The young man and the sea

By Bonnie Wells
Staff Writer

Published on February 08, 2008

When he was 12 years old, Alex Adams took his first two-week sailing trip with his dad - and hated it.

"I was cold, wet and seasick in pea-soup fog and mist off Newfoundland," the 24-year-old Leverett resident remembers. So how to explain that he went back the next year, the year after that and so on throughout his teen years?

"All the bad times go away the minute you touch land," he said, "and it seems like the best experience you ever had."

When he was 17, Adams got his first job as a deck hand for the summer, returning every summer while getting his degree in biology at Wheaton College in Norton.

The summer after his freshman year, his seamanship landed him a four-month stint as an extra in the 2003 film "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," starring Russell Crowe. Coincidentally, the boat the studio transformed into the H.M.S. Surprise was the same one that gave Adams his first taste of the sea, the H.M.S. Rose.

"As a deck hand, I helped rerig and refit [the boat] for the movie," he said. "Then they dressed me up in old silly sailor clothes, put dirt on my face and gunk on my teeth and made me run around in the background."

Since graduating from Wheaton in 2005, Adams has been a full-time mariner on teaching and excursion boats. He has earned his 100-ton captain's license and dive master certification, and is working on his 500-ton captain's license, while contemplating graduate school.

This past November, when he had a rare two months off, he decided to go through his collection of photographs and welcome the public into his world with an exhibit at the Leverett Library that was on view during January. This month the show travels to The Henion Bakery in Amherst, while Adams hops a flight to St. Thomas to join his boat for a seven-month stint asea.

"These photographs were taken while traveling through New Zealand, fishing in southeast Alaska, and while sailing in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea aboard a traditionally rigged schooner," Adams writes in his artist statement. "With an emphasis on the sublime and an eye for images rarely seen in typical life, this collection shows sights seen by a professional traveler."

There is a majestic shot of The Spirit of Massachusetts, the 125-foot wooden sailboat that Adams calls home for much of the year. Working for Ocean Classroom, Adams joins a crew of from eight to 10 mariners, two or three professors and 22 students for a program called Seamester, in which the students receive school credit for studying maritime literature, history and science as well as navigation and seamanship.

"We take high school and college students out for as little as a week and as long as four months," Adams said. "It's a powerful teaching tool in that it's really hard writing all your papers by hand when you're cold and wet. But on the other hand, you're snorkeling in the Caribbean and eating roti [a kind of stewed-meat dumpling] in Trinidad." Talking about that last item, Adams gets a look on his face that can only be described as lip-smacking.

One image in the show is a traditional stone sugar mill on the island of St. John. Traveling among the islands of the Caribbean, students are given assignments to engage with the various locales and locals - for example, to learn about the history of milling sugar.

On Trinidad, students might be assigned a daylong scavenger hunt in which they must, say, take a picture with a local cricket jersey and ask who won the last match; eat a traditional island nosh on the street; and explain five items found in the Trinidad National Museum, Adams said.

In one arresting image, the frame is bisected by a thick stone wall, with an ancient burial site near the 16th-century El Moro fort in Puerto Rico on one side and a view of a trio of horses grazing on the beach on the other.

Several prints show details of the boat, taken from the deck, and Adams has stories from the harrowing to the sublime to go with each one. An image of the bowsprit, the long pole extending from the front of the schooner where the headsails attach, calls up a time in roiling seas off the Florida Keys when Adams and another mate had to climb out on the flanking ropes to refurl a sail that had gotten loose.

"When the waves are strong, the bowsprit can dip [under the water] Adams said. "While we were struggling with the sail, there came a call, Hold on!' and we got dipped."

He said his partner, who had the physique of a linebacker, broke a rib from the weight of his body hitting the water.

Once while a teenager he was rousted out of bed in the middle of the night to race up the topmast of the Harvey Gamage in a full moon, and cling there while taking in the topsail that had gotten unfurled.

"You can be awakened, do something outrageous and scary and then go back to sleep," Adams said. "It's total boredom to sheer terror in the drop of a hat. It keeps you on your toes."

Then there was the time he was struck dumb coming up on deck for his 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift. "I slid open the hatch and saw the most incredible Northern Lights until the sun rose," he said. "The sky was exploding!"

During the summers, Adams works on a 145-foot luxury motor yacht, and as a hiking guide and fly-fishing instructor for the 20 vacationers aboard in southeast Alaska - whale city, he says. An image of a whale breasting the surface and one of Alaskan mountains are drawn from that experience.

There are also jelly fish snapped in Mystic, Conn.; clouds that it behooves a mariner to learn to read; and the black-sand beaches of New Zealand.

Though the images are drawn from disparate travels, Adams said every snap of the shutter brings the same family phrase to mind: "If this isn't nice, what is?"

Adams' maritime exhibit of black and white photographs is on view through March 1 at The Henion Bakery, 174 N. Pleasant St. in Amherst.