The Marshall Islands

I’m not really sure I’ve visited the Marshall Islands, even though I just spent 9 days there.

Our first port was the Kwajalein military base on Kwajalein Atoll.  It has all the trappings of a slice of paradise - salt water olympic sized pool, library, coffee shop, grocery store, department store, beach bar, etc… all contained within WWII era concrete and delivered with the bureaucratic flair of the US military that renders to mediocrity everything it touches.  

And, also like all things military I have encountered since joining the supply train of the US military industrial complex that is the Merchant Marines - there is an undercurrent that gives me the shivers: Forced smiles, terse pleasantries, conversations that wander to nowhere, and a predominance of avoided eye-contact and impersonality… I suppose living there must be like being trapped at a workplace after-hours party every single day.

The locals arrive to service the US military and its contractors by ferry from the next island over in the atoll, Ebey.  The locals are poor, brown, and paid a fraction of what their white, non-indiginous part-time inhabitants receive. They drink a lot, chew betel nut, and have a remarkably high suicide rate.

When I wasn’t working I found myself quite often at the pool, swimming in the salt water, watching the thousands of hermit crabs and lizards, or using the wifi to do email and pay bills.  Next time I am going to go shark hunting or die of boredom.

I rented a golf cart ($7 an hour) a couple times to go exploring the island.  It’s small, about half the size of my native Tybee Island. Half of the island is taken up by the airfield.  To the south is the golf course. To the north are the family accomodations. The port, ferry terminal, and town is right in between the two.

Bicycles are everywhere.   People ride everywhere on the island- the only vehicles are golf carts or the rare utility gas-powered truck.  The bikes are all so different from one another that I found myself convinced of, and fascinated by, the inhabitants’ drive to assert individualization through the modifications to their rusted frankensteinian cycles.

The port after Kwajelein was Ebey, the impoverished town that supplies the base’s cheap labor, an hour underway to the north.  The dock was barely large enough to host us, and the heaving and surging of the water was disconcerting. The previous trip they parted 4 stern lines while doing cargo, and it had been calmer than this trip.  

Cargo was nearly disastrous at every move, between untrained longshoremen, a low value of human life, and the wild swinging of the cranes on the bucking ship.  I truly expected to see us lose a box, but miraculously, we did not.

It reminded me of the time I watched a crane drop a container on a truck in Egypt… the things that replay in the mind.

I walked through Ebey proper to get a phone card- I found it to be as poor as parts of Brazil or Sri Lanka I have visited.  In one of the two stores, the owner (“baqula,” my Filipino shipmate called him) told him how anxious the town had been, waiting for the cargo we brought.  At the other store they apologized for not having bottled water- it was being unloaded from our ship.

The next port was overnight to the north, Majuro.  I did not get ashore there, but the longshoremen were motivated and worked through the night and in the rain, both things the longshoremen of the previous ports will not do.  

In the middle of our cargo operations, the union delegate for our department got angry at the chief mate and abandoned the time sheets and contract at my door.  All the other guys are getting off in Hono, soon, and now I find myself ensnared as the unwilling delegate… a dubious task I am going to abandon when the new crew comes aboard.

It is thankless and time-consuming and I am already sick of it and sick of the position it puts me in- being ground between the irascibility of the gang and the miserliness of the mate.  I am counting down the days to when I will throw the entire stack of paperwork out into the passageway with a loud string of invectives and wash my hands of it and get back to sleeping at every spare moment to make up for the 4X8 watch schedule.

Which will be in 5 more days when we tie up back in Honolulu.

Making Way - Oink! Oink!

It took us over a week to escape the oil spill, the days of which were spent in the Oahu sun on my hands and knees cleaning impossible to reach spots.  Divers cleaned the ship’s waterline, the oil booms, and the underside of the dock. Shoreside personnel cleaned the dock with pressure washers, collected the oil-soaked absorbent from ship crew, divers in the harbor, and their own waste and put it all into drums.

It sounds like a total of 1,800 gallons spilled.  The company threw everything at it, and the entire operation included a tent on the dock where the shipping company big-wigs met with officials while making their presence known to contractors and employees, alike.

But once we were OK’ed to shift over to the cargo dock the proverbial winds changed and it wasn’t long until we were loaded with boxes.  We let go and have been steaming west by southwest ever since.

It’s the first time I’ve sailed as a watchstander in a few years… and I forgot how much I like it, which bodes well for my future at sea: Officers are watchstanders.

The greatest difficulty of standing a watch is getting enough sleep… and since a sailor named Blythe shared her melatonin with me 5 years ago I haven’t missed a day or night’s sleep since.

Watching the color of the sea change from day to day, taking photos of the sunrise and sunset, seeing the green flash and the rise of the planets on the horizon… these are things I went to sea to enjoy, and when you’re a dayman you don’t get to enjoy these things.  I have been soaking it all in. Relishing it.

Of course, this is a ship and half her cargo is the pure, undiluted dumb of the seamen aboard.  The petty infighting, the squabbles over overtime, the sheer dissatisfaction of being away from home all continue much as they have since the first boat large enough to float two people was made by our knuckle-dragging ancestors.  As I’m soaking it in and relishing it, I’m simultaneously amused and annoyed in equal parts by the maritime of it all.

While this crew is remarkably normal and professional, in spite of all the dumb, one sailor in the shore gang that helped us clean the oil spill stands out as one of the more memorable flavors I’ve encountered in years:  He is a union applicant named Pete.

  

Sporting a body style and manner of locomotion that can only be described as “penguin,” his perfectly spherical and hairless head sports a thick pair of glasses that magnify his already large eyes into gigantic proportions.

Pete punctuates every sentence with “Hooters!  Oink! Oink!” at which point his facial expressions cycle through three or four exaggerated states of surprise.  I am not certain, but I think he has a form of Tourette's and it’s probably a horrible thing to make fun of him.

Of course, we’re all still exclaiming “Hooters!” randomly throughout the day.

Sunset on Oahu

Aloha Tower

Back In The Saddle Again

After a year of recuperating from an injury on my last ship—a nightmare of mismanagement and dereliction named the Moku Pahu—I jumped at the chance to get back out on the ocean again as soon as the doctors declared me Fit For Duty.  

Spinal damage, nerve damage, and a shoulder pretty much shredded—with a case of frozen shoulder to boot—I unwillingly left my last ship with a Not Fit For Duty almost exactly a year ago. Ten days after I was sent home, one of my sailors fell down an unsecured hatch and had to learn to walk again.

There is jurisdiction on a ship for a reason—sometimes it feels stupid to call the electrician to change a light in my quarters, but it’s his work—it’s his for a reason. When the mate on the Moku Pahu had engineers do a crane lift they didn’t secure the hatch and it was almost manslaughter as a result.  

Doctor appointment after doctor appointment, physical therapy over and over again, MRIs, Xrays, EMGs, chiropractors, massage...and company private investigators “allegedly” following me and taking photos. As well as the nightmare of bureaucratic inertia to wade through attempting to get some sort of financial assistance, like walking against a running current (mariners do not get workers comp)…. all the while I was going through that this last year, I was able to tell myself, “At least I’m not THAT poor bastard!”

At least I didn’t have to learn to walk again.

So I happily flew to Hono and paid for 5 days in the Honolulu Sailor’s Home; I figured it was the first installment for an indeterminate stay of beachside boredom that would lead to a job roughly at about the time I grew sick of being bored on the beach.

Of course, I landed a job the next morning.

The job is a 90-day voyage aboard a two-crane auto-loading containership of 411 feet carrying 700 TEU’s named the Matson Kamokuiki, serving Kwajalein, Ebeye, and Majuro Islands of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Her last run stopped in Darwin, Australia, and Naha, Japan, besides.

I signed-on my third day in Hono at Pier 20 and found a tiny little thing crewed with an unlicensed department of Hawaiians and Filipinos from Washington state, and the typical officer corps of white guys.

As it turns out, the white-guys up on the monkey deck used to operate my last ship, “The Mokee Pokee,” before Matson sent it away to be scrapped. The company that bought that scrapped death-trap reanimated its corpse, and then mismanaged it up onto a Bangladeshi beach upon a wave of lawsuits and firings, have a very different management style lacking the Aloha spirit that greeted me on the Kamokuiki. I can imagine that at one point the “Pokee” had been pure Aloha before it started generating injured sailors and running out of fuel and water in the middle of the ocean.

Anyway, past grievances aside (but not forgiven) and back to my new ship: I was knocked off per the contract at 1500 and went ashore to stock up on groceries. It wasn’t long before I was burdened with several heavy and expensive bags of food, which I determined I’d drop back off at the ship before I continued provisioning.

I was halfway across the dock before I saw there was some sort of problem—had I known exactly what, I’d have turned around and not returned until the late hours of the evening.

Alas.  

The vessel normally ties up starboard side-to, but due to USCG inspections the port engineer requested they tie up port side-to. During bunkering operations (“filling the gas tank” for ships) the black-gang (unlicensed engine department) had moved the manifold hookup (think “gas tank fill pipe”) but didn’t blank off the usual manifold pipe (put the “gas cap” back on it).

The long and short of it?  An unknown quantity of heavy bunker oil sprayed out the manifold pipe with great force and onto everything in its path: main deck, dock, and everything in between.  

No one knows how long it sprayed everywhere, but the Bosun said it took them 30 seconds to stop the pumps after it was discovered.  

Note: This is all hearsay and should be considered such.

Oil spills are all-hands events. My expensive groceries and I were visible and exposed in the middle of the empty concrete pier with nowhere to hide from managing eyes… As I stood motionless, like a deer in the headlights, I was spotted, waved over, and put unceremoniously to work.

Less than 10 minutes later I was up to my elbows in benzene and bitumen. 

We didn’t finish securing what could be secured until midnight. Everyone on the ship and all shoreside personnel spent the night putting heavy bunker oil-soaked kitty litter, oil pads, shovels, rags, etc… into dozens of empty drums.

Today the ship was overrun with “suits.”  Insurance types, pale-faced corporate bean counters with virgin hardhats, USCG personnel, and—incongruously—a random gang of smiling Jehova’s Witnesses that not only somehow found themselves on my ship sharing the word of… well, whatever jibber-de-jabber Jehova’s Witnesses share… but they stood slack-jawed in the most amusing way as we craned stores aboard, so they didn’t elicit the same disdain they might have under normal circumstances.

When I was knocked off today, I got out of there posthaste; now I’m writing this in a coffee shop, avoiding the ship.

But I am fit for duty. I am excited to be underway. I am stoked to visit the Marshall Islands.  And I am hoping this ship gets called back to Australia and Japan again.

Today was my 1,032nd sea day... But who’s counting?