SHIVER ME TIMBERS! – Gilligan Takes the Wheel (Boat captain)

When I was a boy, my parents screwed a captain’s wheel into my night table. Sometimes I would steer it and pretend. Now, it’s really happening. And I believe it’s safe to say that I’m the only captain in the history of the Desert Princess who has ever not known which direction "port" refers to. (It’s left, I’m told later.)

Edmondson, the captain and operations manager for Lake Mead Cruises, continues his on-the-lake training: "It appears that you’re turning the bow (front) of the boat but you’re not. In fact, the stern (rear) is pushing one way or the other. It’s like driving a car in reverse."

Maybe I haven’t heard the theme song in a while, but I’m pretty sure the S.S. Minnow crashed when the Skipper turned the wheel over to Gilligan.

"The Park Service can’t know you’re doing this," says Edmondson who, having read some of my previous articles, is visibly nervous. (He even brought along a second captain, Ray Sloan, to stand behind me and be nervous, too.)

"Even though we’re both standing here, they’d have a fit," Edmondson says.

By the time you read this, Edmondson already will be at his new post, captaining a charter boat in San Francisco. (Coincidence? Perhaps, but I sure get a lot of calls from people approaching the end of their jobs.)

"Just don’t hit anything hard," Edmondson says. "If you hit something hard, I’ve got to fill out paperwork, and I hate that."

The Desert Princess departs for sightseeing cruises every day at noon and 2 p.m., making a round trip of eight miles. Its passengers are mostly tourists.

"A couple of weeks ago, these people had their parents visit, and the parents booked a tour with us on the Internet," Edmondson says. "And the kids were like, ‘We lived here for 12 years and didn’t know you were here.’ "

A personal watercraft cuts us off.

"Don’t worry about him," Edmondson says. "Unless he breaks down right there, he’s safe."

We’re doing 8 knots (11 mph, about the speed of an overweight bicyclist). And the three Caterpillar diesel engines do not need adjusting. My only job is keeping the bow straight. It’s currently aimed for a cone-shaped outcrop called Promontory Point.

However, in today’s 15 mph wind, that’s a real job. The Desert Princess weighs 100 tons. But only 6 feet of it sits in the water; 60 feet juts out like a sail above it.

"I think you’re evading submarines," Edmondson says as we weave like Nick Nolte on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Edmondson, 62, is a former outboard motor company representative from Jacksonville, Fla., who says he always has loved the sea. After captaining fishing boats, oil-spill recovery vessels and water taxis, he was hired by Lake Mead Cruises 11 years ago.

"Some people work for money, and some work for the job," he says. "I work for the job. I feel like I’ve never had a job in my whole life, because I’ve always done what I want to do."

Starting pay for a Lake Mead Cruises captain is $16 per hour.

"If you look to the right side of the craft, you will see Lake Mead," I announce over the public-address system during a pause in the guided audio tour tape.

It’s also the captain’s job to communicate with his passengers, letting them know they’re in responsible hands.

"And if you look to the left," I continue, "you will see Lake Mead."

I follow up with a joke about being free to move about the cabin since the seat-belt light is off. Then I turn around to behold the giggling faces on the top deck. Not one smile is cracked.

"You weren’t that funny," I’m told later by a passenger who refuses to identify himself.

Tourists don’t know, or care, who I might be besides a captain with bad jokes. (Crickets and tumbleweeds also greet my announcement of the humpback whale off to the left, and the iceberg, "right ahead!")

"Sir?" I’m asked by my deckhand, 27-year-old Billy Sylvanie. Nobody calls me sir unless I’m ordering a breakfast burrito. This is cool.

Sylvanie has just performed a passenger count and tells me the exact number of passengers who I failed to make laugh: 124.

"And if there are 124 when we get back," Sloan says, "that’s what’s known as a successful trip." (Actually, a few years back, two Desert Princess passengers had too much to drink and dove in the water as the boat was docking. They swam to shore, where they were arrested by the Park Service.)

We’re now staring at the reason Las Vegas exists: Hoover Dam. The Desert Princess used to dock here, putting passengers eye to eye with the cars driving over the dam. (That’s no longer possible thanks to a half-mile, post-9/11 security barrier, and a water level that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation says could dip 125 feet below its 1983 high by September 2008.)

I have 20 maritime minutes to my name. But even I realize that a dam means a dead end. We need to, as we captains say in nautical speak, hang a U-ey. Actually, what’s required is an "in clutch" maneuver, I’m told, which means steering the boat in place with its engines instead of the wheel.

"Your job is to not run over those boats and keep the bow into the wind," Edmondson says as he shows me how to shift the throttles. "If we get it off the wind, it’s going to blow us into those rocks over there."

Rocks are a bad thing, because they extend outward under the water, like the reefs that recently sank that cruise ship off the Greek Island of Santorini.

"Boy, we would really make the front page," Edmondson says. "Your article would be nothing compared to it."

The boat goes one way when I command it the other — much as I did to my parents as an adolescent.

"You gave it too much," Edmondson says, noting that I’ve caused something he calls a "cavitation" of the propellers.

"They’re sucking air," he explains. "They’re not doing a good job."

It appears that the propellers and I have much in common. Now is a good time to point out that captaining a ship normally requires 365 days at sea (beyond the breakwater of any harbor). And that’s just to take the test for the license.

I overcorrect the mistake, launching us backward. I feel like Curly Howard of The Three Stooges during his road test.

"Always remember your stern," Edmondson says. "You’ve got 30 foot of paddle wheel behind you that you can’t see."

I surrender control of the vessel, like Captain Bligh to Fletcher Christian in "Mutiny on the Bounty," and the sailing immediately turns smooth.

Someone knocks at the wheelhouse door. It’s a woman and her son. Edmondson motions 11-year-old St. Clair, Mich., resident Matthew Whittlesey over. The boy says he enjoyed my iceberg joke. Then he jumps in my former seat.

"Oh, we let little kids steer the boat all the time," Edmondson says. "Some I’ve let go all the way to the dam and back."

Once, Edmondson says, an 11-year-old girl steered for three hours around the entire lake.

"And it was pitch black," he says, "so I taught her to do it by radar."

Whittlesey experiences none of the problems I had keeping the bow straight. At one point, he even uses his tiny feet to steer.

"We’re going with the wind now instead of against it," Sloan says to make me feel better.

Watch video of Corey Levitan at www.reviewjournal.com/video/fearandloafing.html. Fear and Loafing appears Mondays in the Living section. Levitan’s previous adventures are posted at fearandloafing.com.