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If you have ever been on a boat in a marina, you know what shore power is… you run a plug over the side from the dock, and it’s a special plug you have to fork a ton of money over for at some place like West Marine, no simple land plug will do, for your safety no doubt, and then you can run your toaster and car stereo without having to run your engine or generator… simple stuff right.. well, not if your boat is 364 meters long and uses the power of a medium sized american town.. but truth be told, it almost was that simple.. just a lot bigger.

So I mentioned in my posts how there were these 6 Germans on the boat, but I never mentioned why.. they were contractors I might have said.. that word has so much mystery in the days after Sept. 11, and it’s kind of fun to mess with..it’s so ambiguous that it has become kind of sinister…’Contractor’ now makes people think of Haliburton, Kellog Brown and Root, and Blackwater… War Profiteering and quasi legal waterboarding type stuff… but these guys, these 6 Germans, 3 of whom spoke english and the rest who still had a sense of humor, were in some ways Eco-Contractors. They were a group of Marine Electricians who needed 23 days to do a job, and they used the whole time, wrapped up with like a day to go and some long hours, to install a shore power system. They were all from Hamburg now, but a few were from the old east, a coastal city they told me about called Rostock. Of the 6, 3 spoke English, and they ranged in age from 25 or so to 50, the oldest being the main electrician with like 20 years experience at sea before he settled on this as a profession, and he was the one with the childhood in Rostock I believe (it might have been Kiel, but I think he said Rostock..we spoke of many things, and a ship is about the last place on earth where you have to describe things like the geography of northern Germany instead of just pulling it up on google maps to settle a point) before the wall fell. Dropping down in age where the thoughtful guy with the best english and the taste for British music, Christoph, then Niels, the guy who looked like a World War II Storm Trooper villian, like Vin Diesel only bigger, but who had a heart of gold and loved to fish and joke around. Then there was a cocky guy who reminded me of the cast of The Full Monty.. if it wasn’t for his German, I would have picked him for a mine worker out of north England with a sense of humor and a taste for the ladies.. the rumor was that he was so endowed that he had to wear his regular loose track suits or we would all have been offended. Another mid 30’s guy whose glasses gave him a scholarly look who was neither the biggest trouble maker nor a coward by any means. He had sharp eyes but a kind relaxed demeanor. Then there was Tiny Tim I have joked about before, the little guy who wasn’t so little, it was just that 4 out of the six of them were massive dudes, like Alaskan North Slope Oil Workers or Tongan Rugby Players.. that he looked like the kid of the bunch, and seemed to be struggling with a bit of homesickness and maybe seasickness, although he even had like 2 years experience on the north sea so I might have made a bigger deal about this than it was. They had all worked on ships on the north sea, and the bigger you are in relation to your surface area, the easier it is to keep warm, so it makes sense that these guys were big. On our trip through Kowloon at the end of the journey, before they hit the airport and I hit a hotel, we goofed off for a day seeing the sites, the combination of the 6 of them and me was so surprising to the Locals, who already see a lot of Foreigners, that some women actually asked to have their picture taken with us. We looked like a Viking death metal band dressed up for an uncles 4th wedding. We must have eaten more dim sum than the next 10 tables as well, although when I ordered the chicken feet, the classic westerners gag, it’s fair to say soem food got left on the table.

Anyhow, the story I am trying to tell is not of me and them but of what they were up to. Well, imagine California, and it’s never ending stuggle to clean up the environment.. as much as all the rules in California make my skin crawl, the one place I have to hand it to them is that they are on the cutting edge of Environmental technology and regulation… it’s a damn pretty place, California. I sometimes think that the best place perhaps ever to have lived on earth might have been Santa Barbera in the times of the mission. The word California came from a book that was about an Eden found, and despite the countless people crawling all over it today, the place is beautiful and worth restoring. The fact that Tesla and so many solar manufacturers etc are coming from this state is kind of a testimony to what the place is all about.

So some smart guy in Cali figured out that part of the pollution problem in their two biggest metro areas, LA and The Bay Area, came from the massive ports in the correspondent Long Beach and Oakland harbors.. While they have been clamping down on cars and power plants, these huge ships come sailing in with no environmental controls from the high seas, and while they sit in port they keep at minimum a huge diesel generator or two humming away to power the ship. On the Libra, I think we had 8, each the size of a box truck, and there were at least two running all the time. I have forgotten how many kilowatts they produced, but it was in the hundreds if not thousands. The average american home is usually consuming about 1kw.. so one of these could power maybe 1000 homes.. they were for everything from the lights and instruments and refrigerators to running the pumps for ballast and the huge reefers, the refrigerated containers that were set anywhere from 50 degrees to deep freeze temps of like 30 below. We seemed to have about 30 of them on board on our trip west.. of a possible 10k or so containers, it wasn’t a lot, but they drank power. I think a few of the generators might have been necessary to get the big engine started when we decided to leave port again after the 24 or so hours it usually took to load and unload..

So what the eager minds in Sacramento realized was that if they made these ships turn these generators off, they wouldn’t be pouring the byproducts of relatively inefficiently produced energy into the air and sea, next to their biggest and already most polluted cities. Western Europe, the California of Europe as one might see it, also decided that they wanted the same options. Now I can speculate that it didn’t hurt that they also got to sell this power at a higher rate then the ships produce it at, and that it would crate a few jobs in cali and bring some revenue in.. I would never speculate such craven motives for the bean counters in cali, where self entitlement and imperialness are all part of the deal that goes with fun in the sun, but sticking to the premise that their natural gas plants and occasional windmill and dam can produce this energy more cleanly than the ships diesel generators can, this is a win for the environment.

But how do you make it work? well, on the shore side, I still don’t know.. they had to dig through these container yards and run wires that wouldn’t interfere with the cranes and trucks that roll back and forth loading and unloading containers just feet from the edge of the piers, and then up to the ship. On the boat side, I learned all about it because I even got to work on it for a day in an act as much as out of camaraderie as boredom as we cruised the east china sea, and many a day I would walk by and at least watch the work for 5 minutes or so.

So what they had done is install these two things that looked like steel refrigerators on the two back corners of the boat. There had to be one on each side so they could dock whichever way the port wanted without the danger of 6mw of wire running across the decks. They literally looked like fridge freezer deals, tucked into a steel passageway right over the stern of the ship, where the bosuns throw lines and cleat them underneath the last row of containers. A few times I walked by them as they were working on them and threw them open and pretended to hand out beers and snacks from them. The upper freezer portion would be where the line came in from shore, and the bottom section had a huge switch that would take the wattage and connect it to wires that would run it to some rooms near the engine control room that were the electrical nerve center of the ship. Imagine if your home fuze box was the size of a 6 car garage with huge boxes running in rows that looked like data banks from the 1970’s, or some old computer system from the 50’s. That was where the wires would end up, in another pair of ‘fridges’. So just put the fridge with the switches in and run some wires right.. easy…

Well, don’t forget the boat is 3.5 football fields long.. now, the engine room isn’t that far forward, about a third up, so one football field, but these wires are 3 inches thick with insulation.. I think the guys told me it could handle 6 megawatts.. one per wire.. that’s 1000 homes with the Cuisinart and the TV running. We had to run three or six from each side (forgetting now..it’s been a year!) into a similar fridge sized thing, this one more like a sub zero, in the electrical room. When I first heard about it I don’t think I realized how much metal cutting and welding it would require, and I also never imagined the noise.. the first 30 yards or so had to run down from the boxes into these huge empty rope storage rooms at the back of the ship and below. They were cavernous, like high school gyms… one even had a basketball hoop up if I remember, and they had cool staircases and compartments and structiural members running through them, super james bond stuff, the floors mostly empty except for some equipment that could wind ropes I think. but the downside to these neat spaces is that they were right over the screws, and they were constantly like 100+ db..,clanking metal noises and intense, like a bad horror movie soundtrack, deafening, and cold…  the guys had to run the wires, one at a time, down through these spaces on racks they had to make out of metal stock about a foot wide to fasten them down, then snake it to these passageways that ran along the inside of the hull of the ship, and up the 100 yards down these 300 yard long passageways that ran windowless like tunnels the length of the ship, with maybe 5 doors the whole way. It looked like a huge Rube Goldberg conveyor belt going in… I would come by the guys maybe every other day out stretching my legs and sparks would be flying everywhere and the deafening throb of the prop would have us all wearing hearing protection so I would have to wait for them to look up and notice me, and I might make a funny hand signal or just watch for a second, or crawl past trying to make sure my clothes didn’t catch on fire.. Some guys would just silently say hi, engrossed in their work, and I could tell others were going batty in uncomfortable positions jammed between metal deck pieces or on scaffolds and would give me more insane looks than I figured days at sea were making me muster, with often times similarly offensive hand signals to take the stress off. They were bundled up in huge blue overalls and helmets and boots and they would all come back to the superstructure and fight the chill for a while before they even made it to dinner.

  the big container they show on either side of this photo marked Change turned out to not be necessary.

The day I finally figured I could be of some service they were unspooling those great lengths of wire, hundreds of yards worth, black sheathed 1 plus inch weighty lengths of copper, 3 inches total, and like any extension cord, they had to be kind of uncoiled and unwound on the back deck, so I jumped in and just started wrangling these things with them like people showing off a captured 30 ft anaconda… they would slowly feed them from the deck down, hauled by ropes I think, through the contraptions and shelves they had made to the long run down the passageway and into the engine room area. It was like trying to get that draw string back into your favorite old sweat pants on a grand scale.. the spools were huge wooden things maybe 5 ft high that they had a special contraption to stand up and run out. It was a warm day and we were in the East China Sea, and there were Chinese fishing boats bobbing by all the time, and traffic, and it was sunny and almost warm, and the water was muddy and sometimes blue, a departure from the loneliness and dark waters of the north pacific. We would see other ships roll by, and sometimes Nils would take a picture, and they were excited the job was progressing and the sun was shining, and they were out of their thick insulated outfits and down to even t shirts and work gloves.

You see what made this job special was that it was the first time it had been done, at least by them. I was witnessing engineering in action. They had been hired by CMA CGM to do all the boats that had to go through the regulated ports, which like I said were the west coast of the US ports, maybe Vancouver as well, and the ports of Western Europe. They told me there had been one experiment with it so far, and when the ship took up the power, there was a blackout in the nearby town..they thought this was as funny as I did.. kind of a classic case of the meeting of good intentions and age old problems, but time and experience would no doubt iron out these bugs.

A few months ago I was looking up some facts about the Libra and I came across an article on this very thing, and it turns out I wasn’t mistaken that I had come on board at an interesting time and place in the history of shipping and the environment..I had witnessed a small piece of nautical history. Compared to the noise they make and it’s affect on marine mammals, and the completely unfiltered bunker oil exhaust they put out, this is a minor victory in the battle with global warming and the restoration of marine mammals to pre industrial harpoon numbers, but it made for a somewhat more unique trip than my novice seaman experience had led me to realize until now. And thanks to that, I had the relief of having the Germans around.

There are like 20 papers and articles one can find on google about the specific work I witnessed, which is called Cold Ironing, or Alternative Marine Power:

http://www.cma-cgm-blog.com/cold-ironing-world-premiere-cma-cgm-libra-ship-cma-cgm-group-protect-environment/

http://shipandbunker.com/news/am/863345-cma-cgm-adopts-modular-cold-ironing-solution

http://www.shipinsight.com/cma-cgm-reduce-co2-emissions-50/

A few weeks later they must have had it all hooked up. They told me it would require another guy to hook it into the ships systems I think. They must have gone back to Cali and back again to China before retuning and throwing the switch. I traded emails with Niels and Christoph and they mentioned they were back at it again after a few weeks home, onto another ship doing the same work. Nils sent me some fishing photos and asked me for an address to send more photos from the journey on disk. I think I might have spaced that but will give him a hollar now. That is one hell of a big fish!

It was Halloween Day 2013 when I reported to my ship. We were due to set sail the next day. I was supposed to get on board at 2pm the shore agent told me. If you have never been in Oakland Harbor, it’s a fairly confusing place. The idea that I am going to show up at some locked gate and the people will know enough to just let me in and onto a ship, it’s kind of daunting. I told my cab to wait, especially since I had no cell phone, for the assumed rejection, which would take me back to my hotel begging for internet access. Ever had a cab in Oakland?.. it’s a trip, something out of Sanford and Sons, old LTD’s with the doors falling off, and those kinds of browns and greys that no-one seems to paint cars anymore, but that would be a story in it’s self. When I finally got on board, it became apparent that the person who seemed to be “the one who dealt with the passenger” was the first officer, whom we’ll call Mikey. but I had to get to him. All I knew was that I was meeting this ship called Libra. I had two backpacks and some bags of food and gifts. I hoped to hell they knew better than I did what I was supposed to do. In this post Sept 11 America, the security was a bit daunting, a bit Orwellian. I pushed a button outside of a metal turnstile with like 10 times as man bars as I have ever seen before. The whole place looked like the electronics bunker on a firebase in Afghanistan. It was my assigned gate. the Parking Lot was surrounded by what looked like stolen road construction temporary dividers, and there were beat up cars parked willy nilly like a junk yard. Longshoremen drifted in and out, helmets on and a kind of stoned detachment on their faces. I braced myself for incompetence, but they seemed to know who I was, expect me as a matter of fact.  It felt like a miracle. No one searched me, they just buzzed me through, and I dropped a 20 on the cabby, the meter having spun up 3 more bucks while I waited. I was told to get into a van.. you see, no one walks through here. it’s a container port.. I would eventually have perspective on these places from 150 feet up on the bridge, stopping at 4 more in my next month, but for now it was an obstacle course out of a video game, but an easy going brother from Oak-town driving the van gave me some crap for not seeing women for 3 weeks in an easy banter that I knew I would miss leaving America, and dropped me off next to one of those moving cranes, literally the line of cranes you can see from the east side of the San Francisco Bay Bridge that inspired George Lucas to design the At At’s (ouch.. turns out that is a myth http://www.slashfilm.com/did-oaklands-cranes-inspire-the-at-at-walkers-the-answer-finally-revealed/ ). There seemed to be movement everywhere.. and the Ship was, well, Huuuge.. it towered over me.. the guy gave me one tip when he dropped me off.. don’t go into land. don’t cross that white line. That night I would break that rule to pace the length of the ship I was about to ride, twice, before I had the guts to get on it for the last time, but he told me in such a chill way I heeded, gazed around me a bit, and looked waaay up the gangplank (maybe 5 stories up) and saw two white balaclavad faces staring down at me, somewhat impassively, but intimidatingly enough if you have ever seen third world soldiers. They both looked Asian, and they both looked like the meant me no harm, but could be all business. They just watched me. I waved, they watched me. I grabbed my lightest backpack, wondering if I could make it up without pausing for air and hit the steps. They were rounded so they would work at any angle. I dug in and hit the top, out of breath, maybe a minute later, with thankfully no stops. The faces, attached to blue work overalls, with white helmets, still stared at me impassively, like something out of Alice in Wonderland. I realized they weren’t armed but I could still feel that kind of binary authority that makes white guys talk fast in third world countries to try to make friends with a kind of decisively small set of options in what seems like a situation with the shoe on the other foot. “I am the passenger” I said.. they stared at me some more, and then the older one, who looked like a southeast asian Sergeant Major, still wearing a white balaclava mind you, turned to the other younger slighter one, and said something in a language I soon learned was  Filipean Tagalug. He disappeared into a door. the older one had me sign a book, and he then disappeared down the gangplank for my things, thinking it best I not carry a big pack up it, while I scrambled after him for what was left. There was never any of the deference you might find checking into a hotel. They were crew. This was their boat. He grabbed my  pack as a safety measure, and I followed him back up with my groceries  I felt like I was dealing with Ghurkas.

They walked me in through a bulkhead door and a regular door to a hallway. Outside the boat was slamming and moving as containers were dropped on board by the huge cranes, but finally the reassurance I was expecting. I entered a big office and meeting room, and there was a giant of a man in a blue uniform with sweater, some stripes on his shoulder. Later on he would usually be in day to day clothes as with most of the officers when they were in the super structure, but we were in port, and he was dealing with bureaucrats all day, and that meant uniform. This was Mikey, the first officer, officially the number two guy, although he shared that level with the Engineering officer, and he spoke english with an accent but without a major fault. He was maybe 6’5″, and a bit chubby, although he more than once assured me that it wasn’t all fat, and it was possible to believe him. He wasn’t only huge, he had been a muscle head, but now had a bit of the chub of a man in his late 30’s who worked and had a family and couldn’t keep up with the rigors of vanity when he had what he wanted.. well almost. he wanted to be a captain, but short of that: wife Check kids Check good job by Romanian Standards check a bit of authority… ditto.. check. I was a bit too bewildered to take too much in.. I was on this colossal machine, almost too bit to be believed, and this guy was being as cool to me as he knew how to be, with a bit of ego, but  could tell he was smart enough to have an ego, and he was explaining some things to me while trying to be authoritative while gauging me for potential friendship as he figured out I was actually a year older than him while he acted like second in commands always do.. busy, harried, annoyed, but strangely helpful.

There are jokes in the army about Majors. it’s the rank with no authority.. a year ago you were a captain and you had 200 hungry fighting men working for you, and if you can wait 6 or so years, you will be a lieutenant colonel, and then you might have 800 hungry fighting men below you, but majors are always kind of sanguine, always kind of annoyed, and they are always number 2. This guy is the XO, basically a Major. There is another study about monkeys that said that the monkeys that take to rape are always the ones that are never given authority in the pack.. they are always defeated but never killed by the alpha monkey, and they get frustrated and eventually, well, take matters into their own hands… Mikey made it clear to me in our first conversation that he was already qualified to be a captain, there were just no boats ready yet.. it was the kind of aside the majors say.. the kind of statement that says “I know you think I am the guy who just brings the captain coffee but I seriously am a big deal around here.” which only makes you want to ask them to bring you coffee, but you don’t, because in some funny way they are asking you for sympathy, and letting you know that they see you as kind of a big deal (“if you can afford to get on this ship, you must be someone.. it ain’t expensive but it ain’t a Priceline trip to Paris with a Lets Go book under your arm”) and so are they since they run this monstrosity and are a bit worldly, so it’s mutual.

I am giving Mikey shit, but a secret I held onto the whole trip was that I liked the guy.. he was alright by me.. he tried hard but had to hold onto his dignity, which when he was 25 he would have muscled you into respecting, but now that he was older and actually kind of getting to where he might really become a big deal, although the kind of big deal who knows he should be a big deal, he knew he had to wait for it when he was used to just getting it and he knew it was maturity, but Mikey wanted to just pound it into you, but most guys like that are meat heads, and Mikey, after some 16 or 20 years at sea with his thoughts, was no fool. The reason I kept it a secret, other than because I try to play the cagey east coast american prick, is that I could tell that Mikey was my unofficial minder, and he didn’t want me kissing his ass any more than I wanted to condone anyone having any power over me whatsoever in the middle of the damn pacific ocean. I had lived through 8 years of George Bush’s America, and the last thing I wanted was anyone telling me what to do for my own good anymore. He got that just by looking at me, seemed to respect it instantly, and to be the kind of guy who also hated rules, but there were rules, a very short list.

“Mr. Thomas, there are very few rules. You will never go away from the super structure without closed toed shoes and a helmet, and you will always call in and out to the bridge when you do so they know where you are going. If you are just wandering, no problem, tell them that, but try to tell them something.. when you get back, call them again and tell them you are back. There is officially no drinking on board, and you aren’t supposed to bring more than two bottles. When you want to see the Engine Room, I will bring you down there the first time since it is a bit confusing. we can do that any time” That appeared to be it. Not bad.. “There will be a safely briefing later.” That ended up being kind of fun, with me picked to slide into the crazy Gumby looking cold water survival suit in front of 6 germans.. He took me to my room, which proved massive. He was friendly, even managed a smile, welcomed me aboard, and told me one thing: go and come as you please, the gate will expect you, and they will call you a van whenever you want it.. be back before we pull the gang plank up at 8am.. I kind of blinked.. that was it.. I am almost free of CONUS, and it’s Halloween and I can go hang with a buddy in Berkeley and buy a bunch more random crap to stay busy before I leave. I just have to get back here by 8am.. I already feel like a sailor, like I am in some forbidden mysterious new world, and I am already getting shore leave.

The events of that night I might have already detailed in this blog, and if I haven’t, maybe I will, but it was a fun night, with some surprises, and a beautiful blonde California girl gave me a ride back to the ship which was a heck of a way to go, dropping me at yet another security gate where despite it being 2am and Laotians drag racing 100 yards away, they knew who I was, and got me back onto the ship. I passed out to wake up the next day with my fate sealed. The Gang Plank was up and we were slowly pushing off of shore. I ran up to the bridge to watch the show as they had specified, and it was a neat one. The boat was so big that the pilot had brought along two assistants with a gps system just to get us out of the channel by the port. There were also two coast guard guys to watch them, since no one really knew how this boat could make the turn in a turning basin they had just specifically widened for us, between the port and the Old Alameda Naval Air Station, famous for Mythbusters experiments I had explored once by car buy now found myself towering over from a perspective I had never even imagined. supposedly we had 10m of fudge on each side. 20 meters might seem like a lot but remember, we were 362 meters long.  As I looked down, Tug boats looked like toys, and we seemed huge compared to even Treasure Island and Downtown San Fran. I kept an eye out for a buddy that I thought might come out in his sailboat to wave me off, but he ended up sleeping late and having to go directly to work, so no dice, but as we inched under the SF Bay Bridge, I had my second Mikey encounter.

It was a beautiful day, cloudless and maybe a bit hazy, but perfect as a big city day can be. I had discovered the flybridge.. yup.. I can go anywhere.. this is awesome.. as long as I don’t get in the way. As we approached the bridge, I had been told it would be close.. that if we had miscalculated the tide, we might run into the side of the deck of the high span between SF and Treasure Island, a stretch I had recently ridden on the back of a friend’s scooter, just a few years earlier on my motorcycle, a similarly terrifying experience since it’s just grate and 180 ft down to the cold waters below. Why everyone decided to end it on the Golden Gate I am not sure.. it seemed like this would do the job, but the traffic moved faster.. it was just a bit less, sacred..

Anyhow, so as we approached the bridge, the big bridge, I was on the fly bridge, the one on the boat that sticks out on either side of the indoor bridge, so you can look directly down to the water.. it’s the widest part of the boat by like 2 ft on each side, and exposed to the elements like a big balcony, and I could tell Mikey was keeping an eye on me the way a father watches a 10 year old.. it’s not a close watch, but it’s a put those damn scissors down I caught that kind of watch. The whole crew was busy but the captain had the pilot telling him what to do so Mikey had just me to watch.. and he acted busy and had binoculars in his hand, but I could kind of feel it.. like a brother who mom told to watch another brother. I felt like Corey and Corey in Goonies, and he was Josh Brolin, seeing what I would do. As we got closer to the Bay Bridge,however, there was this excitement, and I knew they had brought the three masts down just to make sure we cleared it and I got this rush, like holy crap, you could almost touch the bridge from underneath. There is one more staircase to the roof of the bridge, and it goes to something called “The Monkey Park”. I would learn that name in a second.. for now, I saw a way to go higher, just 10 ft higher, and that seemed to make the thrill of gliding right under that bridge I had just scootered over clutching my buddy while we both shivered after he rode to oakland for while being filmed from a car I was in with a typewriter strapped to his 200cc just 4 days earlier all the more fascinating. I bolted for the stairs, but Mikey caught me.. “Mr. Thomas.. no.. no going up there.. that’s the monkey park.. the radars.. they can.. shorten your life considerably”.. I didn’t say anything.. backed off.. watched the Bay Bridge go by.. wow.. literally 30 ft over my head if that, but in the back of my head.. yup.. he’s my minder…

He was obviously right..radio waves wasn’t the only issue with the monkey park.. if we weren’t under way with enough speed, the emissions from the stack, which ended at the same height, could give you carbon monoxide poisoning in seconds.. There was enough cylinders cranking below me to squeeze the volume of a city bus into burning crude bunker oil with almost every revolution of the propellor. People had died just doing maintenance near them I would later find out. Sometimes a down gust would catch me coming up the outside staircases and I would have to pause to just exhale the heavy oil stench.. it wasn’t like diesel, sulfuric.. it was like a moldy asphalt smell.. like a burning road. But Even though Mikey was right, I still kind of gave him my best white boy in the prison yard stare. Like alright dude.. what’s it gunna be.. you gunna bug me the whole trip? I tried to look just a bit threatening, and a bit wounded.. but he is 6’5″ like I said.. he turned away like it hadn’t happened, but he wasn’t insulting either..

I kind of hoped he and I would shoot the shit and become buddies.. we were the same age, both of us had seen a lot for our age, and his English was really good, and he had a philosophical side. It happened a few times.. he ruled that first office, the huge one, on the main deck.. always checking bilges and refrigeration systems on the ships big interactive dashboard system, sending email messages to headquarters in Marseilles.. If others were around, I got advice, authority, bragging, kind of the big brother treatment.. “Ah Mr. Thomas, you have no idea how important all this is, my job, this ship, this bilge. i can save thousands of dollars and even days just by setting it right, but no one appreciates me..” but if we were alone, the chiller Mikey came out. He loved movies, and that meant american movies, and he finally just divulged to me that he kind of loved american culture. When I am home, I hardly identify as an American anymore.. not after the Bush years. It just seems in bad taste unprompted, a bit too Toby Keith instead of Kris Kristofferson. The way Europeans look askance at patriotism, I have begun to, but when I travel, I can get into United 93 let’s go mode.. you know it… with or against us.. if you have ever had a foreign official treat you like shit just because you are an American, you become immensely patriotic. it’s happened to me more than once.. oh, huh.. sorry american, yours was the last passport I processed.. it has nothing to do with my government using your country as a straw man while they rob their people blind.. have a nice day. When Americans travel, they divide people into American Haters, Neutral, and American Likers. Mikey admitted to me that he was obsessed with a TV show called I think The Black Donneleys and that he was working through one of the middle seasons as we sailed. He loved the show and what it displayed about American culture and just the honesty of it. He was kind of telling me he knows america well because he watched this show, that he get’s us. He thought it took place in boston. My brain jumped onto this reflexive issue I have. Now I am 50% Irish American from two cities, Chicago and New York, where my ancestors arrived 115 years ago on both sides. Both my Mother and Father were exactly half Irish. I have marched in the St Paddy’s day parade with my dad’s home county, my grandfather allegedly kept a keg in the basement through prohibition, and my father always had at least a keg’s equivalent in cases in the bottom of our pantry ( I used to crawl on top of them to steal cookies), my great uncle was a Chicago cop and got offered a scholarship to play for Knute Rockene at Notre Dame in the 20’s but had to take a pass because he had like 9 brothers and sisters to support, I have spent 3 weeks as a reporter in Belfast, been inside the headquarters of Sinn Fein on Andersontown Road which like 10 people on earth can claim, have met Teddy Kennedy, seen Chappaquiddick and Hyannis, have even had a meeting with Billy Bulger (yup, a full on sit down meeting), I am named after two apostles, knew a member of the Westies by the time I was 15, and my pubic hair is red, and even though I don’t sound like Matt Damon in Goodwill hunting when I interact with normal Americans that don’t think freckles are a sign of racial superiority, I hate that I am always asked to prove my Irishness amongst other Irish Americans: “Well officially there were 7 alcoholics in my family, but if you count our setter, there are 8!”. If I started drinking right now, I would never stop without handcuffs.. there’s your answer. and I might kick your ass in the process.  I assumed the show was about Boston Irish (it turns out it’s about New Yorkers, Hell’s Kitchen, like Sleepers and State of Grace), which always get’s under my skin because A. I’m a Yankees fan and when you are a Yankees fan, Boston Irish are provincial misfits.. like rednecks without black people to bully (unless you call resisting school busing under Brown V Board of Ed and the Civil Rights act bullying). and B. I am sick of Boston Irish getting all the attention as the true Irish.. OK, so the music is good.. I’m a sailor and I lost my leg… but seriously, there are just as many white catholic hooligans in Cleveland, they just don’t pretend that robbing liqueur stores qualifies them for the PIRA.

All this flashed through my head in an instant, like man, the damn irish thing.

But here I find myself in the good situation I guess of wondering whether I have to defend my Irish Cred to this Romanian Sailor in the mid Pacific who for some strange reason can speak with intelligent authority about American Subcultures, but I get to cross his intentions off the list.. he may be my ball buster, but he’s an America Lover ( if we had had internet, I might have been able to Google the show and realize it was about New York and I wouldn’t have even been butt hurt, but other than sending emails, they said actual internet surfing on the high seas was 6 months away, and I was glad to be on before it)… I speculate now that he was a teenager when they kicked out and killed Cauceuscu and the wall fell. I can understand if he has some blue jeans appreciation, but this was like discovering he was a bigger Boss fan than me. But if Hajjis decided to storm the boat to roast some American Corrupter, I knew who the Seargant Al Powell was to my Detective John McLean.. it was my home boy Mikey. Like I said, the ‘let’s roll’ instincts, they kick in.. I nodded, and let my Irish furor settle, my Anti Boston hooliganism.. maybe I suppressed it, and now you have to read it, but he was being kind, trying to let me know that “He get’s where I am coming from.” and it made sense to take it at face value.

So I knew I had an ally in Mikey, but I also kept my distance.. I knew at some point, he would drop the boom on me for something.. It happened in our first stop in China, Fuqin. By the time we had crossed the Big Puddle I had gotten used to boat life. I had become adept and climbing ladders, moving about the ship, and exploring it’s nether reaches. Mikey even taught me about the bilge and the rest of the doodads on the computer, in addition to my countless bridge tutorials and boson’s walk arounds etc. so I was almost starting to feel like I could said the dang thing. There had been one day where the seas were so ferocious (30 ft waves and spray shooting over 100 feet up) that they banned me from deck which I again acted butt hurt about like a teenage girl, taking it out on the new weight system, but I had had no other tangles.. When we went to Fuqin, I was the only one to go ashore. I brought back two cases of beer for the crew and some Chinese candies, after an awkwardly funny day in town which I detailed in an earlier post (Fuqin’ A). I felt like a real victor having gone ashore, like Marco damn Polo since it was such an obscure part of china, and when I came back on and tucked the beer away in the crew lounge, I went back on deck to search for the Germans on the aft deck to gloat (I think this is when it happened.. it could have been in the misery called Xiamen, but I think it was in Fuqin). They were working hard but were always up for a bit of my sarcasm which I would tailor to their north sea chagrined dry palate . I was feeling cocky, just feeling good, so I went back the way I was.. light jacket for the late fall chill of northern China, flip flops and, whoops, no Helmet. So not a big deal right.. after 2 or more weeks, I should be able to avoid all the things that might hit my head, even in the tight staircases that lead down to the aft deck, but what I am not mentioning is that  we were unloading and loading.. those huge cranes were going back and forth overhead.. now again perceptively scary, but not really since if things are falling off those cranes, you got bigger things to worry about, but then there were the Longshoremen. OK, so those containers piled 6 high.. they can actually be piled 15 high, you just don’t see the bottom 10 under the deck, but then there are these metal clamps that they use to hold all but the top few together. When the ship docks.. it isn’t just crane operators and truck drivers making it all happen. about 20 or 30 laborers come on board to clamp it all together, and whether they are from Oakland, Fuqin or Hong Kong, they are usually from the wrong side of the tracks, and I started to understand why when I came up the gangplank that the two Fillipeanos, who would later become friends, looked like Burmese soldiers with their safeties off. These guys are known to crawl all around the ship trying to steal stuff. In addition, if the bosun doesn’t supervise them, they toss the clamps onto the deck with a bounce from 30 feet up, and over time it makes the steel on deck start to rust and decay, so that once a year the guys have to sand and repaint the walkways where these 5 pound clamps and poles are always bouncing bouncing bouncing.

So I had walked right under all this activity, containers whizzing over my head, with no helmet and no closed toed shoes.. I had, however, remembered to call in I think. I go down, shoot the breeze, maybe help drag around a few 3 inch thick wires, and brag about Chinese food, the cool temple the town had forgotten about but I found, and seeing women for the first time since we left Russia. When I get back, someone summons me to the big office. I had forgotten the CCTV, pointing in both directions down the circumferential walkway from the superstructure, and there is me day tripping through all this chaos.  He happened to be watching.. like the father of a 10-year-old, and yup, busted.. He was stern albeit respectful.. maybe a little raised voice in that Eastern European way that isn’t really anger so much as concerned frustration.. in the context of his culture, it isn’t like being yelled at, it’s more like a loving smack on the back of the head… There were never any threats or punishments, but maybe in the back of his head, it never occurred to me until now,  there was some risk averse corporate dictate that said I was to be left ashore with a ham sandwich and a note explaining if I did something like that more than once.. given some of the things I did do, it seemed unimportant, but a bit flagrant, but Mikey did treat it in a way that never made me resent him any more than I might resent any authority with the regularity that I do, but it was one of those things that got in the way of me and him just being dude and dude.

I did get some color from him. His family in Constanta. the regular jokes about married life. His dream to own a restaurant on the beach, if he didn’t already have a stake in one. But we did keep it light in case the old minder/mentee thing came up again. I went about my rounds.. read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk, say hi to folks, learn something new about the ship, take a nap, eat, lift weights and repeat. One funny thing I could have don with Mikey would have been to fill up the pool.. I alone had discretion over the pool. it was the size of a postage stamp, on the same floor as the gym, kind of a utility floor towards the bottom filled with closets, food stores, and emergency stuff. They told me a few times that I could fill it at any time, but it would be seawater, and they do it when they are in the tropics, but up here.. Eh as a Romanian might do as his shrugs his shoulders and puts on a mock frown, it’s cold. I thought about filling it and just floating in a gumby suit as a kind of weird meditation and survival training. Me in my postage stamp pool, 10×10 insulated from the world half way across the pacific. floating in a neoprene suit.. that’s a dissimulation chamber if I ever could dream of one. I finally got mike to admit they might be able to run it through some pipes near the engine and warm it,but it never got past that.. it was my major prerogative as a passenger for a bit of fun, but when we got to China, with stops every other day, life became kind of exciting again, watching the fishing boats, sometimes 50 at a time, bob by.

At our next port, Xiamen, I got butt hurt.. the Ship agents got jerked around by the Government, maybe looking for  bit of Baksheesh, and I stood there ready to go ashore for what turned into hours. The crew told me about two hours in that this part of China has no sense of humor, that I should wait until southern China where there is commerce and they like westerners, not try to get off here. I was a bit insistent, it became a thing of pride for me, that American sense of rights that had long about been bred out of surviving Romanians, and they finally called me to tell me I could disembark at something close to 11pm.. I went downstairs out of curiosity, but I was livid..  There was this town of 10 million, and I had never even heard of it before. A buddy of mine years ago had once made the comment to me that there are 100 towns in china with a population of more than a million that you have never even heard of before, and here was one of them, and we had paraded past it as we docked, and the captain had talked about how most of the bridges in town had appeared in literally the last few years, all these works.. the town was just exploding. I wanted to see it, but now it was 11pm, and we sailed at 8am.. we had arrived hours earlier.. where they kidding? that kind of indifference seemed so intolerable to me.. so superior and unreasonable. When I got downstairs, the young ship agent put a piece of paper in front of me. It was one I had seen before, and I had been told I didn’t have to fill it out again in our last port, that I was techincally in china and didn’t have to do any more but come and go as I pelased until I checked out before going to Hong Kong. I told him this. He said the customs agents insisted. I told averted my gaze and just walked out, stormed towards the elevator, just having had enough.. he chased me back to the elevator, and said”You are american, I want to go to America!” Almost pleading to me.. I am sure I was the first American he might have ever met..”My country is horrible.. they do this to us, run us around and abuse us..My brother goes to Harvard.. I want to go to!” I stopped.. the elevator had arrived.. I am deciding what to do.. this didn’t seem the time for a Crimson moment.. Ah Harvard.. tut tut.. my chum Dagwood is in the class of ought 6! I didn’t know what to say to him.. I wanted to look at him and say “grow some balls. if you hate it, change it!” but I am not sure I said anything.. I went up and went to bed, and when I woke up, we were halfway out of Xiamen harbor..with relief.

I kind of blamed Mikey for this a bit, for not going to bat for me.. The guys told me earlier that day that if you want to go on one of these ehips, don’t go on to see the land.. do a cruise ship.. do this to see the sea.. they said this was more common than I realize, and it always pissed off the western passengers. I had just watched Mr. Roberts in my room, and as comical as it was, Mikey became the Captain played so famously by James Cagney. it’s absurd because Mikey as first officer likely had 300 things to do that day as we ported, least of which was to convince the chinese not to ignore my request to come ashore, and he likely had gone to bat for me, but this port seemed to have a reputation for this kind of stupidity. The whole movie hinges around Cagney’s character denying his ship shore leave for a whole year, so that when they do finally get ashore, they go so nuts that it causes riots in that kind of good natured 40’s broadway way. That would come a few nights later in Chiwan, a night worth waiting for, but my pent up frustration led to me doing a silent protest of sorts. I showed up at Mikey’s room the next day and handed him my watched Copy of Mr. Roberts from the Barnes and Nobles on Santa Monica’s third street promenade (two blocks from where they took down Whitey Bulger, I might add). I told him it was a good movie, gave it to him, and kind of walked off. I wonder if he ever even got to it, or if for me he had becomes Cagney, if only comically, but he took it and I got some funny satisfaction, some weir phyrric victory in my now quite alone american head.

After our crazy night in Chiwan, to be detailed later, we all woke up to watch the slow journey down the pearl river just a few miles to Hong Kong harbor. There was a festive mood. Even if you don’t know about the history of the Pearl River, the opium wars, and the opening of China not once but twice, the second time just where we had been by Deng after the death of Mao, it was still triumphant to come into Hong Kong which we had passed just two days before. We passed under more bridges and past the airport, and the men were excited, knowing that Hong Kong was an inviting place. Mikey was on the fly bridge, same as me, taking it all in, and he was smiling and laughing with the rest of us. The germans were finally taking time off, their project done, and were up on the bridge taking photos, and we had an extra captain and Crew Chief who had joined us from france to do some training with the bridge crew on Harbor Operations. There was this buzz on board, up on the bridge, like we were in friendly waters and we felt like we were all on a walk in the park together. It was the first time I could tell that Mikey’s hawk eyes weren’t watching me. I was no longer new. That day the Germans and I went in and explored Kowloon after some Customs formalities we had to attend to independently on Hong Kong Island. by the time I got back to the boat, the night  I was supposed to disembark, it was close to 9pm. Mikey saw me struggling to pack and let me off the hook: “Mr. Thomas, you don’t have to leave.. you can keep the room another night.. we don’t care, we are happy to still have you, as long as you make it off the ship by the time we push off at 8, it’s no worries..even if you don’t” The ship was going to Shenzen, then back to Long Beach. Shenzen was another half day deal, so if I overslept, I could have just about taken a subway back to Hong Kong. I could tell he meant it, but at that time I gain acceptance, that’s always the time I end up leaving. I was dreaming of the bath I wanted to take at the Intercontinental, while I watched the ships go by in the Harbor. Even though what he was saying made total sense, I wanted to get in and take that bath, be on land, be anonymous again and cruise the places where I had met Anna Koren, fallen in love with the old wooden Harbor Ferries, and seen the tallest man in the world. Little did I know how much 23 million mainland Chinese visitors a day had changed the Hotel Scene in Hong Kong since my last visit in 2009, and that I would end up at the Chunking Mansions that night (if you know anything about Honk Kong, you know what a drop this is!) with every good hotel booked solid or twice the price it had been when I was last in Hong Kong. But at that moment is made sense to slip off before the morning rush, with no traffic between me and my assumed bed.. with no stress. I could picture  a nice goodbye on a sunny deck, as they went one way and I went the other, but goodbyes are awkward. I passed through the mess halls, dropping exotic foods I had saved since SF and Fuqin in the crew fridge and saying good bye to all in passing. I think when I got to the door I tried to give Mikey a bit of a hug, or maybe it was just a handshake.. he was huge, no doubt about it, but kind of a sly teenage character in reality, and walked my way down the gangplank and to a cab at the gate, the formalities of the other ports, even in America, dropped in the everything goes world of Hong Kong commerce.

He is likely a captain by now, and I bet a good one. he’s plenty smart, and his physical stature makes him the kind of guy who will naturally get acceptance despite his youth. Being in charge has likely let him relax a bit with his role and enjoy the scenery and I hope he keeps his appreciation of the good old US and A..I bet he still watches his movies and sagas, and keeps up, like so many Yuppies in America and I guess worldwide, with the series he watches. Underneath I could tell the guy might have been just as shaped by the humor or Friends or How I Met Your Mother as any other middle class American guy, and he would have been a football player had he grown up in the states, and retained that big guy who is nice to little guys as long as you don’t cross me attitude, but as much as I should dread that globalization, dream of him being something exotic and unfathomable, it was kind of nice, even if we never smoked cigars and really settled in, knowing that Mikey was on board, and might have my back if it came to it, like some mick cousin from Hells Kitchen. I hope he get’s that restaurant, and if I even stop into Constanta, I vow to go in search of it, maybe look him up. Sounds like a good life to me.. On the sea, then by the sea.. Good on ya Mikey.

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.