[Vennila X Vana]

My god Joseph, you just kept at it until I reviewed this story. Well I hope you're happy.

The Good.

-It's not bad. Really, it isn't. It's not exactly my style or anything I would read if I didn't have to though.
-The story itself is a good one.
-I agree with everyone else, nice use of ship terminology and dialects of sailors.
-The symbolism could be very meaningful if one was to look that deep. It coould mean a lot of things to a lot of people and that's cool.

The Bad.

-More sentence variety. Almost all your sentences start with nouns, and they're like all the same length. Reading this aloud would be so monotonous.
-When you have something ironic or facetious in there you ruined it by over-explaining it, which insults the reader. I know you're better than that. Case in point: The captain, whose budget was small, ‘tested’ the ropes with hired experts who were bribed to tell the captain that the ropes were fine. What is this? Come on.
-More word variety. You used the word, "word" itself way too many times.
-Isis hit the nail on the head here. Show don't tell is exactly what I would say. It's like you're sitting in front of me and just elaborately telling me something that happened to you once. People can't relate to the nameless multitude of characters, and sometimes that can be good but it didn't work here I don't think. It was very...direct and that was demeaning. Like this paragraph:
That night the ship got caught in a hurricane. It was so bad the navigator couldn’t use his astrolabe to find out where they were. To make matters worse the compass broke when it’s glass case shattered. The helmsman was steering the ship blindly.
The captain never was in a situation as bad as this.
This is a storm! It's wild and crazy. You're telling me like we're sitting in front of a campfire and you're not very interested in this story at all. Maybe to fix that you should try more details?

The Ugly.
Oh yeah, 20 points of for asking me to read it so many times. [Just Kidding, Sorry it took so long!]