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My hands gripped the varnished helm as I steered by the stars, halfway through a midnight watch. My heading was north by northwest, keeping the Big Dipper fixed in the rigging of the tall ship Lady Washington.

The Pacific was calm except for the long ocean swells that tugged at the rudder. A full moon illuminated the southern sky, glittering off our wake. Above me, a loose line flapped against the mainmast--not the tinny clank of steel on aluminum, but the hearty thunk-thunk of hemp on wood.

For people like me, who have voyaged through the pages of Joseph Conrad and Patrick O’Brian, this is the stuff of dreams. Many a salty fantasy will be fired up from Friday until Sept. 10 when a fleet of 14 tall ships parades into Los Angeles Harbor for a celebration of sail. Visitors are welcome, and armchair sailors can line up for a chance to explore one or more of these classic sailing ships. Some will cough up $50 for a 2 1/2-hour cruise. And some of them will sign up for a chance to live their fantasies on a longer voyage.

This visit represents the largest Southern California assembly of traditional tall ships in years, dramatizing a remarkable maritime comeback. A generation ago, only a few vessels from the Age of Sail could be found, the rest having rotted on their mooring lines as steam-and diesel-engine ships replaced them.

But a worldwide fleet is growing steadily. Some ships were restored, and many more have been built new, reviving centuries-old shipwrights’ skills. Why the renaissance? Many of the larger vessels, such as the 262-foot Ecuadorean-flag Guayas, which visited San Pedro in August, are used as naval training vessels on which young sailors learn teamwork and seamanship.

Others are used to teach the same lessons to at-risk kids or other youths. Witness the Los Angeles Maritime Institute in San Pedro, which has two handsome ships that sail almost exclusively with groups of inner-city kids.

Still others are replicas of historical vessels; the Lady Washington was built in Grays Harbor, Wash., to commemorate the voyage of Robert Gray, a Boston fur trader who sailed the Pacific Northwest in 1792, lending his name to various regional landmarks.

This growing fleet also provides opportunities for people like me, who simply yearn to help sail these spectacular ships and who are willing to spend some combination of travel dollars and sweat equity for that opportunity.

I found my ship in June, moored at the old fishing port of St. Helens, about 25 miles down the Columbia River from Portland, Ore. Sea bag slung over my shoulder, I stood on the dock and admired the vessel that would be home for four days.

By today’s standards, the Lady Washington is small--only 87 feet. But what it lacks in scale it makes up in sheer elegance--an 18th century brigantine with a raised stern, wood scrollwork painted in primary colors and offset by varnished mahogany, two stout masts and a 20-foot bowsprit supporting impossibly intricate rigging that includes 150 lines strung from the sails to the rails.

I climbed the gangplank and introduced myself to the skipper, Kevin McKee, who assigned me to Prairie, a 19-year-old salt with long blond hair tied in a nautical knot. Prairie fitted me with a climber’s harness, showed me how to clip onto a line and escorted me up the forward mast.

“As a trainee,” she instructed me, “you should keep yourself clipped in. And always maintain three points of contact with the rigging.” With enthusiasm, I agreed and up we went, 35 feet, then out onto a yardarm. I enjoyed the view for about 30 seconds and then, with a queasy feeling in my stomach, decided to climb back down.

An hour later we were welcoming aboard the local Chamber of Commerce, which had chartered the ship for an evening cruise. We tossed off our lines, motored out into the Lower Columbia River, turned into the wind and raised sails. I watched alongside the local merchants as my young shipmates, in pirate-like period dress and Teva sandals, with gold rings dangling from various body parts, scrambled up the rigging and onto the yardarms like the Flying Wallendas. A few minutes later we were angling off the wind, sporting a dozen grand, white, trapezoidal sails, each bulging in the evening breeze.

“I’ve lived 70 years,” one of our passengers declared, mostly to himself. “And I never dreamed I’d see anything like this.”

After delivering our passengers back to St. Helens, the skipper mustered his motley crew of 16 men and women. There was Ryan Meyer, the 22-year-old first mate, whose gold earring and long black ponytail are a perfect fit with the ship’s ambience. Meyer spotted the Lady Washington sailing into Ventura in 1998, stepped aboard and volunteered. Today he has a Coast Guard license and sometimes skippers the vessel.

Or Margaret Strozyk, a gutsy 19-year-old from Aberdeen, Wash., who has been volunteering for more than a year. She’s also been studying for her captain’s license. Or Michael Kellick, a part-time actor from Los Angeles, who has been known to sail a tall ship in the morning, then report as an extra on a science fiction episode of “The X-Files” in the afternoon. Or David Fielder, a 50-ish graybeard from Portland, whose idea of a week’s vacation is to catch up with the Lady Washington and pay $25 a day for the privilege of crewing on an offshore transit.

Our mission: to sail this tall ship down the Columbia and up the Washington Coast to Puget Sound and Seattle. Just before midnight, we tossed off the mooring lines and turned downriver.

I was assigned to the midnight watch, reporting to Tamara Becker, a Washingtonian for whom the cruise was truly a busman’s holiday; in her other life, she works as a licensed mate aboard oil tankers. For the next four days, I did what I was told by a 5-foot-tall woman with chemically assisted red hair and several years at sea. We motored through the darkness as a light show of riverfront towns, shopping centers and pulp mills glided by, eerily reflected on the water. Every 30 minutes or so we passed an incoming freighter, with Becker exchanging greetings on the radio.

I took my first stint at the helm, steering between the red-and green-lighted buoys that designate the shipping lanes, matching them with the navigational chart while trying to learn the idiosyncrasies of the heavy helm. Even under power, it was a cosmic journey--an 18th century spaceship cruising through a 21st century galaxy. At 4 a.m. we were relieved by the next watch. I crawled into my bunk alongside the ship’s galley and sailed off to sleep.

Three hours later, I found out why nobody else had claimed this bunk as the cook served up bacon and eggs to a hungry crew mere inches from my head. Up on deck, the river had broadened as we neared the ocean. The crew expressed some anxiety as we approached the Columbia Bar, the notorious “Graveyard of the Pacific,” where the mighty river’s flow collides with incoming ocean swells.

The crossing, however, proved uneventful--mellow, Meyer called it. The only casualty was a lanky 18-year-old who minutes before had been scrambling through the rigging. Now he lay on the deck holding his stomach, while his friends leaned over and offered remedies for seasickness.

The cruise up the coast was equally mellow--calm seas, bright sun and a gentle northerly breeze. Now and then the ship would lurch on the front of a large wave, triggering a few musical groans and squeaks in the rigging. But mostly we worked to the throaty rumble of the diesel engine, standing our watches, then spending the off-duty hours sanding and varnishing hatches and rails. I watched Kellick, the part-time actor, weave an artful marlinspike sheathing around some lines at the stern. As he worked, he hummed a sea chantey and then told his story: He was strolling the piers at San Pedro one day when he decided to spend $25 for a day sail on the schooner Swift, operated by the Los Angeles Maritime Institute.

“I was overwhelmed,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that a guy like me could actually still sail on one of these incredible ships. It’s amazing where you can go and what you can do in this world if you’re willing to do a little work.”

On our third day we approached Cape Flattery, which marks the entrance to the broad Strait of Juan de Fuca and, ultimately, to Puget Sound. From five miles offshore, I studied the shoreline, imagining myself on watch for Capt. Cook or George Vancouver or the various Spanish sailors who explored this coastline in the 1700s. Each was looking for the fabled Northwest Passage--the shortcut to Asia that would eliminate the need to sail around the tip of South America.

For two centuries, this storied place near latitude 48 degrees north was the Holy Grail. But it was Cook, who doubted the existence of any such passage, who dubbed this point “Flattery” and sailed northward, missing the strait altogether. Once round the point, our skipper ordered his crew back to the rigging to raise sails--a welcome relief from the engine’s drone. Now the Lady Washington cruised proudly on the same course and by the same wind as countless ships before it.

My last midnight watch began midway down the strait. We seemed to be alone in the 20-mile-wide waterway. The lights of Port Angeles drifted by to starboard, and the full moon was enveloped in a silky horseshoe-shaped cloud. Becker kept me company at the helm, watching my compass heading, scolding me when I wandered.

Why, I asked, do people go to the effort to sail these ships? “People are tired of dealing with computers,” she said. “People want to have adventures where they rely on their own skill and ingenuity.”

Kellick emerged from the forward hatch and joined us, reciting something suitably romantic from Shakespeare, then offering his perspective. “I think tall ships provide an index to our natural selves,” he said. “So much of our lives is artificial, the latest electronics or the latest shampoo. Sailing a tall ship is real. It’s a genuine challenge. You have to learn something about the physics of wind and wood and sails. You have to learn a new language. You have to work with people you don’t know. Eventually you’re going to find yourself in a hairy situation, and the only solution is to rely on yourself and on your shipmates.”

In our four-day voyage, we encountered nothing hairier than a moderate northerly. But we still managed to learn a few things.

Boats, after all, are not about going someplace. They are getaways. Anybody who has ever gone to sea knows that much of the appeal has to do with leaving day-to-day problems and worries behind on the dock. For the duration of the voyage, be it an afternoon or a month, the sailor’s only problem is to find the wind and harness it, to ride powerful natural forces. The ship is the destination.

And all the better if that ship is a tall one.

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Ross Anderson is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Seattle Times.