Quartermastery

The number of days until my incarceration ends is almost countable with all my fingers and toes.  I haven’t “gone sideways,” yet, but there are a few around me that certainly have.  Actually, there are a few sailors here that exist in that state and only attain lucidity on an irregular and infrequent basis, but I’ve insulated myself against exposure to them.

Or maybe I have gone sideways and I’m “that sailor who’s hiding in his room….”  I’ll only know it  with hindsight, when I am on the beach, again, decompressing and being retrained by Laura.

Autumn in the Marianas Islands means thunderheads, torrential downpours, and oppressive humidity… but it was cooler than during my first two trips.  The first night out of Guam saw 5 meter swells on our quarter.  Our load was light and we rolled like mad, and as a result, nearly half the crew was incapacitated by exhaustion the next day from failing to sleep through the action.  Some of them even got sick.  My schedule (on the midwatch) is so screwy I frequently fail to get enough sleep, but I was able to “throw a kickstand out” and sleep soundly.  Seasickness for me feels exactly like hunger- so I pig out.  It’s like puking in reverse.

The cat, Catain Scratchy, is no longer aboard.  He departed with the last captain.  There are four plants on the bridge I have been taking care of since I boarded, but with Scratchy’s absence, I have tended them with more detail and vigor.  They were withered, bruised, and stunted back in July- but no more.  They’ve sent out flowering runners in all directions, and they’ve taken over one corner of the bridge.  Of course I had to transplant one of them in the dark, as we took a swell and rolled far enough to send it to the deck, but it didn’t miss a beat.

Four days out of Guam we transited up the river to Xiamen, past the new city that stands where hovels used to be twenty years ago, past the 14,000 teu, 1302 foot Emma Maersk, past a ship dead in the water next to the channel choking all other ship traffic, and to our cargo operation involving only 360 moves in 8 hours.  We let-go during the middle of my “long sleep,” so my following watch, midnight to 0400, was just brutal.

The South China Sea was lit up by “squid boats,” which are small fishing boats with lights as bright as portable suns.  The light attracts the squid, which the fishermen catch with nets, but the lights also ruin mariners’ night vision and blot out the stars.  You can see a fleet of squid boats when they’re an hour over the horizon, looming like a city.  When they finally pop up over the rim of the world, they stab at your eyeballs.  Like ravens on a corpse.  Normal navigation lights disappear in their glare, which effectively makes the other little fishing boats- the ones that don’t get picked up by radar until they’re within 5 miles- utterly disappear from sight.

I drove us in and out of Ningbo, the currents working me like a dog.  She’d hold steady, on course, then run like hell either port or starboard and I’d have to throw the helm 20 degrees over to check her swing.  That is a lot on a ship- for those of you who are not quartermasters.  Actually, I’m relieved for another 34 minutes before I have to go back up to the bridge and continue driving us out of Ningbo.  Next stop: Shanghai.