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.