Yucknevage was too busy holding a swaying yardarm 70 feet above the choppy sea and untying the topsail to answer.
"That's Nick's quiet yell," said Cherie Patricelli, a 26-year-old nurse at Misericordia Hospital. "You should have heard his real yell when we dropped the whole yardarm on deck on the way up."
That mishap occurred in early December as the Gazela was being sailed to Caddell's Drydock on Staten Island, where the 102-year-old ship, the oldest and largest wooden square-rigger in operation, had her hull refitted to the tune of $100,000 and uncountable hours of volunteer labor.
After a bus ride from Penn's Landing, the crew had cast off from the shipyard in the bowels of New York's industrial waterfront about 11 p.m. Friday. But not before bidding farewell to George Lusby.
Lusby is an old salt who worked on the refitting at nominal pay. He is deaf, and it is an informal dictum that anyone who volunteers for the dubious pleasure of working and sailing on the Gazela learn sign language to communicate with him.
Then Captain Steve Masone, a Merchant Marine captain in his other life, born to be grizzled, warned the crew that he would "chop your toes off if you go aloft without your harness," and the Gazela threaded her way through the constant barge and freighter traffic of the Narrows and into the open Atlantic.
Captains never look worried, but later Masone confided that "we had compass error back there - we could've had trouble."
Saturday, 2 a.m.: Paul Introcaso was due to rise at 5:30 to begin breakfast, but instead of getting his rest, he was leaning into a cutting wind, watching the near-full moon trace the Gazela's web of rigging in the choppy sea along her 172-foot length.
Introcaso was formerly a jeweler but has pretty much given it up to serve as one of the ship's cooks. Like the 34 other crew members on this sail and other volunteers left ashore, his job description for most of the year is back-breaking grunt work.
