head for the hard, honest buck.”
Crowds packed the Highliner Pub for a literary night of the fun, the strange, the salty and the unexpected.
The contest, sponsored by the Seattle Propeller Club and the Port of Seattle, included 14 participants who spoke, strummed, sang and fiddled songs and poems ranging from ribald to rueful.
They told of idealistic dreamers and doomed crews, of fast cash and the irresistible pull of the great blue horizon. Humor was clearly the favored approach with the judges, who chose three winners who served up droll yarns and drew plenty of laughs from the crowd that packed the bar.
Second place and $200 went to Jon Campbell, who traveled from Rhode Island to compete in the contest, a favorite part of the Seattle Maritime Festival. Playing an acoustic guitar, Campbell entertained the crowd with a song called “Frederick’s of Galilee” about a line of imagined lingerie for women who do the messy job of stringing bait.
“So get her that spandex downfilled bodysuit where the fasteners don’t rust./ It’s sure to keep her warm at night if the industry goes bust./ Get her that slinky gillnet wraparound, the one with the floats to match her eyes./ It goes good with those fur trimmed hipboots, the ones with the flares around the thighs.
“And he sells a full uplift flotation vest and it’s a lacy pastel hue./ And he sells a peekaboo survival suit that will always see her through./ So get her the polypropylene garter belt and the PVC chemise,/ ‘cause Frederick of Galilee has put the sleaze back on the seven seas.”
The entries ranged from poems to songs, but they all shared a sense of the sea. Singer Jon Campbell won second place.
Last year’s champion, Dan “Dano” Quinn, won third place and $100 for “Johnnie Gantline’s Gambit,” a saucy cautionary tale about a “green young sailor, a polliwog of a tar” who survives a shipwreck and is set straight by a crusty one-eyed, peg-legged, hook-handed pirate.
“Johnnie Gantline, the not-so-green sailor, crossed the ocean just once more./ He never, ever went to sea again when he reached his native shore./ The old captain had taught him a lesson, and Johnnie heeded the call./ You can learn a whole lot just by listening,/you don’t have to weather the squall.”
While most contestants stuck to fictional tales, a few told of real lives lost at sea. Jeb Wyman, a fisherman for 25 years, spoke about a captain named Bob who took him under his wing as a young greenhorn. A hulking man with an oversized personality, Bob survived years of commercial fishing, widely considered among the most dangerous jobs in America, only to drown in a Washington’s Cle Elum River in an effort to save a teenage girl caught in rapids.
Current events were a theme in poetry by Jeff Engles, a former 20-year merchant seaman who now works for the International Transport Workers’ Federation. Engles touched on societal greed and paralleled the Somalia pirates who seized the Maersk Alabama in April with a different type of pirate—financial industry titans and corrupt politicians.
“Pirates off the coast of Somalia don’t wait for a stimulus package;/ they take one./ Pirates on Wall Street grab their booty like slippery eels, then escape to their lairs in the suburbs./ Pirates of the sea hold a ship for ransom while the governor of Illinois sells a senator’s job/. Lawless scalawags roam the Gulf of Aden and we are aghast,/ while ruthless lenders package loans, sinking the world into Davy Jones’ locker.”
Home port for the annual "Stories of the Sea" poetry contest, part of the Seattle Maritime Festival.
Leech’s poetry debut was in 1995, while working on the fishing vessel Columbian Star out of Astoria, Oregon. A boat named Panther was fishing in the same area, inspiring Leech to pen a ditty called “Panther’s on the Prowl.” He read it over the boat’s radio, to the Panther crew’s amusement, and soon started churning out poems he’d share with his crewmates.
Leech was landlocked for a while, running a restaurant with his wife, but the pull of the distant horizon got the better of him.
“I had to go out fishing again,” said Leech, 59, who now works for Manson Construction, dredging shipping channels in the Southern U.S. “I was looking out the window all the time.”
Leech, who lives in Chinook, Wash., said that while he often participates in poetry festivals, he doesn’t usually enter contests. He didn’t necessarily think he’d take home top honors on Thursday.
“I thought I hit it pretty well,” he said. “As long as it pays my gas money, it’s good.”
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A poem by Jeff Engels read at the “Stories of the Sea” contest:
Catch a Cab
The cab shows up in the cold morning
Down to the sea one more time.
My wallet is empty and my seabag is full
Life ashore starts out fun, but when you are broke it’s dull.
Never quite fit in no matter how hard I try,
So it’s one last kiss and a long goodbye.
Seaman squawk, seaman joke, seaman are crazy
And usually end up broke.
My world is shifting from cocktail lounges and ATM machines,
To Carharts, a bunk and needle gun machines.
But I like it; I love the bizarre rituals of the sea,
Making and breaking tow, listening to the same sea stories,
And mostly chow time and the payoff.
I love the freedom, adventure and hundred dollar bills,
Stacked up and ready to spend on booze, girls and poker,
Then blow the rest.
My arms are strong and my heart has more calluses than
The hands of a Foss tugboat ab after four months at sea.
I’m riding the storm
Not punching a clock,
As I jump in the cab
And head to the dock.
Carolyn said on May 23, 2009
Deborah,
That was a great story, I really think that the song was hilarious!there must have been a lot of laughs that night.