TR Blogs

oooooh yeah.. this is exciting stuff… everyone loves a little chaos, they just don’t admit it…

Allright.. so piracy is basically any crime committed against a boat, like hijacking it, it and it’s crew, or hauling off it’s crew for ransom, just sneaking on and stealing things, or stealing what’s on it by force….and of course it has a fabled history… in the west and the new world, it was both an outlaw and opportunistic thing and an ‘extension of diplomacy; with state sponsored pirates like Drake. The Spanish Galleons would come from Manila to Acapulco, Mexico, and then gold and silver from the Andes and Mexican mountains and wherever else it could be found would be combined with asian trade and taken across the Caribbean and Atlantic in what were eventually huge flotillas filled with just about everything you could imagine valuable. This proved quite tempting to both independents and the Brits. I once spent a few weeks in the Panamanian town of Portobelo, and it was famous for being one of two or three carribean ports where gold and silver from Peru was loaded onto galleons for the once a year Armada back to spain, and I had always found the pirate obsession annoying after living in Florida, and felt the stories were overblow. It turns out they are anything but overblown. Pirates took Portobello at least once, and I could trace the battle to an old falling apart fort behind the town that now has a population of just a thousand or two. Nearby a group of salvages had found an old ship thought to have been one belonging to columbus on his third journey, and I could touch the guns, sitting in a saline solution to preserve them until they could be stabilized, and it all gave me a thrill.. I won’t be celebrating by getting drunk and wearing black leather like a lot of tool bags do, but it did give me an appreciating. Later in Cartagena, I learned of an amazing battle that happened on a spit of land now occupied by the Colombian Naval College, where 300 pirates overwhelmed the town, sacked it, and decided to stay a few months, although they never found the Cathedral gold, hidden by the Spanish bishop for months.. In MAdagascar, South East Asia and the Spice Islands of Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia, perhaps even further east, there was a similar culture and trade that wasn’t stamped out until the late 1800’s… it was just part of life to raid and take, from the Chinese, from each other, and then from Europeans as they arrived. Gong back through time, as long as there has been trade and boats, there has been piracy…the romans and greeks I think both dealt with it, and the Vikings could be considered pirates of sorts, although they sure didn’t stop at boats, and Indian Ocean trade routes had similar run ins with people in little enclaves…

In the modern era, there are a few hot spots… Indonesian Piracy popped up again some years ago around Singapore, and still happens in the far flung areas of Indonesia and the Philippines, but it garnered attention when guys would shimmy up bamboo ladders from pangas around the turn of this century from the islands of Bintan and Batam, within sight of Singapore, or nearby Sumatra, and rob boats headed to or from that famous trading port, or just through the legendary Straights of Malacca. Around the world there are robbery attempts in the Caribbean and elsewhere that are classified as piracy, and can have tragic consequences, but are not really piracy in the sense of being organized boat going operations in the classic sense, more like hoods borrowing a buddies fishing boat to rob a yacht… it’s piracy, but it’s not ‘Piracy’… the world is getting so settled, the areas of chaos less and less, so that it’s less of a problem.. the global reach of military forces makes retribution possible from anywhere, quicker than people imagine,s o ti has placed global shipping out of reach for all but the boldest and most desperate.. since the Mayaguez Incident, the US has had sophisticated skills built up to seize ships professionally if they are captured, and just about any navy ship, of which there are hundreds of American ones alone roaming the sea at any one time, in this era of Pax Americana, can do all but seize a ship.. definitely follow it, harrass the pirates, and bring in assaulters if not interdict the pirates to and from their destination with helicopters, launches, and occasionally the big ship it’s self…

So when I mention desperate enough, surely I am talking about the spate of Somali Piracy that ran from like 2009 to about 2012…in arond around the horn of Africa…everyone who saw the film Black Hawk down knows that Somali is a failed state, although there is an area called Somaliland, it’s Northwestern corner, that has kind of rejoined the world and lives civilly, but the rest of the country still goes through bouts of rebellion and fundamentalist governments.. they actually had peace and an oppressive muslim government for like 6 months, but the US smelled Al Qaeda, and had them overthrown with Ethiopian troops, and it was back to chaos.. out of this chaos sprang a group of real honest to goodness pirates, like Blackbeard,  or the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean coast that the US Marines famously helped clean out int he early 1800s, in fact, three of them have made the list of Famour Pirates through history on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pirates

So what did I learn about Piracy on the CMA CGM Libra? well, that it’s a pretty rare circumstance.. the Captain had a great story of being taken hostage, but by North Korea.. I will tell that one later.. it’s more funny than scary… This ship doesn’t go anywhere near pirate prone areas, but some of the sailors have been through those areas. One crew member told me about taking a passenger around the world through the Red Sea on a previous contract, and he said the guy, I think an American, was on deck the whole time with binoculars almost praying for an attack out of humor and boredom, but they saw nothing.. it became a joke on the ship, but I think one that the American was in on, like a good natured Snipe hunting expedition with the kids…

There was a fax machine that existed to print pirate info as it came, from some Piracy Agency in England I think, the IMB-PRC (International Maritime Bureau- Piracy Reporting Center), and a sheaf of reports I could read back through hanging in the lounge on the side of the bridge if I wanted… I dont think we got an update the whole time I was aboard, and the most recent one was just about an incident where someone basically mugged the crew of a fishing boat someplace in the southern Philippines… since I got off the boat, the muslim fundamentalists on Mindanao, the major south island of the Philippines, have been under attack from the government, who is routing them from their base areas in the jungle, and they committed a pretty violent act of piracy, but this was the closest pirate group to our route, and still a thousand miles if not more from Hong Kong.

Some guys told me about going through the Red Sea to the Suez Canal recently and getting mercenaries on board.. they would hang out until they were clear of reach of Somalia, then go home.. the guys said they were tough and looked professional, and that is about it…

I never got the impression that there were guns on board, and I think they would just do what philips did, lock the doors, zig zag, and call the navy… the second officer, who I did ask about it with a joke that I knew the chances were slimmer than slim, and he told me the Libra was too damn big, it would never be hijacked because it’s hard to get on even a small boat like the Alabama, carrying maybe 2000 teu, but hauling the amount we are, 11,400 makes getting onto deck through all but the pilot hole a huuuuuge climb.. I used to take breaks on the gangplank the ship is so tall…

But there was a pirate attack while I was on board.. when we got to China, our last stop before Hong Kong, chowan, right in the pearl river bay that separates Macau, Hong Kong, and old Canton, now Guandong, the pumping heart of chinese commerce, there were two guys we let onto the boat to set up a shop selling trinkets and to hang out right at the top of the gangplank before the double doors to go into the accommodation. They always have cheap crap like flashlights and other things they think the crew will want, and they call buddies to give us rides into town and such, and I think we enjoy having them around to kind of entertain us after weeks with each other, some local color, smoking good natured cantonese middle aged wheeler dealers, and they had a stack of movies, including, right on top, you guessed it, about 6 copies of Captain Phillips, allegedly in Blue Ray, but it turned out to be a screener (where they set up a video camera in the theater, and you see people getting up to go the the bathroom, and the sound is horrible), although no harm done for a buck… this act of Piracy was the new use of the word as Copyright infringement… if Metallica was there they would have thrown a fit, but I couldn’t help myself. I had been preparing for my trip as It hit theaters, even playing two blocks from my last hotel in jack london square, but a convenient time never came up to watch it, and I think I balked once at the 12 dollar price on third street in Santa Monica (no wonder people buy pirate copies, you theater owning pricks!) it couldn’t have been a hotter topic, and I hadn’t seen it yet. So I bought it, took it to my room and watched it with the shadows of the big container cranes working out my window dancing across my glossy screen.. it seemed like the perfect place to watch it, making me glad I hadn’t seen it in theaters..I was a bit moved by the end, it was kind of heavy, and it felt weird that the boat, although smaller, felt like an older more sun beaten version of the Libra.. down to the details of the little ship diagrams on each floor.. it was like watching a crime movie about an apartment building similar to yours… somehow juicier through personal knowledge.

Anyhow, not to trivialize piracy, the Maersk was just one example of this many hundred strong Somali Group that took dozens of boats, and there was a lot of action between the US, Dutch, and other navies against them for a couple years there. This reality show for the young american male targeted network Spike sure didn’t expect to be this busy:

but it is quiet again for the most part I hear… Once in asia I went on a youtube binge watching videos, and there was a good collection of actions between pmercinaries, navies and pirates, and not to mention the rescue of two hostages in northern Somalia on the night of the State of the Union address in 2012,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-forces-rescue-kidnapped-aid-workers-jessica-buchanan-and-poul-hagen-thisted-in-somalia/2012/01/25/gIQA7WopPQ_story.html

There is a seperate war going on with Muslim Fundamentalists in the South of Somalia that led to this SEAl Raid, the War on Terror and the Piracy becoming to the SEALS what the BArbary Pirates were to the Marines.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2446081/Navy-SEAL-Team-6-raids-Somali-terror-stronghold-Delta-Force-captures-U-S-Embassy-suspect.html

but I think the difference is that these pirate gangs work out of the ports and villages north of Mogadishu closer to the horn, and these guys are to the south.. so much going on!

I will leave you with this: in my glut of video watching after the trip, to understand this better with my trip having given me context for life on bord and international shipping, I came across this video:

http://www.thatvideosite.com/v/12770/dutch-commandos-storm-a-german-cargo-ship-taken-over-by-pirates

so that’s what it looks like on top of the containers during the day… I only got to see it at night when the second officer couldn’t see me! it’s funny to hear dutch people trying to act tough by the way…

it’s hard not to feel bad for all involved,  from these hungry somali guys taking naps in the western comfort of these nice air conditioned ships they get to capture,only to be rousted by these annoying soldiers, to the ship crews terrified by the arbitrary nature of these desperate men boarding their ships, occasionally murdering to even the investors who are forced to risk their boats and pay ransoms, but it does give people something to talk about… that’s the biggest thing I learned about piracy crossing the Pacific!

Fuquin isn’t on the tourist trail.. even the locals will tell you, there ain’t much to see.. now I will say that in my 6 hours wandering around Fuquin, I did find some things I enjoyed, I can’t lie, but it’s off the tourist trail for a reason.. 90% of the town is about 10 years old, and the surroundings are farm land, not much nature left except on a few hill tops, no beaches that I have been able to discern, just some estuary and islands, one amazing old temple that the locals disregard and use as a card room, but then this remarkable urban testimony to the new China. The last time I was in China, about 6 years ago, I got as far as I could from the Han Chinese as almost possible. I went as quickly as I could by train away from the ‘economic success stories’ on the coast, and buried myself in the indigenous cultures, mountains and river valleys of Yunnan and southern Sichuan, which was basically unchanged since the cultural revolution excepting a few tourist and mining towns I hit, outside of Kunming, which I dubbed the Chinese Denver, which was hard to not see as an Economic powerhouse. On that trip, I had avoided what I saw today, traveling by motorcycle into the recesses, which was the Han thing, 800 million strong, the New China thing, the success that people talk about that makes my eyes glaze over while I think of all that cool Chinese character being bulldozed into a shopping mall, Hutong Land. When people get excited about it, New China, I make a mental note to not be curious about them anymore. I smell MBA indoctrination and some secret Bougie fantasies. But here I was today, my decision on where to roam decided by a ship schedule, confronted by it.. I will say that the old China is more than there, it’s not just in the cracks, it’s still on main street. In downtown Fuquin, which the ship agent who gave me a ride there and shared lunch with me called a village, I found a small city, what felt like 20k 30k or so people, and putting the history together, the whole place was a fishing village until they built this port and free trade zone ten years ago. I still had a funny time watching an old guy pull his goat through the main intersection of town, it fighting him with all it’s might, him leaning back on the rope, still something timeless occurring, and I even gave it a tap on the haunches to help him out. But the other thing is going on too..

When I woke up and looked out at the port, it felt new, it looked new, and the agent, a kid named Antonio, which was westernized from the Mandarin word for East, confirmed I was right, ten years old and built on landfill.. he said there wasn’t much in town, and even the crew, who had to work all day anyways, told me it was a ghost town and to wait until Xiamen tomorrow to go ashore.. I wasn’t gonna sit around after 17 days on the ship (not that I was complaining, but I wanted to smell green, see trees, eat something not fried) so Antonio offered to take me in, the only drawback that I had to wait through his two phones ringing off the hook to get through conversations in his passable English, which was his college major. He had about 3 big ships a week to handle, plus what he called a feeder ship coming down the rivers or from Taiwan every day or more. He taught me a lot, and I saw a lot.. He is from Fuzhou, the provincial capital, about 2 hours away, and he said he could barely understand the locals here. But I could tell pretty quickly the locals had been marginalized by a new China, and this was an Industry town. After he took me to Immigrations to get my Visa validated, which for some reason took 20+ minutes even though I was the only customer in this massive office, he took me to town. They had created a special visa system just for Americans as part of this bullshit reciprocity thing that all these countries had started after September 11, but at least they didn’t take the humiliating step of finger printing me like some do. Anyhow, Antonio drove the company car to town, which he claimed was 20 minutes away, and that there were no taxis. This turned out to not be completely true. It took 20 minutes because he never once used his gas pedal, I actually looked, 15 kph the whole way, for safety he said.. he just put the car in drive and let the torque of the engine idling take us there.. it must have been 3 kilometers away. In fact, the whole island is only 10km long they told me, maybe 10 miles, now more a peninsula joined by both a bridge and a land fill bit they recently did, and the town sits on the south side. The downtown area is called “shady side fuqin” if I heard it right, for the shady side of the little river that runs though it. After hitting an ATM and finding an upstairs restaurant with some impressive service (they all had radio earpieces like some ultra club, but I was calmed by being able to see out a crack in the wall, no, not a window, just a gap they forgot to fill above the pisser, next to a fully functioning window, and I was able to see a sewer and a goose wandering around in a dirty back yard, which brought me back comfortably to the old China again.) for a huge bowl of seafood and Sichuan peppers that we ladled out into these tiny bowls. Antonio spit his bones out in true Chinese form, while I am sure I did something equally deemed offensive to the Chinese. Then we wandered back to his car, through farmland and a few jaunts to satisfy my curiosity, finding an old temple back in an Alley that was impressive as hell, with endless amazing colorful and gilded carvings, but with a poker game going on, and the level of restoration one might find in an old kitchen, with catalogues stacked upon them, museum quality art works, and LED lights nailed into corners and tape and glass stuck here and there. The place was awesome, and given all the reverence of a cement community center in a Great Society housing project, which I delighted in.

The town shares bottom land with the river and rises on some hills, and you can walk down an alleyway and pop into some intensively cultivated land on the banks of the river, where you would expect buildings anywhere else, just feet off the main drags, but did I mention buildings? Here is what I have been avoiding. So ten years ago they build this container port to export from Fuzhao and a few of it’s more interior provinces, and this little village becomes a boom town, and the thing impossible not to notice where these huge town house looking things, with every weird example of run together european and chinese architectural flourish, so that the whole place looked like a vertical version of a Dallas suburb sprinkled on rural Asia, or like someone took Amsterdam, carved the houses from each other, and scattered them one by one over the land randomly, with these gaudy but oddly appealing chateaus next to pig farms and lettuce plots. It ran like that for miles, with these 4 or 5 story high palatial looking apartment buildings squeezed in on these little plots, sometimes with just a dirt track leading to them. It was all so odd, so Chinese-ly odd. Context matters not after the Cultural revolution.. if the market will sustain it, build away. So the other shock was the other part of main street. Now the old china, like I said, still there.. fruit sellers and foul smells, market garbage like piles of fruit scraps and semi open sewers mixed, with noodle joints, and turtles for sale, but the part I didn’t expect? Boutiques, and the Suburban Mo’s. I got it in my head that it’s 1962 in China.. it’s conservatively sexy, the women look, well, strangely hot, and this town has a raft of married non working mom’s with cash to burn and long days to fill, likely because the harbor and nearby chemical plant pays to sustain that. I was just kind of shocked. There were endless wine shops, boutique tea stores, and homeware stores.. but not the cheap hardware stores I learned to love in Yunnan.. we aren’t talking Rodeo drive, but it was a hell of a lot closer than I expected, rain shower heads and solar hot water heaters.. and the women, with a distinct style, attractive, lot’s of wool, like a chic version of england in the 60’s, again with the crazy platform heels with tassels and fur and frills, and I was amazed at the difference in nutrition that either the one child policy, now 30 years old, or the industrialization had created, because these housewives were amazons compared to the older people you could see who had survived the Cultural Revolution and concurrent famines of those upheavals. They were tall, attractive, and fashionable decked out. It hit home most in a supermarket I found upstairs from main street. I think the fancy thing in China is to put things upstairs.. the shit you want is never at street level when it comes to food, at least so the pretension implies. I figure out that this staircase leads to a supermarket, and head upstairs. I pass a sign that says in English, to my distinct satisfaction, “High Quality Consumption Environment” and other such lines that are that kind of no beating around the bush when it comes to greed chinese language direct translations. Another I think said something like “Parking Trouble Free Shopping Experience”. It was a bit like a Whole Foods in America, in that there were actually satisfying things to see and explore, dried fish boxes of many varieties next to a handful of vegetable matters I had never quite seen before, things you expected from an outdoor market with shanks of beef hanging, bullfrogs for sale, and people spitting between the stalls, but I the setting of a western market, but it was the clientelle that hit me.. more of these hottie pottotie amazonian chinese housewives in 6 inch heels, and mostly unpretentious, all kind of ready to say hi. At one point I thought maybe one of them had pinched my butt and was looking for a little flirtation, but I figured out it was her bag, but it had that feel, a bit of Orange County, a bit of Camelot innocence with a bit of tongue in cheek randiness, don’t let the hair band fool you, Binky-san likes to party. The country couldn’t forget what it was, it was all over the streets, it still felt honest, just modern. I rue two generations from now, but this was hard to not on some level see as pleasant, maybe suburban, maybe the precedent for something horrible, Chinese Edward Scissorhands being born as I write, no doubt not nature based, not reverent, but I was suckered just long enough but the oxygen pumped breezes of the High Quality Consumption Environment simply by virtue of my not having thought in my brain of brains that china could pull it off quite so convincingly. Latin America can’t.. they hustle and they bustle, but the anxiety is always there.. same with India I imagine.. it just comes across as at odds with the gestalt, but here it was.. the new China, and I was half pleased it might have just pinched my ass..

I wrote this while at sea

Why I took this trip:

1. To allow my head to catch up to my proverbial behind while still getting where I want to go.
2. To listen to my body since I hate going to the doctor, and figure out if I have any real ailments other than stress and a lot of time zones wearing on my body.
3. To cross the Pacific like my dad and Colonel S had in the Military. My dad talked about it so much it left an insecurity.
4. To see places from a new perspective and to see terra incognita
5. To Connect Asia and North America in my head the way my trip on the QM2 had done it for me for Europe. I fee like if you take a boat between two places, it is less of a cop out or a disgrace to take a plane there next time, because you aren’t ‘skipping over’ places that might have stories and knowledge for you.. you aren’t half ass-ing part of the Earth’s tapestry.
6. I don’t think it was intentional, but out of boredom and curiosity, I have learned a lot about the shipping industry, and the Philippians
7. To let my the Carpal Tunnel in my right wrist heal. I have it from typing hours a day, and euphemistically, from being single for so fucking long!
8. To get in shape and eat a healthier more consistent diet
9. to obligate myself to sleep in one bed for a while, even if it is always moving at 20 knots
10. in other words, to center myself, the way Alaska does, by isolation and stability, while still getting what I want, which is a chance to explore and learn about things I find exotic every day.
11. To learn about weather, meteorology, and navigation, which might help make me a better pilot. Things happen on a boat at a much more processable speed.. it’s easier to learn here than on a plane.. you don’t have to fly and look around. You can just stare at the map for an hour while the watch office does that.
12. To be in an all male environment for a while, my hope being that my reward might be some time in a very female environment once I get to Asia.
13. I hate flying… from the indignity of taking off my shoes still some 9 years after Richard Reid, to the blast of carbon it creates, to the small indignities the corporate entities that handle you along the way heap upon you, to the intensity of it’s health impacts and psychological discombobulation that goes along with it, I try to avoid it whenever I can, and the alternates tend to be more rewarding.
14. To learn about the nature and ecology of the Pacific, and to see some big storms… to see the Sea

OK, so 23 Days, something like 7000 miles.. how much wildlife did I see…

Well, just enough… it’s the ocean, and due to the size of the ship, you don’t just throw a line over and trawl… maybe we could have, but the odds of something jumping up under a ship that big to take a bite seem pretty miniscule, and add to it the fact that the fan tail is like a 5 minute walk from the accommodation.. it’s not like falling asleep with your hand on the tiller and tying the line to your toe… Filipinos love a good fish, and they didn’t even try, so fishing was out…

So that brings us to whales.. when he got off the Libra, someplace between the Golden Gate and the Farrilons, the Pilot for SF bay told me to look out for whales for the next few hours, it would be good watching he said..

He was right.. I don’t think any major migrations were occurring, but a couple hours later, me still soaking up my first day on board by not wanting to retire to my room until exhausted (there would be plenty of time to rest) and realizing the guys didn’t care if I grabbed the binoculars every once in a while as long as the Titanic wasn’t bearing down on us, I caught me a nice crew of Finbacks with an up close look…   they were kind of trying to get out of the way of the boat, and you could see their long sleek bodies laboring to get away, swimming across the surface:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_whale

There must have been 4 of them, maybe 5, and I guess this was a small portion of the roaming eastern pacific population of 25-27,000.. Wiki, which knows all, says their population has doubled or more since the 70’s, so things are good, and they are a bit of a mystery still, never quite as famous as their nearer shore relatives the humpbacks, greys, rights, or the big ol blues that do roam these waters…

The guys were always watching… I noticed that two of the Filipinos, Norman and Leo, seemed to keep a sharp eye, although I might be giving credit in a kind of Lone Ranger and Tanto way, because a lot of the Romanians seemed to have a similar eye, but those two would be standing there, perhaps not even looking out to sea, and something out the window of the bridge would catch their eye, and it would be a whale.. it happened to me once if not twice… I never determined what they were, as the waves were choppy, but you would see a spout, sometimes just a mist, but these guys had been staring at the sea for so long they would spot it… One time I hung off the side of the starboard fly bridge for 20 minutes trying to see more.. we were moving fast, but I would spot a spout every 4 or 5 minutes.. in a different time, I would have said “to the boats!”, but no longer…

The biggest classic thrill was after out big lifeboat drill, maybe 2 days out, so getting far from shore, maybe 1000 miles… I decided to do my fist wander up front, maybe my second.. I hopped up on the little platform at the very prow (The ‘King of the World Spot’ for all of us who don’t read Patrick O’Brien novels, and looked down on instinct, one hand on my helmet to I don’t lose it, the other on the little metal guard rail to keep me from falling over with a little up pressure to keep me from loosing my teeth on some sudden surge).. there, way down there, were two dolphins, two toned, riding the bulbous bow… they looked small.. it was the first time I was like oh wait.. it’s a long way down… I now realize they were like 5 feet long, but again, I was 45 feet up.. I think I was amazed instantly at two things: one, that they could go that fast.. the boat was going 21 or 22 knots.. like 24 mph… and that they would go that fast, dart away, and overtake the boat to get back in position.. I am pretty sure I saw it right, and it was impressive.. the second thing was that they were out here mid ocean.. I tend to see Dolphins like people, they think like us essentially, and  see their territory as the pelagic zone, close to shore.. a few weeks before I had been walking Venice Beach at sunset, and I saw one of those things: some tourists had jumped in the water, they seemed Latin or Italian (I guess that is Latin!) and a pod of dolphins decided to play with them.. literally, they were swimming with each other in the surf at sunset.. I was walking and just plopped down and watched.. everyone who could see it, about 10 people, felt a bit blessed… seeing them out here made me realize dolphins have balls in a funny way.. if they are 1000 miles out to shore, in what I see as shark territory, what can’t they do? Turns out these are deep water dolphins, according to ol wiki again, and they actually can be 8 ft long.. that’s how bit the boat is… I thought they were 3 feet long when I first looked down…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_white-sided_dolphin

Through the middle of the trip there wasn’t much wildlife… there might have been some whales gliding invisibly by, on their way from Ak to Hawaii for some well earned rest, maybe some tuna gliding round out there, but you don’t see much evidence of a food web above.. it was winter and there were big storms to the north, but the closer we got the Japan, the more I noticed birds…. I didn’t expect to.. I was noticing them around the date line and beyond… way deep in the Northern Pacific… maybe it’s the success of Fox eradication on the Aleutians, but here we were, 1000 miles out, and there are birds… You read in old sea stories how that’s a way to figure out if you are near shore, but some of these seemed like they didn’t come into shore, maybe some albatrosses, and these brown dudes,a nd grey dudes, but not being an orinthology type (can’t even spell it…) I was at a loss…

You might imagine as we got closer to Japan there wasn’t much beyond birds… The Japanese eat everything in the sea with aplumb…the furthur you get from Tokyo, the more likely you are to get something on your plate that looks like something George Lucas or Ridley Scott dreamed up., and dolphins, not so much anymore you might imagine if you have seen The Cove, all the rage these days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc2arU61LSg

So Flipper ain’t hanging in Japan, he’s chilling with Kurt Cobain and Philip Seymour Hoffman talking about how tough show-business is..   Off the Siberian Coast, I think nothing came in because it was such a busy port, but had I dreamed to see something, it would have been this, but no dice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pacific_right_whale

Anyhow, by the time you get close to Korea, and the Sea of Japan, you start to see fishing boats, and more fishing boats, and by the time you hit the East China Sea, you wonder how there can be any fish left… I could see 50 different fishing boats one night when I walked around the ship to count.. they would fill up our radar like locusts… I imagined the crew’s bouncing along, squatting and smoking, trying to make the best of the sea… doing he most awful things with that chinese smile that makes you love ’em anyways.. there were birds, and the Chian Sea is actually shallow, so I wonder that it might produce a lot of fish, but they gotta be leaving as quick as they come in with this honeybee fleet outside of every port city…

Anyhow, that’s what I got! Next trip maybe I will bring some blow-hole identifier or something, but I might have joked, it’s about the last place on earth you don’t just settle arguments, or sate your curiosity instantly, by googling questions on your iphone! 4 or 5 finbacks, 2 or 3 dolphins, and a few sea lions as we left San Fran I neglected to mention, over 23 days, and a lot of birds.. remember this line?

What did I see? I saw the sea…

I had been dreaming of taking a freighter trip for years.. it was first suggested to me by a friend from College whom I spent a lot of time with in Nashville where he became a professional musician. Back in the day, when I was hitch hiking around America, there was this feeling that I would hop a freighter like the days of old.. I used to actively think about it, ways to flee CONUS (Continental United States) in my currently broke state.. it had all this vintage magic associated with it, time to think, the challenges of a salty adopted family to egg one into manhood, and the exotic.. sailors who lived by their own rules, who gave up conventional life for rewards unimagined… it’s a dream so often repeated in film and literature, but still not a cliché somehow, because really is out there, if we just know how to get to it, let ourselves get to it.. if Riding the rails, which I had tried, was the grand daddy of Vagabond Adventures… this is the Great Grandaddy…This is Lord Jim.. taka me to paradise or let me die…. In my hitching days I never was able to make it happen.. in my conversations, it became clear that a brave new world of regulations and security, heightened by September 11, had made things like that harder than ever.. it would make me a criminal, unless I joined some union and became a professional.. while you might be able to jump on with the boat people of Thailand, or Indonesia, or India, it’s not quite how it worked in the US. When I lived in Key West, among a group considered by many to possess these traits relative to American Culture, there was a lot of rule bending, but no breaking quite like that.. rarely did people just sail off to Cuba without checking out from customs first…  it’s just not how the world works anymore unless you are making a lot of money somehow, and people don’t talk about that. It’s sad how old dreams of adventure now fade to being on your face with flex cuffs on with some ICE agent who went to community college in Grand Rapids talking to you like you are a bad five year old who should be ashamed, and wait till Judge Daddy finds out… rebellions romance is somehow not the same in action in these days of the American Empire.. But there were these memories of my Nashville Buddy showing me these freighter travel web pages… it’s the kind of thing that ‘those Europeans and Australians’ do with their 6 week of vacation, whirl with our two, us Americans don’t waste time getting there.. we fly to the beach and Pedro hands us a Margarita within 45 minutes of arrival while we text back to our sister to remember to tun down the heat since we left so quick… it’s undignified, and it’s the American Way to Travel… we have an empire to build..we can’t just sit around. It’s why we never have context for where we go, because we get to just where we planed to be… he seemed to know that if he couldn’t do it, I needed to… I worked up to it in a way in my years of travel. I did long ferry trips up to Alaska, as far out as Dutch Harbor, I lived on a boat in the keys for months, I hung out with a friend who went to a Merchant Marine Academy, and tried to learn from him, I dreamed of being Commerce St. Croix, the ship Captain in the Lords of Discipline, and I finally even took the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic to see if I would get bored.. multi day trips on the Mekong and Magdalena would follow, and I had had my Captains Courageous trip, a wooden cargo ship had once taken me down the wild coast of Colombia, a trip that will live in my emotions for ever, as if I had discovered a lost place and time, gone in search of Captain Kurtz and found him. Nuqui to Buenaventura, with all the intrigues of Jungle and the Pacific, snakes and sharks, Guerilla armies and smugglers, Banana loads and buckets of fish, and people with time… it had been a magical trip… a freighter and some white mans regulations would not now be a let down.. I had seen the wild side. When I knew I had 3 months to get to a wedding in Thailand, and that there was the possibility of crossing the largest body of water on earth, the largest ‘Thing’ on earth, I jumped at it… I had been in Latin America for months, and was more than over the shifting morality of that place, cool jungle or not, and pining for Alaska, but it had to be done.. I parked myself in a buddies basement garage in Venice Beach and went to work, hoping he would give me enough time to make the plan happen without me having to shuffle around from hotel to hotel, which he thankfully did (just don’t spread your crap everywhere.. I gotta live here too!)… I had a million reasons to want to, which I will detail later.. one is Oedipal. My father had been commissioned a Naval Officer with orders that would likely take him to an Invasion of Japan just as the bomb dropped. HE spent the active portion of his service bringing ships home to america for Mothballing and repair, cleaning up the pacific from the 4 year conflagration… and he would talk endlessly about how good the time had been, just cruising back and forth to america, I’m not sure how many times, but over about a year and a half I was left with the impression.. reading books and interacting with the crew and the world, peeking at paradise and the results of such a complex set of acts of man. No son doesn’t want to equal or outdo the acts of their fathers, nor reap the same benefits of similar actions. Living in Alaska, and having loved the pacific for years, I wanted to see it through… I wanted to know what was south of Alaska, and out there from where America seems to end on Ocean Beach in San Francisco… what is past Seal Rock and where my buddies surf.. what is that space between… what defines it.. what is it? I jumped on the internet and tried to find a booking agent.. the fist 4 I tried, and the only I could find, literally never returned my calls nor emails.. New York, London, I talked to someone in Brooklyn, thickening my old accent to get respect,and they had a guy, but never heard back from him despite my full old school voice cred…. it stared to feel like some sort of secret society.. I had time, hadn’t given up yet, but I was definitely frustrated.. I asked a friend to help me, and after a couple of days, with me growing more accepted that I would sit around LA for a bit, maybe do another improv class of finally get some hot model/actress girlfriend to show me the sites, then just jump on a lane from nearby LAX, disappointed but accepting, my buddy came through, some guy in New Zealand, and he is communicating.. His name was Hamish, and like most Kiwis he was a straightforward gentleman with a kind but keen sense of humor. I had been near his hometown about 7 yeas before, and we joked rugby for a bit, since his local team is one of the best in the world. The rest of the conversation went something like this: me: I want to cross the pacific… do I need to rush to book, will it sell out? Hamish: laughter… Me: not that popular of a run? Hamish: you’ll be the first one in a few years… me:umm… sweet, so no problem picking my room Hamish: shouldn’t be an issue! he was right.. when I got on board, a few of the guys could remember every passenger they had met on two hands, over long careers.. they tended to be former sailors who missed the sea… old German guys who want to solve engineering puzzles and be alone, occasionally an adventuresome European couple doing the ‘around the world without a plane’ challenge… maybe crossing the Atlantic, Germans off to see New York, might actually book up during the good months, but not this… it’s one of the longest single hauls possible, and most people are intimidated.. I am too dumb for that.. The paperwork came in, and I went at it.. I hate paperwork.. it’s all built on distrust, and who wants to hang out in situations predicated on distrust, but I wanted this trip.. my buddy knew a doctor in the valley for my physical.. lot’s of rings.. Persian.. cash on the barrel head.. get me an appointment! Multiple entry visa to China.. 160 bucks.. fucking crooks… alright.. I fond some cool expiditers on Wilshire.. one had grown up in NYC, and we hung out during his smoke break and talked about life in the Big Apple while we enjoyed the LA sunshine.. they were cool and made me feel like i was getting this lined up right… health form, identity sheet, application, copies of passport, contract, travelers insurance, long cruise survival guide.. statement that I know there is no internet, yellow fever vaccination card… lot’s of Xeroxing and scanning, all at Paul’s office, me making some pretty offensive & loud comments before I realize that someone else was working on a Sunday besides Paul, but it’s LA, and it’s showbiz, no one takes offense.. When I finally get my paperwork in, somehwat down to the wire (backups at the Chinese Mission!), Hamish sends me the all important Voucher.. it’s my golden ticket… estimates are that I have about a week before I have to be in Oakland.. Oakland baby… I had just been visiting a buddy from Alaska who has found sanctuary from a pretty funny social faux paux in Alaska by cooking at an old Hotel in Berkeley.. he bought a sailboat, he’s got balls, and he has been showing me Oakland… I know just where I need to get to, and I got people to say hi to while I wait.. A last 2 nights at the Andaz on the sunset strip to say bye to some east side friends, and experience the former Riot House, the rock and roll hotel that birthed Golden Gods and broken TV sets (the windows no longer open wide enough to get a TV out, although we thought of taking one up to the pool), and Bobby Felckman, the hostess with the mostess… and I was on Amtrak for Jack London Square. Once up there, I was to go stay with a cousin in law of a buddy who I had been put together with by serendipity over a small town theater in the midwest, and headed for his pretty nice digs on the legendary Asbury Street in SF. Some Luxury while I wait. I started calling my shore agent.. wrong number.. he quit a year ago.. calls to the agents in Long Beach… are you in Long Beach, the boat leaves in a day? Holy Crap, do I need to be in Long beach, I’m in Oakland.. oh, no worries, (after a long agonizing tense wait) the boat will be up there in 2 days.. you have like 3 days to go.. 3 became 4, but  I still had time to play with… My Alaskan buddy picked me up next to Fisherman Warf and sailed me back to Emeryville…. couldn’t have been a cooler way to get me ready, on a 26 footer.. we dodged ships like I was going to be getting onto.. we stared at the harbor trying to figure out what it would be like… I checked back into a hotel on Jack London square and waited out my last night.. made a mad dash to Whole Foods Oakland (somehow Oaktown keeps it real, even Whole Foods was cheaper than in LA or SF) to fill up the fridge I had just learned I would have (Cheese and Simple Green Vitamin Juice.. the two things I knew I would want on board… the cab driver wanted to get lunch there, so it worked out perfectly… I’ll get you back to the hotel no problem sir!) . I had all I needed.. a stack of books on everything from Burma to the History of the FBI, and a pair of Flashmans, every 5 dollar movie worth a crap I could get my hands on in the Santa Monica Barnes and Nobles, two pairs of Ray Bans, some puzzles and origami from a games store in Berkley, and three packs of ear plugs… Hopped a cab with an ancient old brother cab driver, probably thought the panthers had been young punks, and even he had never been in the Harbor.. this was gonna be interesting…