I'm a deep-water sailor just in from Hong Kong,

Way, hey, blow the man down.

"Blow the Man Down" was one of the printable sea chanteys Capt. Dave Lyman used to sing on the poop deck of the Falls of Clyde. If there ever was a deep-water sailor it was Captain Dave. It's too bad I can't print his favorite sea chanteys in a family newspaper. The words would make you blush.

His taste in sea chanteys aside, Captain Dave was not the image many people have of sailors: roughnecks who get into trouble. Sailors are some of the most complicated people you'll meet, with interests such as anthropology and art.

You see, a sailor is somebody who goes to sea for a living and to do that you have to be a romantic. That was Captain Dave. Under the growl, behind that handlebar mustache, hidden by the rumpled aloha shirt was a pussyfoot, the easiest touch in the world, a sensitive man who knew what it means to fail.

What you have to understand about sailors like Captain Dave is their love for the sea. Otherwise, the profession makes no sense. He had to learn to survive on the ships he sailed in. We're not talking pampered ocean liners here; he sailed in tramp steamers out of the roughest ports on the globe.

That's why he was the real thing. Not a Sunday sailor. And he rose out of it to the top of his profession, a harbor pilot. A harbor pilot is somebody the captain turns the ship over to when entering port because that is the most dangerous part of the voyage.

Captain Dave was certified to command a ship of any size in the world: an oil tanker the length of King Street, the Queen Mary, an aircraft carrier, battleship, you name it. It's dangerous because anything can go wrong. This time something did. On Sunday, Captain Dave fell and was killed. He is testimony to the seamanship it takes to run the harbor.

The memories he left behind! All the couples he married as a sea captain. The sea songs we used to sing. He taught our tugboat captains how to do the tugboat hula for the Honolulu Harbor Festival.

An important thing he did was help found the Hawai'i Maritime Center. To help the Wai'anae Maritime Academy, he bought out Murphy's Bar for a fundraiser. Then there was the Polynesian Voyaging Society he helped to get started with Tommy Holmes and company. And a one-room museum they ran back in the 1980s on the ninth floor of Aloha Tower.

Captain Dave lived big. My favorite memory of him was the maiden voyage of the Navatec. The ship took a bunch of waterfront VIPs out to Diamond Head and back. Captain Dave and I were the program. He was Rip Van Lyman and I was Rip Van Krauss, two sea captains who had gone to sleep in Hawai'i in the 1820s.

We'd just woken up and were reminiscing about what Honolulu had been like 150 years ago as it went by out the portholes.

He could do that because Captain Dave was a historian, so much so that he narrated harbor tours during Harbor Festivals. Another thing he did was show kids how to tie knots. There must be hundreds of kids in Our Honolulu who learned to tie knots from Captain Dave at Harbor Festivals and Bishop Museum Family Sundays.

I think the kids admired him because he carried a whiff of the sea, a deep-water sailor just in from Hong Kong, or Liverpool, or Rio.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.