I didn’t sleep well the night before my flight.
It was 12 hours from Honolulu to Incheon; then, another 2 hours to Busan, where an agent picked me and 5 other sailors up and drove us to a hotel, about 20 minutes away, where I finally got a solid 6 hours of sleep. The shuttle was back at the hotel at 0700. The ride to the ship took over an hour.
She is small - 500 feet. The gangway is only about 30 feet, end to end. As with all ships we in the neglected US Merchant Marines inherit, she was an old foreign-flagged and abused nag, tired long before we got her… it seems I’m always fixing ships before they are reflagged back out of the fleet or scrapped, altogether.
10 stories from tank top to bridge deck, she has no elevators and the ladder is only wide enough for one man. The freeboard is so low that we’ll be restricted to the house in seas I’d otherwise ignore. There are no tunnels fore and aft. My quarters are positively tiny.
The Sea of Japan is usually a boring affair on the 1000-footers I’ve gotten used to, but we rolled our way along our first night out as if we were on the open ocean with weather… which is probably why the old man warned me when I signed articles that if I mind a bit of a roll that I’d be uncomfortable.
I feel eternally grateful I find the motion of a ship lulling and comforting, or else I’d truly be a miserable bastard at sea, what with the bland food, the poor excuse for company, and the asinine hours. The view, however, is the finest a man could ever hope for.
The gang, for the most part, is OK, but they’re standoffish in a wholly familiar way... I am, yet again, the only white guy in the unlicensed deck department- a division of labor I find perpetually fascinating. When my seatime permits me to advance to third mate, I will be yet one more statistical data point that says: “White Man In Charge.”
To say otherwise would be blindness. The unlicensed gang in the US fleet is more and more Asian, less and less white. We jokingly say “no rice, no work,” and all of us together (all skin tones) find the joke amusing, but it’s interesting to see it happening just as I watched construction turn more and more Mexican during the last decade.
Unlike my last two ships, there are no women aboard this one. The old man is a surfer who spends as much time ashore in Saipan and Guam as schedule permits (and he influences much of the schedule), the engine department is full of gun-nutz, and the steward is 130 lbs of tall tales and a lifetime of frustration; anyone who understands human nature would fear the steward more than the gun-nutz in the black gang.
It is an island unto itself - an “Island Of Misfit Toys,” if you will. And I will be here for another 118 days.
1600 pilot for Yokohama… time to get back to it.
After all- it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
It was 12 hours from Honolulu to Incheon; then, another 2 hours to Busan, where an agent picked me and 5 other sailors up and drove us to a hotel, about 20 minutes away, where I finally got a solid 6 hours of sleep. The shuttle was back at the hotel at 0700. The ride to the ship took over an hour.
She is small - 500 feet. The gangway is only about 30 feet, end to end. As with all ships we in the neglected US Merchant Marines inherit, she was an old foreign-flagged and abused nag, tired long before we got her… it seems I’m always fixing ships before they are reflagged back out of the fleet or scrapped, altogether.
10 stories from tank top to bridge deck, she has no elevators and the ladder is only wide enough for one man. The freeboard is so low that we’ll be restricted to the house in seas I’d otherwise ignore. There are no tunnels fore and aft. My quarters are positively tiny.
The Sea of Japan is usually a boring affair on the 1000-footers I’ve gotten used to, but we rolled our way along our first night out as if we were on the open ocean with weather… which is probably why the old man warned me when I signed articles that if I mind a bit of a roll that I’d be uncomfortable.
I feel eternally grateful I find the motion of a ship lulling and comforting, or else I’d truly be a miserable bastard at sea, what with the bland food, the poor excuse for company, and the asinine hours. The view, however, is the finest a man could ever hope for.
The gang, for the most part, is OK, but they’re standoffish in a wholly familiar way... I am, yet again, the only white guy in the unlicensed deck department- a division of labor I find perpetually fascinating. When my seatime permits me to advance to third mate, I will be yet one more statistical data point that says: “White Man In Charge.”
To say otherwise would be blindness. The unlicensed gang in the US fleet is more and more Asian, less and less white. We jokingly say “no rice, no work,” and all of us together (all skin tones) find the joke amusing, but it’s interesting to see it happening just as I watched construction turn more and more Mexican during the last decade.
Unlike my last two ships, there are no women aboard this one. The old man is a surfer who spends as much time ashore in Saipan and Guam as schedule permits (and he influences much of the schedule), the engine department is full of gun-nutz, and the steward is 130 lbs of tall tales and a lifetime of frustration; anyone who understands human nature would fear the steward more than the gun-nutz in the black gang.
It is an island unto itself - an “Island Of Misfit Toys,” if you will. And I will be here for another 118 days.
1600 pilot for Yokohama… time to get back to it.
After all- it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Prison with the option of drowning! Better you than me bro!
ReplyDeleteInteresting. And an interesting place to spend Christmas Eve. Thinking about you tonight. Love, Momster
ReplyDelete