Recently a friend made a comment to me that both flattered and cut: Why don’t you finish that blog about that boat trip!
Damn.. he’s a good dude, a great pilot, and I was half surprised he had read it, let alone wanted me to finish it. I am quick to defend, being an East Coaster to say the least: “I finished the trip! I moved on!” but the truth is, I have just been too damn busy to tell the last few stories I wanted to.. even to me, this blog wasn’t really finished… so it has been like 6 months since I did anything with this, and almost a year since I sailed, and I have been ‘a lot’ of places, like 4 more countries on 2 continents, but I am back in my native land, and it is a quiet land, and all I can hear is the hum of the fridge, and I know it’s good for me, to let my ass catch up with my brain, but given my addiction to these kinds of adventures, I guess I gotto finish writing. I have at least four posts I have already written in my head from my slow boat adventure last November. and the first two have to do with the two most important people on the boat, the captain and the first officer.
I had a fantasy of what this was going to be like. I was going to meet the french captain, with a white beard and a witty banter.. he was going to think I was hilarious, ( “you are sooo insightful, for an american… ah Monsior, you are correct again, and I read the same book about the Second Zulu War… Ah correct again our incredible passenger, I have also been to Buenaventura on the Pacific Coast of Colombia, fascinatingly horrible place, and do I have a story that only you and I will completely get or you, while the rest listen with open mouths, impressed” )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GryQrpCsUdk
and we were going to educate the rest of the crew with our witty banter and philosophies over the french food and white tablecloth service I was expecting.
When I first boarded the boat, I was told that as long I stayed out of the way, I could go anywhere. When we departed Oakland, I was invited to the Bridge, and I got to observe in detail all that went on.. remember how huge this boat was.. it took like 10 people there alone to turn it around and get it out of the harbor. We even had some coast guard guests come to observe, so there were 12 people running around the bridge, with the pilot and the watch. There was this short but authoritative man, and he came to me and shook my hand, and said he was the Captain. He was calm, kind of crisp, had eyes that were not wary, but looked or things of importance and didn’t dally or things that were secondary. He wasn’t quite a man on a mission, but he was a busy man at that moment. Instead of the witty banter, I observed him for days on end, at meals, on the bridge, and we spoke when time allowed. He never avoided me, but he never lavished me with flattering time, but he did take me seriously.
Well, I did get the tablecloth, and I think I ruined it every night dropping food in 6 directions, usually a brothy vegetable soup, while I ate alone and tried to adjust to life at sea. and with only one exception in 23 days, if I sat at that table, I sat alone. it was, well, maybe good for me at first, but it got old. The crew ate in four segregated groups in two rooms, with some more informal segregation amongst the Filipinos, and it was a week before I broke that segregation, but I learned for that first week just by listening and watching 3 meals a day, while I endlessly turned my tablecloth into a Pollack Painting complete with flakes of the super flakey bread, that my almost personal Filippino steward was always too polite to notice. Yup, basically me and the captain had a waiter. The other guys could order from him too but they rarely did.. their meals were brought in big bowls they passed around family style, but me and the captain got the full treatment a bit more.
Now the Captain was always at the next table, a long table with all the officers, usually about 8 of them at each meal, and then there were the cadets, 2 or 3, huddled at their own table but listening to everything that went on at the other table.. they had an advantage over me.. they spoke Romanian. Yup, they were all Romanian as I said before. I have one good Romanian friend, but he is over the place, has been since literally ’87 when he defected by walking into the US Embassy in Cairo 3 days after he was sent there to build a dam by his government, and he has tried to teach me a few words, but not enough to follow these machine gun conversations. I would sit there with this little divider between us, but not blocking anything, just a little half wall, trying to figure out what the heck they were saying. They would congregate upstairs in the officers bar before meals, the only room on the ship I never visited, and I would hear them playing Fifa Soccer on a video game machine. I would be hungry and go to town on the grub. I would hear howls and screams sometimes as they unwound and someone won or lost, or Romanian music videos, usually a female singer that sounded beautiful, and I would imagine her doing cheesy things trying to look glamorous in hotel lobbies and on the beach of Constanta, trying to be a Romanian Madonna or Britney Spears,
90’s Romanian mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcV8RgLfzX0&list=PL92EEF3A83B03AD15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cKknBmfmK8&list=PLq1eMf0hI2HiZp2id_jtoaQcNH3Gdwivx
and at some point the captain would get hungry, and they would all descend the circular staircase right by my seat at once, and 8 to 14 at a time. One by one they would great me with the word “apatite” or “good apatite”, kind of a bon apetit, while I ate.. I would say hi to them one by one, and they would troop to the other two tables. I sometimes wondered if this was a direct translation from Romanian, or how it was said in Romanian, or how they felt we said it in America, but I never corrected it, since it was like being on a greeting line at a wedding.. they just kept coming, every time, and then the Romanian would fire up..
it was greek to me, well, Romanian, and the captain would kind of calmly rule the conversations. I didn’t pick up much, but as these things go, everything would sound controversial, just by nature of the language. I once picked up that the Engineering Officer was perhaps a Christian, and they seemed to get in a row over this, but the captain would calmly moderate, sometimes taking the opportunity to teach lessons.
The cadets, only 4 feet away, same as me, were in on the conversation usually, silently listening and watching, learning, like being one table over from a Romanian Bull Halsey or Admiral Nelson, it was well know that it was part of their education to listen but not participate in the conversation at the next table. I knew that more than half the officers spoke fluent English, so I used to kind of pine to be invited to the conversation, but it never happened, so I stared at the wall and gorged myself to fight off that empty stomach feeling you get on boats, and since I had started to pump iron in the little gym, and likely spent more time on deck in the cold than anyone in the crew unless we were docking, I would polish off the plates like a bachelor eating over his kitchen sink. This was before I had the balls to eat with the Germans and Filipinos in the downscale crew mess, not really knowing I could, but knowing I had to kind of pass the smell test with the officers by sitting there for a week or so, pretending I didn’t hear anything while they chatted away, like a photographer never looking them in the eye except through the camera so that I maintained my role as a background observer.
My impression of the Captain was that he was fair and reasonable, and that he didn’t see himself as necessarily important in an egotistical way, but that he was in charge, and he would run the conversations, be the voice I heard most, but he knew someone in Marseille or some customs guy in every port was out to embarrass or trip him up, so he stayed busy like any other crew member, and they followed suit. He was short and wiry, although it was hard to tell because he was perpetually in some sort of uniform sweater, but he kept his hair shaved clean.. picture the DJ Moby with former Sen. Tom Dachle’s personality. He ate no meat and only olive oil, so the whole officers mess was obligated to a fairly healthy diet excepting the cheese and sausage plates that by Romanian tradition were ever present at their table. They would troop by with Salmon or some other fish for him, and after about two weeks they gaged that there was enough for me to have salmon fairly often as well to get me away from the banality of the lightly grilled chicken we used to seem to get every other day.
One time towards the end of the trip, he kind of apologized to me that he was so busy.. he would be on bridge a few hours a day when we were in transit, but there wasn’t much to do.. we didn’t change heading for the first 12 days until we passed through the straits between Honshu and Hokkaido, but he would come up and do a few hours with whomever was on watch, out of the 4 or so rotating mates. If I came up on the bridge and he engaged me, I knew they were bored out of their minds and I would be game for it, and instead of my usual games of grabbing binoculars and looking for whales or asking about one of the dozens of different displays and machines on board, I would get into a conversation with him. We talked about hunting and cold and New York City. He had a sense of humor, but it came after business, and he loved to hear stories about Alaska, since he had been past it, cutting through the Aleutians on the great circle route, but never stopped there. He had seen enough of the world to not be curious about say New Jersey or Kentucky, but he loved it when I talked about Eskimos. He even cross examined me once quite strongly about home innovations in green energy since I admitted to some recent experience with it. It was tough. I was speaking to him with 3 other men with engineering backgrounds with my back to the sea while he grilled me, and those of you who know me know I can bluff many things for a few minutes, but I had a hard time knowing more than these guys did, but the questions persisted because I was talking about many ideas that were new in Romania. I remember almost faltering once or twice, and his gaze never left me, and the others crowded around his plush high chair to hear, but it was fair, and interesting, and I could kind of feel his calm power that day. Months later an engineer buddy taught me about the principles of refrigeration in a bar in Chicago, and I realized where I had screwed up. He admitted that he made a fair wage as captain or Romania, maybe 50,000 USD, maybe more, remembering that he only worked 8 months or so a year, and he admitted he wanted to make his home back in Transylvania as efficient as possible while he still had cash flow. I would never really ask him direct questions because even though he was genial, the situation on the bridge didn’t seem to allow for it.. they would sometimes be talking to me, some buzzer would go off, he would swivel around and the rest of the crew would attack whatever the offending alert was, and then he would spin around just as fast and pick up the conversation as soon as it was resolved. There was a sanctity to his chair when he was on the bridge, but at times I was even offered to sit in it when he was below deck. But below deck was where he usually was, doing paperwork. That was the jist of his apology. He told me he did 2 days of paperwork for every port of call (there would be 4 on the second half of my journey, in china and Hong Kong, and we refueled as well on an unsceduled stop in Russia, with all it’s attendant issues.). This was in addition to all his regular bookkeeping.. he might have been the captain to us, but to CMA-CGM he was one or perhaps 300 they had on their roles, and he had paperwork like any captain in any cop movie you can imagine. It was rare that I passed by his door, as it was out of the way of anyplace I would be going, but if I did, I inevitably saw him in there working away.
So here is a fun fact about him, before I go on to tell his best story that he told me on another day on the bridge, about being held captive in North Korea or some 6 weeks in the early 90’s. He is a Transylvanian. Most of the other Romanians were from Constanta, which is kind of a Romanian Atlantic City, or Miami Beach. They were big city, a bit more brusque but with good humor, but he was a quiet mountain guy, maybe the Romanian equivalent of a Coloradoan.. it gave him a bit of strength, in that kind of fascist from the hinterlands way. My immediate instinct was to bring up Dracula, but I knew we had time together, so I let it slip a few days, but eventually he did tell me that, yup, he lived maybe 2 hours from Dracula’s Castle. He didn’t dally in it.. he wasn’t insecure, I never picked up on any feelings of inadequacy he might have for the job, but he didn’t want to play into a huge spectacle about the only cliche his home territory has. He might have had a bit of a Dracula look, but not the Bella Lagosa accent.. man, these Transyvanians and their fake real accents… why does he have to be so inauthentically authentic!
I bought him a bottle of wine before I sailed, and brought it to him when we were a day out of Oakland.. directly but not officiously, before I think he understood it was a gift, he told me kind of “ouch, liqueur is not allowed on board, but it looks like a nice bottle, so we can make an exception, but only one glass and quickly” I admitted I didn’t drink, and he was relieved, and when I told him it was for him, he hid it under the table if I remember correctly, and .it was never mentioned again. He played by the rules but he wasn’t a martinet or a dolt, more like a fish that kept looking for a way upstream. The crew seemed to take him at face value, and I never heard a complaint about him.
He had been a seaman for at least 25 years, and had gone to the same school I think they all had, the Maritime University of Constanta
http://www.cmu-edu.eu/
Don’t confuse it with the Naval Academy! they were different!
He worked 4 months on, then would go home for a few months, then back at it, and had a two room suite he called home for those duration on the last deck above me before the bridge.
The Engineering officer, the Christian guy who didn’t speak a word of english, and had the pallor of a guy who as below deck all day, was a salt and pepper haired guy, shared the floor with him, and there was a little administrative office and a laundry room exclusively for him and the engineering officer, in addition to the big desk he had in his sitting room. Every once in a while the engineering officer and I would bump into each other, with him in his one piece blue overalls, and he would give me a genuine smile, but the preoccupation of his job and the language barrier kept it to that. The other top dog, the First Officer, will get his own post. He was my minder of sorts, and an interesting cat. He lived on the floor below me, maybe as a precaution, but with the same big suite that the Captain and Engineering Officer and I had, just three stories down from the bridge instead of one. My floor, for some reason, was largely empty except for two cadets and I think two germans.
Anyhow, so there was one story the captain told me that was as funny as it was interesting, and it showed how Romanians kind of roll with the punches well. It turns out, and this will sound worse than it was, that he was a prisoner of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea for about 2 months once.. yup… these lunatics:
So as the story went, this was right after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the early 90’s, I think he said ’92, and North Korea felt that Romania had an unpaid debt to this here middle Kingdom. Remember that the Iron Curtain had fallen everywhere in the world except for North Korea (and Albania, but it wouldn’t last long there). So whatever the nature of this debt, it was likely from some arms deal before the fall of the curtain, and the new Democratic Romanian Government didn’t think it had to honor the obligations of the Shenanigans of the now Fallen and buried Ceaucuscu Regime.
So when this unassuming Romanian Bulk Carrier showed up with a load of who knows what a year or so after the checks stopped coming in, with our Captain on board as likely a young deck officer, either a cadet or perhaps a third or second mate, the North Korean’s did their thing, Pueblo style, and informed the boat that they were not allowed to leave until the bean counters in Bucharest paid the bill.. simple as that. Some guards were posted, and the crew of maybe 20 was told to stay on the boat. The North Koreans I guess were polite but stern, and they complied. They ate down their stores of food, and waited.. you can imagine that the response from the new Romanian Government, while concerned, was not immediate. They were broke because of a former dictator, perhaps the worst dictator in the eastern bloc, was in part playing footsie with these nuts, so no one was particularly sympathetic. I think he said that the Romanian Government sent someone to visit, and he was concerned, but nothing happened, quickly or slowly. After some time, the Koreans realized there wasn’t much threat from these affable people from outside of North Korea somewhere, and they let them come onto the dock to play soccer. Sometimes the Koreans would join. They all started to bond. Then one random night, of all things, a bunch of cars arrive and take the whole crew into a night club, with their state minder and guards along. The Peace Loving people of North Korea didn’t want their ‘guests’ to feel like they were the victims of their bourgeois masters in the newly demonized Romania. According to the Captain, it was just nuts enough after all the boredom to be fun, but you could see the awkwardness of it all.
But then some minor trouble stared. You can imagine that as a ship, they were provisioned for a month or so, but no two, and food began to run out. They politely requested food from their hosts after a bit. The Koreans, umm.. demurred… then offered some I think pathetic vegetables and grains. The Crew Persisted, and finally a pig was offered. The crew thought it was a bit hilarious, and Romanians know their pigs. They examined it and realized the pig was a bit, well, malnourished, that it should be bigger by their gauge. So instead of rushing to eat it now, while they still had some other sources of protein, they decided to fatten it up with some of the excess grains and rotting veggies they did have. The Pig ate and ate, and they waited, but the thing was so malnourished, that over days and days, it did not grow.. if they brought it at 40 lbs, it stayed 40 lbs despite ample gorging on anything they put in front of it.. days went by they grew hungrier.. finally, it was decided, we need to eat it anyhow. They roasted it up, and it was delicious, but they realized they were getting a bit desperate now. They asked the Koreans for more food, and answers were not forthcoming. There was polite hemming and hawing.. the North Koreans had really learned to enjoy the Romanians, didn’t want to hold them responsible..
A little time went by, and official showed up. Likely fighting back the pangs of hunger himself, he told the crew they were free to leave. It was too embarrassing for the Koreans to admit that they couldn’t feed these 20 guys, so in Korean Logic, the gambit had failed, they had stopped being good hosts, so they cut them loose.
I don’t know where the captain had his next meal, if there were foreign warships waiting for them when the left, or if they just pulled into the next port in Russia or China, South Korea or Japan, and called their company. We were sailing by North Korea when this all came up after fueling in Nahodka, near Vladivostok, and I expressed fascination with being off the East Coast of this fabled boogeyman from the perspective of my nation. This story was the captain’s response after this comment. “You don’t want to go there, nice people, but not much food.. and I know..” After the story, I believed he knew what he was talking about! it’s amazing the experiences you can discover when you put yourself in these unique places. Thanks to the captain for running a good ship and being a competent host.
When we arrived in Hong Kong, the Captains tour was over. I accidentally watched the new captain arrive, and he seemed a bit more regal and imperial, although thoughtful as well, from the one glimpse I got as he came up the gangplank as I was paling around with my now new group of friends on deck, kind of celebrating our arrival in Hong Kong, a city they all like after the oppressive nature of the Chinese cities and officials further north. A few hours later the captain I had known and I shared a car with our shore agent into Kowloon where he was going to get his camera fixed at an authorized dealer he had found someplace in the mess of alleys down there. We were all excited to see it, but he seemed focused on going home, maybe a bit withdrawn after 4 months of handling 362 meters of moving responsibility. He hopped out with his bags at a nearby hotel without too much fanfare and blended into the crowd of Chinese, back in the ‘real world’, with a flight home to Romania I think later that day. Thus is the life of a modern Sea Captain.