Down, Down, Down Under

I brought in two good ahis—a 30-lb "big-eye" and a whopping 50-plus lb yellowfin that two other sailors had to help me bring aboard. I also caught a 3-foot long barracuda—but we were advised not to eat it due to a horrible parasite that can afflict you with initial food poisoning followed by months of joint pain, paresthesia, dizziness, headaches, and other such unpleasantness. And then, a gorgeous, blue aku "skipjack" the Hawaiians have been drying in the sun as time permits.

I would rather have been in the water, seeing them swim by, curiously eyeing me, than clubbing them and taking off their heads... but I have to admit, I was the man for the job, just as much as the Island boys are the men for making the sashimi, poke, and dried aku.

Our BBQs and fishing lines are a way to pretend that this isn't a joyless ride on a neglected ship while the rest of the world is locked down from the plague of Covid-19.

The fishing and the BBQs are all just bandaids over the wound of management that blights this ship, wounds that slowly fester. By the time we got to Australia, the BBQs had stopped, ruined by top-down inspired acrimony.

My time with this captain and mate aboard from November through January dissolved into my refusal of any and all overtime. I chose to withhold my labor and get paid 1/3rd of my daily wages rather than let them benefit from my work. The other sailors did likewise.

It was an embarrassment. The relieving captain and mate—who I like and respect very much—were appalled. It raised a lot of eyebrows at the company and in the union hall, alike.

With these two back aboard, and as a result of the return, their personal dislike of me has sharpened and I believe their actions have become personal vendettas that all the sailors suffer for.

They began by changing how my department operates. On this ship, with only 4 sailors, the only way to do sanitation on this ship AND maintain the deck equipment is to have the sailors do sanitation while "on watch," then turn to and do maintenance on overtime.

They refused to allow the sailors to do sanitation on watch. We're required to do sanitation by contract, so they have to do it on overtime. Which leaves no time to maintain the deck equipment.

All the preventative maintenance items were 3-9 months overdue. Equipment was failing during mooring operations. The manning requirements to have unlicensed engine department personnel on deck to assist in mooring operations are repeatedly violated, and my complaints fall on deaf ears.

The mate kept assigning sailor's contractual work to the engine department; violations of jurisdiction is specifically what led to the life-threatening injuries to my delegate on the Moku Pahu.

I wrote a grievance that spelled out how the unilateral changes to my department was rendering the ship unsafe, and took it to the captain to give him the opportunity to fix it, per our contract.

The delegate, the chief mate, and I spent an hour and a half in the captain's office. All my solutions were shot down. The management tried to "explain away" the issues... going so far as to tell me "we feel the sailors are taking advantage of us" and disparaging the work they do. One item that seemed to infuriate the chief mate was that the sailors "do the same thing every day!" and what drew his particular ire was that the sailor sweeping the stairs was sweeping the stairs. It literally enraged him.

The list of items sailors are to do is specific. His task is to "sweep the stairs every day. Mop every other."

In order to get an extra 3-hours of maintenance on deck, we agreed to reduce the amount of sanitation we were doing and they agreed to let the sailors do an hour of sanitary on watch.

Normally, when we turn in our overtime, the mate uses a red pen to mark items he objects to paying. They're usually quite petty and can be "papered over" by how the sheets are written. We turn them in and we get our redlines back the next day.

The entire time the delegate, the chief mate, and I were in the captain's office, I could see the sailor's hours, redlined, on the captain's table.

At that point, 2e hadn't been give our redlines back for almost 3-weeks.

Afterward, it fed the speculation that the extra hour of overtime they authorized was going to be removed on the backside of the agreement we hammered out.

And we didn't see redlines from March 24th until April 20th, the last day of voyage 28... and when we did, it looked like a child had had a tantrum with a red crayon.

Thousands of dollars each, erased out of spite. The remedy will now be months in the making, if we're lucky.

They act not in good faith to the contract we sail under, and they acted not in good faith to their word in our negotiations.

The gang is now openly hostile towards the officers. The chain of command has become what we refer to as an error chain—a situation that leads to other errors that can result in incidents.

The hits keep on coming.

At a Drill and Safety meeting on the bridge, the captain told us we'd be departing for either Oakland or the Philippines. Two hours later his night orders said: "Chief Mate, as per the email I BCC'd you on, I need to know how many 40' containers we can load in Shanghai. (____) gives a weight to use for calculation. We will load more than 3 high on deck. In fact, plan on loading 4 high everywhere except the wings, and see what we can load fwd of the house. The more we say we can load, the better the chance that the office goes for it."

There are no less than 3 liner ships that go to Shanghai—each one of them could fit the entire cargo capacity of this ship without even affecting their drafts. It's stupid and wasteful, and putting that in the night orders for sailors to see merely serves to yank the chain of dogs already confined to chains.

We are restricted to the vessel by the company, which means every hour we're off while in port we get paid overtime. If a government declares us restricted, we get nothing... but "it is incumbent upon the master" to provide this letter to us.

No letter. Just redlines. He told the entire crew the company would pay it the week prior.  Thousands more dollars moved from payable into limbo.  

The union and the company assure us there is an "ongoing investigation" into this misfeasance, but I've heard it all before.

The results of my last "investigation" from 2019 got buried in the union VP's inbox. When my rep and I called him, he didn't have the faintest idea what the contract says about the issues. The "investigation" before that, from November of 2018, was summarized as "if you hire an attorney, the union will do nothing to help you." 

The electrician keeps posting a "Morale-O-Meter" on the whiteboard on the poopdeck... it is erased within minutes. Someone wrote "Kiljoy" as the captain on the sailing board.  

The greatest deflation of morale, however, comes in the form of the response to Covid-19: there are no flights out of Australia to the United States.

No less than 7 people would have walked off this ship the day we arrived in Darwin... fed up enough to break articles and pay their own way home.

We depart in a few hours, to where we don't entirely know. The sailing board says San Francisco.  

We'll see.

At Long Last - The Oz

When I flew home from my 115 days aboard the Kamokuiki, I needed 5 days on a class 1 ship to get a year's health insurance for me and mine.

Because I had my 1080 sea days enabling me to sit for my 3rd/2nd Mate Any Gross Tons, 500/1600 Master of Oceans license, I immediately enrolled in classes and filled out my USCG paperwork within 10 days of being home.

Don't waste time- strike while the iron is hot!

I figured at some point after sitting for the tests, a 30-day relief job would find me and I'd go out and get the insurance days I needed.

Well, I got called. Exactly two weeks after my 48 hour flight home from Malaysia, I spent another 72 hours flying back.

Within my two-and-a-half weeks away from the ship, the Malaysians had robbed all the rooms, used all the paper goods (or stolen them), and walked off with anything that wasn't bolted down. It was pathetic.

There was no food. There was no power. There was no air conditioning. There were no stores... no trash bags, no coffee, no gloves or hardhats, no paper cups.

Thank god there was toilet paper.

Worse yet, however, was the Malaysian government closed the border the midnight we arrived. I never had a chance to get coffee. I never bought that cheap guitar from one of the 3 music shops I'd researched. I couldn't even buy my own groceries.

It took two days to get stores aboard. We ate cold take-out that arrived on a launch boat with the Malaysian workers until voyage stores did arrive, and as I swung two pallets aboard I asked myself, "where's the rest of it?"

As I directed the gang to put the stores away, the steward and I looked at each other and shared a "holy shit" moment-- it wasn't enough food.

We departed the next day to an anchorage where we would take on fuel. Nine shots of barnacle- and mud-encrusted chain into the locker. Sail an hour. Drop 6 shots. Pull it all back up again two hours later.

We finally left for Japan after everyone was exhausted and fed up, a 6 angry-days of transit north. Breakfast was rationed. Stewie would give me updates on how tight we were and if we were going to make it. We ran out of eggs on day 3.

My sailors break down as one haolie with about 500 days of seatime, and two young island boys who just got their able seaman tickets. The big Hawaiian - we're talking a big smiling sumo wrestling islander - has just gotten his AB ticket and has only sailed as an ordinary seaman.

In short: They're fairly inexperienced. It is a small crew of 4 sailors (myself included) and I have more seadays than all of them combined. As the bosun I am the only day man- the three of them are watchstanders.

I immediately put them to work doing sanitary in the house. This is the landscape that COVID-19 has delivered me to deal with, so I put them to work using Lysol on all the doorknobs, handrails, common sink handles, toilets, and eating areas... in addition to their normal sweeping, mopping, and cleaning.

The planned voyage was a transfer of cargo from Guam to Manila (immediately nixed), and one from Japan to Australia, then take the ship back to Malaysia.

But there was a glaring issue: How were we going to get home if the ship was being laid up in a country we couldn't travel through? Malaysia had shut its borders to everyone--including us.

I asked the old man during a crew-wide meeting and he got flippant. "On an airplane!" he joked. He doubled down when I asked again. Then he admitted he had no idea when I tripled down and insisted on an answer.

He clearly hadn't thought about it and he didn't want to.

So I called the president of my union and asked him. He said he'd "look into it." Based on my previous experience with my union, "looking into it" was the equivalent to "never give it another thought for the rest of my goddamned life" and I seriously began to fret - their lack of forethought was going to strand us.

And the crew talked about it. Disgruntled from lack of food and stores, then enraged by the nickel and diming of our overtime, the mood was akin to a powderkeg.

When we arrived in Japan days later, I went to the old man and quit.

"You can't quit!" he screamed.

"Yet here I am quitting" I yelled back.

"You'll be thrown in jail!" he threatened me.

"On who's authority?" I asked.

Back and forth for 5 minutes, we shouted until he flatly denied me access to the military base where we were tied up.

I stormed out of his office as he was dialing the labor relations board of the company.

 

By the time I got down to the main deck he came on the radio, hailed the chief engineer, and said, "Hey Chief... change of plans. We're laying up in Oakland when we're done. I need you to revise our fuel."

 

Seconds later my favorite person in the union called, so I answered it, expecting some support.  

 

"You're being a spoiled cunt," he told me.

 

So the yelling began again, this time with people who I feel are supposed to have my back.  When you have no food, no gloves, no cleaning supplies, inadequate stores, are denied the overtime you need to run the ship safely... well, if you're not there to stand with me then what in the hell are you there for?

 

Stores came the next day- 7 pallets. More Lysol. Nitrile and jersey gloves.  Touch-free thermometers. A security watch protocol with 100% screening of shoreside crew, longshoremen included.

 

I paid off the International Seaman Center's guy to pick me up some supplies to keep my sailors happy: 10 cases of beer, 10 bottles of rum, 3 bags of BBQ briquettes, and about 50 lbs of pork and beef ribs, and chicken wings.

 

We departed for another dock 5 hours away, then departed again after cargo 3 hours later. The watchstanders were burned on STCW rest requirements instantly. Then we anchored the following morning, and departed again that afternoon...

 

Funny thing on this boat-- the last shot of anchor chain won't fit in the locker without "help," so I have to go down into the chain locker and wrestle the chain so it doesn't pile up.

 

By funny I mean- ain't right. Chain is heavy. It's hotter than burning phosphorus down in the chain locker, and more humid than a fish's puckered anus.  

 

All the barnacles we'd pulled out of the Malaysian anchorage had festered and an infestation of flies and maggots had taken over. The smell was almost 50% the stink of Karachi - and that's pretty foul, right there.

 

And then we were underway for real... the flies, maggots, stink and all.

 

First night out I fired up the BBQ and threw on some ribs. Only the third mate showed up. It was cold, the wind was about 50 knots, and squalls kept blowing through.  I burned the meat, but we ate it out of principle.

 

The next night I did the same. I threw out the fishing lines (even though we're going too fast to catch mahi), fired up the BBQ, and the gang showed up, the black gang showed up, and several officers.  The weather was agreeable.

 

Third night the same.  

 

So now we're in the groove of things and the rage has given way to tedium. The watchstanders are exhausted (it took me years to figure out how to get enough sleep as a watchstander), the tropical heat is bearing down for real, and all I do is work and drink water.

 

And right now we're crossing the equator, which makes me officially a Shellback. All these seadays and countless nautical miles and I'm just now a Shellback. But nobody aboard is particularly excited.

 

The second mate is putting together the voyage plan for our return to Oakland from Darwin, and the old man has set one waypoint in particular-- the point where the IDL (the international date line, or the Prime Meridian's anti-meridian) and the Equator meet.

 

When we cross that point we all become Golden Shellbacks - a very rare sea-going achievement. If that happens, I do believe the whole crew will be very stoked, indeed.

 

I might even have to get that tattoo.

Note:  Those that cross the Prime Meridian and Equator at the same time are "Emerald Shellbacks."