Retired In Her 30's

The word is final- my first ship is to be sold for scrap in July. Built in
1984 in a German shipyard and known as a C-10 (I think perhaps 8-10 in total
were built), she was the world's first "post PanAmex" ship- a ship too
large to go through the Panama Canal. And now her days are non-colloquially
numbered- a shame, too: the hull plating alone is twice the thickness of
that on similarly classed modern ships. She's stout and strong, but the
subsidies which allow her to run as a US flagged vessel mandate an age
restriction and she's simply too long in the tooth for Uncle Sam, and
therefore, too expensive to run for the parent company.

She was designed for the comfort of the crew, as well- not only are all
quarters large and private, with a built in desk, dresser, and wardrobe, a
personal head (w/sink and shower, of course), a couch, table, and end table,
but all rooms have plenty of natural light, a refrigerator, black-out
drapes, task lighting, and (what was novel back in the day) an antennae
hookup for your am/fm radio! All C-10's were built with a gym, pool, and
sauna... but apparently a few of them had the pools "closed-in," or, in
other words: Removed. Our ship still has her pool- and the engineers tend
to keep the heat up to "hot tub" when it's cold out, or unheated while in
the tropics. It is very much like a 12 story hotel.

She's stable in rough weather (my first trip saw some 16 meter swells,
recall, and she took them without too much complaint) and, when at the helm
in hand steering, she's remarkably responsive to even the subtlest of rudder
changes. I have been able to maintain a heading while steering to within
less than half a degree of sloppiness for a solid hour. When all 55,000+
horses are pushing her they cleave the seas and oceans she plies and move
her at a respectable clip... we spend more time negotiating overtaking
situations than being overtaken- by a healthy margin of about 25 to 1.

And now she'd done. It has taken the wind out of the sails of the deck
department. No more chipping and painting. No more vessel improvements.
Those wish-list projects (i.e.: adding internet, repainting the stern and
pool decks, adding a Bose noise-cancelling stereo to the wheelhouse)?
They've died on the vine. Now we're only worried about being compliant in
our ports-of-call for several more months. No clean-outs added to the
embarkation deck drains. No pad-eye repairs on the lashing bridges. No
safety paint on the ladders. No nuthin'.

I'm not given to nostalgia, but this ship has carried me more than half way
around the world five times, and will have done so 6 times when I disembark
in May, and it makes me a little bit sad. For many years she has been a
workhorse of the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, the
Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el Mandeb, the Arabian Sea, the
Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, the Sea of Bengal,
the Malacca Straits... whether on a great circle or a rhumb line, she never
stops, 24/7, 365- the cargo must be delivered on time. Until it doesn't.