Tag: freighter travel

Categories
Uncategorized

The Numbers (for all us geeky dudes)

Everyone has a little inner geek.. maybe it’s my astrological sign, or just being a big kid that makes me memorize all this useless info..but it gives context…. feast your eyes:

The Ocean

The area of the Pacific Ocean, excluding adjacent seas, is judged to be between 63.8-70 million square miles (165.2-181.3 million square kilometers), which is twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean and greater than the total land area of the planet.
The Pacific Ocean comprises about 46 percent of the Earth’s water surface, and about 32 percent of its total surface area.
Its mean depth is 14,040 ft (4,280 m).  (from yahoo answers)

The Ship

made in Korea by Hyundai in 2009..in a town on the east coast of South Korea called Ulsan I heard, although I know CMA CGM also buys ships from a yard further south, Goeje, this island with two huge ship yards on it, because one of the officers sat there for 3 months in a hotel waiting to pick a ship up once, although he had a good time. From keel laying to floating was only like 4 months… then it was floated and finished.. I have not heard that the champagne didn’t break. Cost 300,000,000 $US. I remember that the woman who swung the Campaign was either the wife of the local mayor, or the ship yard manager.

360 m long.. the bulbous bow seems to sit just ahead of the prow by a foot or maybe more. I used to stare down at i thinking it was 20 feet below me. by the end of the trip, I realized it was closer to 50 ft down.

45 m wide

60m high the 3 masts in ‘the monkey park’ that make it higher can fold down. The bridge tends to sit like 160 ft above the water.. it’s really high!

29 m? from main deck to bottom of keel, so a huge amount of possible free-board.. the boat drafted 15m when leaving Oakland. Now with fuel, who knows, maybe 17 or 18m. Before we began fueling, we seemed to have about 2 m of red showing in still water. I read somewhere it can cost like 1 million to paint one of these, incidentally.

Huge! it’s the 4th largest class of Container vessel in the world, and he second largest for CMA CGM. Each in the class is named after a star or constellation, and there are I think 12 ships in total.

1 TEU = 20 by 2.5m by 2m.. basically a 20 ft shipping container is 1 TEU   This is the measure of shipping capacity, kind of the key measure of a Container Ship’s size and value.

11400 TEU possible payload

8600 on board.. about $600 US per TEU income crossing the Pacific.

We only seemed to be carrying one shipping container of fuel, and about 24 ‘reefers’, refrigerated units that needed to be hooked up to our electricity to stay cool. These containers are extra cost for maitnenace, monitoring, and electricty.

approximate value of the cargo for our trip: 5.16 million, although there might have been empty containers going back to China.. one guesses that the eastbound journey is the real moneymaker.. if the ship was full, the income would be: 6.84 million usd assuming it’s the same price to go to the US per TEU.

Fleet Context

Their Larger Class is a whopping 16000 TEU, and all those ships are named after famous world explorers. I think the Marco Polo was the first in that class. They are remarkable for having the smoke stack and the accomidation about a third and two thirds down the ship… ours were combined, with a huge staircase like something out of a bond film circling the stack going up the back of the accommodation, about 3/4 or 4/5 down the ship.

CMA CGM is the 3rd largest shipping company in the world, after I think Japanese NYK and Evergreen in China, although the guys seemed to think Maersk was bigger too..

They have over 100 boats, divided into fleets, perhaps 10 total.. the fleets are distinguished by the nationalities of the crews. It’s the first fleet, maybe 10 spips, likely operating out of Marseilles, that has French officers and therefore French food… if only…

A few of the ships in the fleet had specific jobs, like running things from France to their Caribbean Islands. These large routes between major shipping hubs were the bread and butter of the company.

can go 24 knots, maybe 26, but the fuel costs start to skyrocket.

we tried to average 21 across the Pacific. No one here seems to call the Pacific ‘The Puddle’. It seems like nicknames like that are for US Navy guys to sublimate their homosexuality until the next equator crossing party.

The Crew

Crew is about 30 people, with berths for 40, including rooms set aside for as many as 7 passengers.

1 captain

1 chief engineer and 1 senior officer

3 watch officers (mates)

numerous engineering officers

2 electrical officers?

1 bosun

12? able bodied seamen or bosun’s mates  (4 guys trained as firemen at least)

2 cooks

1 steward

3 cadets (2 deck, one engineering, one electrical I think, one was Filipino, the other three Romanian)

There were always at least two people on the bridge, and one in the engine room. Someone would lock all the exterior doors every night as well, never figured out who it was.

The Engine

engine is a 12 cylinder, 2 stroke, turbo charged, direct drive (no transmission, which surprised me) .. it is 3 stories high and the length of a double bus. It has the potential of 72 mw of power. the turbos alone were the size of a truck, and seemed to take up half of the engine space. In horsepower, it was some ungodly number 90,ooo hp, if I have the ordinal right.

It maxes out at like 90 rpm… one cylinder fires every 30 degrees to make for 12 firings per screw turn…

the drive shaft is about 70mm solid steel

never saw the screw,but heard it was big, 5 m or something, maybe larger…

energy use is 100 to 150 tons of bunker fuel per day cruising… We can carry 9000+ I think…plus diesel..

that calculates to a horrifying 7,333,333 pounds of carbon released per day if my math is right… (convert to gallons, then multiply by 20 pounds per gallon?)

it also has 5 generators to provide backup and house functions. They provide 6600 volts of capacity, for everything from navigation and lighting to running refrigerated containers and turning the rudder. Usually only like 2 are running at any one time. A system is being installed on this and the last journey to make it possible to plug in at shore and shut off the generators. This will lead to carbon savings in most places, especially where the grid is not heavily fossil fuel dependent,but the first time such a system was experimented with, it supposedly shut down the power in the town it was plugged into, since the demands are the equivalent of a town of 6k people in the US to as many as 30k people in the third world.

Ship Carries Bunker, Low Sulfur Bunker for use in the US, and Low Sulfur Diesel for the Generators

It also has a complex ballast system managed by computer

It has two Huge Anchors, and each chain link is steel, over 2 feet long, and weighs 100 lbs individually. I think the whole chain is almost two miles long, and we have two of them.

The Voyage

distance from Oakland to Hong Kong 6,800 miles direct, but we didn’t go direct…

Oakland to Nakhodka: 12 days 5400 miles to Tsgaru Straits of Japan by ‘ram route’ 4950 NM.. circle route would have saved 300 miles, but brought us into two huge low pressure systems near the Aleutians that would have beat us up and perhaps slowed us down more than the circle route would have saved us. The weather report that this decision was based on remained posted in the navigation area of the bridge for the duration of the trip as a kind of proof of the decision.

Time in Nakhodka 42 hours? I remember watching them disconnect the hose, a 30 minute job, on a cold night, and thinking they would show up and get us out of there, but the customs people didn’t show up until morning…

Nahodka to Fuqin  2 days?

time in Fuqin 2 nights we left through this long bay of islands, somewhat satisfying despite the haze in the air

fuqin to Xiamen 1 1/2 days…  also, coming in through the mouth of the harbor was beautiful but for the haze and the huuuuge coal plant at the mouth… mountains and islands

time in Xiamen, a long painful 24 hours getting jerked around by the customs guys, unable to go ashore

Xiamen to Chiwan Harbor 2 days?

24 hours in Chiwan

Chiwan to Hong Kong 2 hours, around Lantau Island, under the new bridge, and into Container Port 9.

Fuel Loaded 9000 tons

cost of fuel in Nakhodka 400 USD per ton

Cost of Fueling in Nahodka 3.6 Million USD

cost for same fuel in Hong Kong or US Closer to 600 USD per Ton

or 5.4 million USD…

Russian Bureaucrats who boarded to check our papers in Nakhodka: 3, although they did have a sense of humor. Upon leaving, three more, although one of them could have been a Victoria Secret Model, so no one minded as much, no matter how much we wanted to get out of there. One of the Cadet’s could barely keep still in her presence.. ah, to be 23 again….

Fuel ship seemed to have a crew of like 12, and I think they were stuck sitting there same as us, for the whole 30 hour process of fueling from when the showed up at like 5 pm yesterday to them casting off lines at about 930 pm today.

What’s on the boat?

The Bridge  the whole length of the top deck, called the bridge, but it would be equivalent to H deck from the main deck. very spacious with a lounge in the corner with espresso and coffee machine, the aforementioned sugar cookies galore, windows everywhere but the stack, and doors leading out to the fly bridge.. the elevator does not go to the top, you gotto walk that last flight.. the fly bridges have controls in the corner for docking, so that the captain or pilot can see right down to the dock. There is a navigation station, with lots of gps and other instruments, then the main console with two leather chairs and all the GPS and traffic and engine instruments both on the console and up above the windows. It was, I gotta admit, kind of neat…

Above it is the Monkey Park, all the antennas, lights, satellite units and radars, and I learned qucikly that it kicks out so much radiation, and the stack empties there so there is a lot of air polution unless you are under way with the wind (you can pass out in a few seconds from the smog we were putting out), so you don’t want to go up there. About 3 days in, they had to do some maintenance.. I was hanging out on the fly bridge and caught on, knowing they shut down all the radars for a few minutes, and it was a glorious clear day so that you could see for miles… the Filipeanos went up to do their work, and I followed… the first officer seemed to know I wanted to get upt here, and I kind of approvingly beckoned me, but then didn’t stand there and watch, giving me freedom. They didn’t begrudge me climbing to the top of the tallest middle post, waving my hand over the ship’s light, making me the highest thing on the ship, and looking around.. it was great… it was high.. you are like 200 ft up perhaps… even that post was taller than I expected, at least three of my body lengths if not 4… black metal rungs to climb up… they were cool for letting me do this, didn’t make a peep.. it somehow satisfied my need to explore the extremes of the ship. A few days before the finish of the trip, I was again on the fly bridge, and the Romanian Electrical cadet went up there. I watched him with this huge smile on his face changing the light bulb… he came down and told me it was the first time he had been up there and it was awesome. I didn’t want to burst his bubble telling him I had scampered up there and looked around for a minute a couple weeks ago.. so last week…sigh…

about 20 rooms

two dining rooms

A kitchen streatching between them, with a staircase down to the deck below with food storage and a walk in refrigerator. They preferred buying stuff in the states to china..I’ll let you imagine why..

a crew lounge (bar, fridge TV,karaoke machine, Xbox, DVD player, tables and couches, and the official ships library, a stack of old magazines and a few old novels and boxes of movies, all piled up on a table, although I did come to appreciate it after a first disappointed reaction), an officers lounge (the inner sanctum… from what I saw through the window one night, or heard down the spiral staircase into the officers mess, was a TV, Bar, Xbox which had some pretty intense FIFA soccer played on it, and a dvd that seemed to play a lot of Romanian female sung pop music.. I always assumed she was a looker..), and a passengers lounge (not much to it.. a TV and no DVD..a small fridge, not much to watch from 300 miles out to sea! they kept safely manuals in there they wanted us to read… one day I was bored, and learned a lot about fire fighting.. no one hung out there so it wasn’t much use when I had a computer to watch things on in my room).

a little work out room with a ping-pong table and punching bag.. new weight equipment arrived for our journey, purchased in Oakland, and I got to help set it up.

A pool room, a bit of a joke on board maybe 9 feet deep and 9 feet on a side.. it is filled from sea water, so you need to wait to fill it until you get to warmer climes… no one bothers until you get to like the Indian Ocean

A bunch of laundry rooms, one for the captain only with a big sign telling you they will throw your clothes off the side if you use it.. with these close to useless high efficiency European style laundry machines.. it was two weeks before someone finally taught me which ones actually worked… things drove me nuts… turns out there were some Chinese machines not up to snuff, even in that category of already useless European designs (god bless america.. you hit the button, and it just goes to work!)

The captain, Engineering officer, and the First Officer have suites, a bedroom and an office… the rest of the crew have either single or joint rooms.

There were 4 possible guest rooms on their own floor, the 7th deck, with a guest lounge. they tended to also be double size, with an office area, sometimes two beds, big square port holes… my booking agent told me to get one of the ones on the side. I started in a middle room facing front, then moved to the port front corner. Cadets lived down the hall, two of the technicians, and later, a former captain and crew chief arrived to do some safety training on coming into ports, and stayed on our floor, as well as the new captain arrived in Hong Kong, although I think he moved straight into his room, and the last captain jumped a flight that night after a 4 month shift…

The first floors had a little hospital, like 2 beds, a ships office, a little meeting room, a fire room with fire equipment they could suit up into quickly, and a locker room for the guys to gear up. We had two lifeboats hanging on the sides.. one time we all piled into it for a drill, maybe 30 guys were in before they stopped forcing more in… I kept wondering if it would snap, and we would be stuck towing all the way to china because we couldn’t get back up. I was relieved to know it had fishing equipment on it to pass the time in addition to the normal essentials.

Amount of Times I wanted to get off the Ship but couldn’t: once, In Xiamin

Amount of Times I wished I was someplace else: 0

Books I read: maybe 5

Movies I watched: over 20

bought some video games but couldn’t get em to work because of security and registration crap!

Puzzles I made from a Puzzle shop I hit in Berkley: 3   the crew helped me with this historical 3D skyline of Hong Kong.. I figured they would scoff at it, but instead, they tore though it in like 2 days as we approached Hong Kong.. I would go to bed late, wake up, and find out that a few of them had done a layer in a night over beers.. it kept on like this for like 3 nights.. I didn’t realize they were that bored…I didn’t mind, I sure as heck didn’t want to do it myself, and they did all the annoying parts!

origami things I made before I got annoyed with the hard to read directions: 1

Times I saw other people on the outer deck’s of the accommodation while in passage: 1, one of the German guys. I had read in another guys blog that he spent all his time hanging out on the balconies of the ship, but would never see the crew, they were just inside all the time… about two weeks in, I bumped into one of the Germans, and almost embarrassed him making jokes about it…  for some reason, they never went out unless they had a reason. Most of them were cold all the time even though it got up into the 60’s on part of the voyage, and had me sun bathing outside. It was, to echo that other blogger, my private domain, like a 9 story jungle gym until I got to the main deck and the second deck with the work shop where there would start to be people outside. When we came into port, people with nothing to do would sometime watch, but there were very few with nothing to do… the bridge would be alive with pilots and the whole compliment, and others would be ready to do the lines, shut down the engines, or what have you…

Times I crawled onto the top of the containers on the back of the ship: 1 in the middle of the night.. it was awesome.. there were Chinese fishing boats around, and I just watched them bounce around on the waves…

Categories
Uncategorized

Hot Topic 1: Plastic in the Northern Pacific Gyre… What I saw and what I learned about the legendary Floating Ocean Garbage Patch

OK, for those who don’t know, there is this famous Urban Legend about this huge patch of Garbage that floats between California, Hawaii, and Alaska, that is twice the Size of Texas (ever driven across Texas?) and just loaded with plastic. The mental impression is that you can walk over it, it’s this huge dump of plastic.. I have seen beaches littered with plastic, and heard about others. There is a famous spot that collects litter in Baja, due to the movement of tides, on the ‘elbow’ of Baja near the town of Guerro Negro, a spot called Malarrimo Beach, which I used to hear about when I lived there, so this was not a new idea to me… I was willing to believe the worst. I had seen around the world jokes and actions about it.. there were famous jokes about lost flip flops.. in Zanzibar Tanzania, they made a huge whale as an art project out of flip flops that rolled up on their shore, and sea plastic art is the new sea glass, with hippies in all sorts of beach places making designs out of bottle caps and  the like… there was even a guy named Papa Nutreno who made a barge out of Plastic and tried to float the seas… I had seen the Nuetrenos and heard their story in Key West once, and amazed a guy in Panama years later who tried to resurrect one of their boats by actually knowing the story.. we were both amazed by the odds of anyone making that connection as we tried to tug a Floating Nuetrino contraption out of a mangrove near Portobello that he wanted to turn into a bar.

http://www.floatingneutrinos.com/Message/Poppa%20Neutrino%20Speaks.html

A year or two ago I finally got a bug in my ass to start to learn about the famous garbage patch, maybe as I subconsciously meditated over trying to take this trip, and the first place I found some really good demystification mixed with an entertaining look at the matter came from Vice Magazine:

http://www.vice.com/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3

hard to not get a kick out of young Thomas Morton, and the shipboard puppy love! I was only armed with this video when I got on the ship, but it had taught me a lot…

I am now finding that people are exploring this idea in other places:

This video isn’t quite as fun, they are a bit more earnest fair to say, but this is a group that sails from Brazil to Cape Town trying to find a similar patch in a gyre there, and sadly or not, they find one… it’s becoming a universal problem.

http://www.plasticizedthemovie.com/

I could link direct to the YouTube version, but why not let their page get the traffic…

319097_10150302240051261_586211260_8415279_1572907418_n

Anyhow, What did I see.. I saw the sea! I will keep using this joke, because one of the people I had consulted before taking this trip, who had come home from Korea in 1964 on a Military Transport had made the joke, and it turned out to be quite true… anyhow, what I am pleased to say is that I saw a lot less visible plastic than I expected, in fact, I saw hardly any the whole time, and you can see it.. if you see anything the size of a coke bottle, it pops out, even from such a large ship, because the sea tends to be a fairly consistent color… you spot birds and anything out of the ordinary in ways that start to surprise you after a bit, even on a boat with 4 or 5 floors of free board… If I could see just about any bird within a quarter or half mile, I became pretty confident that I would spot any flotsam and jetsam, and I did, and it happened like three times the whole trip.. I found his a relief… I had prepared to be horrified..

There are two major reasons I didn’t, perhaps. One reason you might have gleaned from the Vice Movie or, Plasticized…that the pieces are small to microscopic… and the other might have had to do with the fact that we went north of the gyre by a few hundred miles would be my guess.

I’m gonna steal Wikipedia’s map to prove my point:

Marine Debris Poster (4) AI9

we were maybe 500 or 1ooo miles north of it most of the way.

There were like 4 times I saw flotsam, and let me repeat that I was prepared to see these horrible garbage dumps, so not to downplay what is going on, but thankfully, it’s not depressing to cross the ocean.. it did give me the escape, as a visit to Alaska does, from the endless environmental degradation I see everywhere else… I also expected the waters off of china to be horrid.. they were interesting, loaded with fisherman, the air was thick with smog, and  the water muddy and oddly tinted, shallow and strange, but it wasn’t a floating rubbish bin as I had worried.. I stared at the sea for days, and like I said, I saw flotsam like 4 times… the most interesting moment being a time where I was hanging out with the Boson on the very front of the ship.. he and I hung out a handful of times, so I don’t remember if it was the two hours it took us to check all the bilge alarms on the ship (we must have walked 2 miles and climbed 400 ft of ladder), or the time I hung with him while we pulled up anchors in Nakhodka, or when they painted anchor chain while I hung out a few days in, but I remember it being early in the trip, just a few days out from California, me still struggling to get a basic context for things, and we were looking out to the front chatting, right on the little forecastle, and this line of flotsam went by, and instead of ignoring it like it was a common thing, he got big eyes and said “wow, looks like a fishing boat might have gotten in trouble!”.  It was a scum line with like 5 or 6 items on it, but it proved to be so irregular to see anything like that that I now realize it must have been a sunken like he mentioned, or one that had gotten in trouble, maybe up near the Aleutians or on the West Coast, and dumped some of its contents… the stuff was still together in a patch..it doesn’t stay like that for long..

So all this to say that while I expected to find something that looked like a raft party on Lake Meade or Lake Powell minus the people, something out of the T and A movie Piranha, what I saw on the macro level were clean seas, all the way past Japan where the Tsunami had occurred some two and a half years before, and past China which is the New Enviromhagheddon, and while I saw haze and perhaps strange weather, I never saw junk… the problem, as described, is sadly microscopic…

 

Categories
Uncategorized

The Glacial Near Miss

We are still a few days from passing through the straits between Honshu, Japan’s main island that contains Tokyo, and Hokkaido, kind of the Japanese Alaska, but more like a Japanese Maine or Michigan (not saying it isn’t nice, it does look nice, but there is a tunnel under the strait to it…) My computer is giving me fits by trying to get me to pick a region, even though it seems to have no problems playing movies from every region, so I decide to play Tropic Thunder in the crew lounge (little did I know that two months alter I would be visiting areas of Myanmar still ruled by factions of the Shan State Army that inspired this movie), knowing that the Filipinos will get a kick out of some if not all of the humor in the movie, and I am half curious to see who laughs when. I knew that Ben Stiller’s Tom Cruise take off adopting a Vietnamese kid would be funny to them, and predictably, when he flings the kid off the bridge at the end of the movie, they were howling, but they laughed at some of the subtler stuff too, telling me a few of them do understand English much better than they speak it, and that they can be cheeky even though it seems a national obligation to just agree all the time and smile a lot.

Fresh from this paternalistically seditious success, I decided to retire to my room, but something got me curious to peek at the bridge, maybe because the ship was kicking relatively hard (nothing 130k tons kicks that hard comparatively, the officers keep reminding me, many of them having cut their teeth on remarkably smaller vessels, but you know the seas gotta be big for it to move at all unpredictably). I arrive on the bridge, it in it’s typically blacked out state at night, to find one of the smarter young mates, a kid named Carlos from Manilla with 4 years of a Filipino Maritime academy under his belt, and Luarenin, the 3rd mate, on watch. When you show up on deck when it is blacked out, just a few dark screens on, every other light blocked by a curtain in the nav room, you take a moment to figure out who is there by pausing as you approach the console to let your eyes adjust, and they often say something to you when you show up to let you know who is there, since it is like walking into a darkened movie theater. Often times people engage you in talk because nothing is going on other than the normal rounds: Hit the dead man switch every 9 minutes, plot the location once an hour, rip off and file the weather fax and warnings, and look for traffic. You can go from Oakland to Japan and never see another ship they have told me, and we have seen 2 so far, one which was perfectly silhouetted by the setting sun during our pig roast the second day out, so I find it exciting, well, it’s not that exciting, it’s two ships literally passing in the night, but to a brain raised on disaster movies, and given the relative lack of outside impacts on our little bubble at sea, it is exciting for me.

But let’s say it’s slow motion exciting. I know realize how much compressed narrative it takes to make this stuff movie sexy. I had fantasies of constantly dodging fishing ships and the 7th Fleet in some secret emergency a la The Final Option or The Hunt for Red October… but to quote someone I talked to before I got on the boat who had a similar experience crossing the Pacific from an army deployment in Korea in the mid 60’s.. What did I see?.. I saw the sea. No more, no less, he was wisely implying.

When I came up on bridge I discerned it was Carlos and Luarntin like I said, but they seemed preoccupied… I had been scanning the controls at this point for over a week, maybe once or twice a day, learning a bit more every time, so I was able to put together pretty quick that they had approaching traffic, on a course that was potentially dangerous, and to make it more exciting or dangerous, they couldn’t see it yet.. it was a foggy night, and even huge ships often only have like 4 lights, just like any other.. the one you are looking for first is usually the mast light, which should be visible as many as I would guess 8 miles away on a clear night, but this was not a clear night.. it was blowing 30 knots, I can’t tell you how big the waves were because I was still learning to judge that from my pampered position on this behemoth, but maybe 30ft, possibly more (spray was smashing over the front rank of containers, which must be 80 feet above the water level if not more), and there was rain and fog.

Laurentin and I sill hadn’t bonded yet.. he was one of the few officers that held me at a suspicious distance..in fact of all the guys on the ship, he was the hardest nut to crack, the rest just didn’t speak English I later figured out.. not that any Romanian is unfriendly, he isn’t, but his public persona was quite sour by Romanian standards.. he was the scoffing grump of the crew, not that he couldn’t be warm, he was to me, often, but also kind of saw me at first as a big smiling potential nuisance, and I had to prove myself as not someone who was going to break an ankle in the middle of the Pacific…he’d been at sea for I bet 25 years, and he doesn’t want trouble.. I walk around in flip flops, and I think he underestimates me a bit, and there was no point in trying to verbally convince him of anything about me.. he was like a cliché of an old army NCO.. show me don’t tell me, Leroy! Later in the trip I would go to great lengths to try to break him down, and I learned that a lot of it had to do with a skepticism of Americans, as he felt that there hadn’t been much wrong with life in Romania before the fall of communism. I decided to grab a pair of binoculars, there are always about 4 pairs floating around the control areas of the bridge, and look for the damn thing. One more set of eyes couldn’t hurt, no one had really made too much differentiation between me and the crew, and maybe I could win some points with ol’ larry with a bit of earnest American help..

After about two minutes of scanning, I saw the faintest of white lights, a few degrees to starboard of the visible crows nest behind the bow that is about 200 meters in font of us always, and hangs like a little white painted cloud at night, kind of a constant marker of our nose position, unless, of course, the ship breaks in half or something. I called it out, and he seemed to find it at the same time, and for the first time, I got some approval out of Lawrence.. nothing glowing, but he didn’t seem to mind the help.. Finally I was something more to him than just a mysterious crazy American willing to pay for something he needs to be paid to do, and my help was accepted.

Here is where it got funny. My brain is racing at the speed of Speed 3.. two ships charging at each other in bad weather on the wild north pacific ocean! Hundreds of thousand of tons of cargo and life and environmental devastation in the balance, Dennis Hopper has rigged the Exxon Valdez to plow into Long Beach or some shit, and Keanu only has 10 minutes to save the world..

In our case.. that 10 minutes was a foot tapping boring ass time staring into the gray.. you see, our boat goes 21 knots when we are going full, about the max before diminishing returns in fuel, but we had slowed due to the inclement weather, so maybe 17 knots, and the other boat must have been doing 12 or 15, but that still means you close at like a minute and a half per knot, maybe 2.. this is Top Gun at glacial speed. So we go from “bogey at 12 O’Clock, Mavs!” to…..: “how’s about those Mets…?”… as we watch the light slowly materialize maybe 5 miles away from the mast light to eventually a red running light marking his port side, and this and three other instruments, from an IFF type thing (Identify Friend or Foe, something that reads data released by the ship by radio waves, and can even plot it on your other screens. Info like name, registration, size, and heading) to different radar and GPS screens. The other ship goes by about a mile to port, some 8 minutes later..

I watch him slip off the port side and away, trying to read his name by the light he has on his stern to match it up with the weird Indonesian sounding name that our instruments gave us, kind of wondering if I am the only one who had turned this into a harrowing near miss at sea, wondering if their watch officer was sweating like Ted Striker in Airplane, or just dreaming of vanilla sugar cookies like everyone on the bridge seems to, and realize that things really do happen at a human pace out here…

I decide to turn in, chuckling to myself about getting so quietly jazzed up about something akin to a wrestling match between Galapagos Tortoises, a bit embarrassed that I got so excited so quickly….glad I didn’t voice any excitement to give Lawrence any other impression than that it was just one more sugar cookie cravin’ night for me as well, wishing I was eating pan fried salt-less chicken on the boardwalk in Constanta after a night playing hide the gypsy with the wife and reading Dracula adventures to the kids…

it has been an eventful night by Libra standards!

Lawrence and Chuck do give me a warm good night as I head for the dim light of the staircase, and I do feel like I have accomplished something… which is a rare feeling when you have time… nothing but time…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER2VNU3R0gA

Categories
Uncategorized

What’s it like?

What’s it like? You are a thousand miles from anywhere, and even if you get bored it feels like none of the worlds problems could touch you if you can just let them go, and moonless at night in the middle of the Pacific, Venus can reflect and dance off the water it is so brilliant.  you are surrounded by space but you can’t step into it, that would be a mistake, and high walls, like a medieval keep, and it feels safe, isolated and safe. You live in a 9 story condo, with a bunch of people who don’t require you to lock doors.. they feel as removed as you do, and you don’t have to explain too much. The Condo floats on a box the size of a small park, a huge intricate jungle gym to explore, it never stops moving to remind you are alive, making noises as the containers creak back and forth, and the pulse of the prop never lets you feel too alone despite the distances, like a mothers beating heart. The View is always water, but it never stops changing, the wind blows fresh from at least one direction, and there is always a new port to look forward to. Could it offer Shangri La?..if not, you have the boat to return to. There is no surfing the web, or texting your friends, or stressing social plans. There is email, but no attachments… it can bring bad news as well as good. You consume media, but it’s pre selected,no surprised unless you create one for yourself. You read books, you think, you remember, and you explore. You Floss your teeth better than you ever have given yourself time to. You feel good enough that you wonder if it would be more, or less fun with a woman you love but still want to explore.

There is enough time to focus on people, and the people have often taken that time to become interesting: The Crew  of this particular boat was made up of two groups, Romanian Officers and Filipino Crew, except for one Second Officer who is Filipino, a crack navigator named Leo with a 4 year degree in Commercial Shipping, and a few cadets who are mostly Romanian. Even though some of the Filipinos outrank the Romanians, especially in the case of Leo, they separate socially, and the Romanians get the Men’s Club type officers lounge and the ostensibly nicer food. The Romanian officers feel like a slightly suspicious but mischievous fraternity, and the Filipinos like a beach Karaoke party where you still make it to confession the next day. I eye the one group like Dean Wormer from Animal House, with amused suspicion, the other like Dean Wormer might feel being force to hang out with the Campus Christians…. short bursts are exceedingly pleasant.. anything longer… Romanians are what you get when a Russian and an Italian have kids.. drama and narcissism mixed with a sense of humor and some mature perspective. Everything is a big deal, but nothing will kill you… There is a kind of acceptance that they will never be the top dogs in the world, but then again, who wants to be.. they are wary of authority but happy to do their job.

Filipinos have that affability, that best described as puppy like innocence, playfulness, and amiability.. they act forlorn sometimes, but it tends to be pretty adolescent stuff. Conversations revolve around exchanges of well publicized facts and some pretty genial Jr. High joshing.. but they respond well if you get a little bluer with the humor, like kids who respect their rebellious 7th grade math teacher too much to make the joke themselves, but will laugh if he does, and kind of like being judged worthy of it. Wow, the teacher made a sex joke. He must really like us! A few come across a bit savvier, a bit wiser, like the guys in the kitchen, whom I didn’t begin to hang out with and appreciate until the end of my trip, but it does take an east coast attitude to question niceness, so maybe I shouldn’t complain, as they were all nice as hell.

The wild card on this trip is 6 former longshoremen from North Germany who are installing a 6600 volt version of shore power.. think of your buddies plug at his nice yacht marina times, well times 45. They have been working about 8 hours a day consistently since we got here, cutting holes in bulkheads and welding, running this 2 inch thick insulated and shielded conduit in bunches of 6 that will allow the boat to plug-in on shore. It starts with these two refrigerator looking things ( dubbed them that, hoping the name sticks, feels like you can reach in and grab a beer if you don’t get electrocuted first) that they will plug the shore power in from on the rear deck, one each side, through a huge junction box the size of, well, a small walk in, and then up into the ships electrical room through the secret gangway as I call it, these secret hallways that run the length of the ship below deck. If pirates ever attack us, these things are like Chu Chi was for the Americal Division, along with a bunch of other passageways that led to places like the bow thruster and bosons supply. They are a jovial group, all from Hamburg now, but a few from East Germany before the Fall of the Wall. They all have enough English to fool me, but a few of them can have thoughtful conversation as well. We are the ship outsiders, and they are kind of my purge valve for western European thinking. I admitted I have an ex girlfriend whose parents hail from Hamburg, and have a few wacky stories about my three trips to Germany and my family history there (along with 50% of all of America) to kind of get to be in the club. Four of them are huge, they look like a death metal band, or essentially like what you would want a band from Hamburg to look like, while the Electrician, the top guy in some ways, nearly 60, is a bearded pleasant old guy, what you would want an old German sailor to look like, the kind of guy who would thoughtfully shrug and sigh before he ordered torpedoes to hit your ship during World War II.. das is war, yeah.. sad.. and then there is Tiny Tim.. he’s not actually that small, he just looks small and young compared to the rest of them, even though he is in is at least in his late 20’s, with sea experience, and a pretty sardonic wit I can sometimes tell even though he looks like a 12 year old compared to the rest of them and speaks the least English.  HE looks tired and like he has a stone in his shoe every day, but is a prety tough cookie with a lot of sea experience already. They are like the giants in Where the Wild Things Are.. kind of philosopher welders.. the two who speak English especially are thoughtful gentlemen even though they almost make me look tame physically, and if you have ever seen me, you know that is saying something. One of the English speakers looks like Vin Diesel, only bigger, and could easily play a viking in a movie, or a shaven head Star Trek warrior bad guy or German machine gunner that the hero has to kill in some french back alley against all odds. Another actually reminds me of a Welshman for some reason, but from the days of kilts and broadswords.. if they ever did a Welsh Brave Heart (BraveSheep?) he would make a great supporting character if not lead, and his English/Welsh accent is already there. These guys give me an out sometimes, not that you completely need one, but when the Romanian Bitching seems to be more genuine than ironic, and when Karaoke and cheap Canadian Whiskey feel like a secret party at Filipino summer camp, these guys allow me to just be sarcastic and off enough to return to it all, and what they are up to will save the planet, and crap like that. My first class service follows me to their dining room, so when I join them, it’s always a bit awkward, especially when I get a plate of what they are just ladling out to themselves, just from a waiter, but also when my food is noticeably better, but I got to make it a joke. One time I was forced in with them while we waited to be checked by Russian customs, and as they rode me for it, stuck with the technicians, I said F you guys, I’m going to eat salmon! They roared…

You have the sea to watch, the boat to explore, the long list of what you wanted to read or watch but never had the time, that puzzle or model to make ( I made 6, one with the help of the whole crew, the skyline of Hong Kong in 3D.. seemed appropriate since they all see it for real about once a month. If I was ever doing puzzles on dry land, I would want you to shoot me…) and you can do nothing and not feel guilty, and the mom’s of the crew will still feed you three times a day, let you raid the fridge, poke into what they are doing, listen to big decisions being made without conspiratorial secrecy, and never judge… it’s teenage heaven!

Categories
Uncategorized

An Opening Vignette: Ronald’s Birthday Party

We are a few hundred miles south east of Kamchatka, headed for the Tsugaru Strait, 9 days from Oakland, it’s Ronald the Able Seaman’s birthday, and this boat has finally broken me down enough to try Karaoke.. how great of a feat that is I will explain later.

Today had been an annoying day for me.. I mean, I don’t have much to complain about.. I am seeing a part of the world very few people see, I am literally in one of those places on the map you don’t even contemplate, the kind of place I dedicate my life to getting to, and I feel alive every time I feel the boat move, but today, and it was a kind of passive move, and only the second time there have been any restrictions placed on me, I was barred from going on deck because of 36 knot winds and some crazy waves.. might not seem like a big deal.. sounds dangerous in fact.. we are a thousand miles from nowhere, in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean, a floating island loaded with industrial exports, and likely some empty containers headed back to the world’s greatest industrial mecca, the Pearl River Delta of China, but I woke up this morning dreaming of roaming the decks on what to me seemed like one more Alaskan day, but the Romanian Officer on Watch had other plan for me. My frustration was compounded by the gym being a construction site when I woke up.. the grapevine told me that some leaky sewage pipe had been discovered when they were moving the punching bag the other day, so I was kind of pent up, and of all things, after we passed a frontal boundary that had scared the shit out of the crew on the weather report, the day broke beautiful and sunny, if a bit windy, and I was left to roam the ‘accommodation’ the super structure of the ship that is like a condo complex, after three days of hibernating in the gray and ticking off the stack of old movies I had brought with me and scrounged.

Ronald was one of the more irony blessed of the Philippians, meaning one of the most easy to talk to. If you have spent a lot of time in the third world, you lean that abstract thought is not a given for huge swaths of the world, and conversations often never get past exchanges of well published facts, lot’s of awkward nodding, something I am well familiar with by now. I had had high hopes for him until some lunch banter turned into his explaining that the Philippians was being hit by so many natural disasters because they worshiped too many god’s. Alright, so too much for hoping Ronald and I might get sarcastic together, a pent up need of mine that had been growing for the last few days, a need to vent my sarcasm that builds up, to purge it somehow, a natural need for the New Yorker in me like bathroom breaks and the occasional sexual act not with a computer screen in front of me for my general humanity. Anyhow, Ronald still was nice enough, fun enough, and I had noticed during our hilarious emergency drill a few days before that he had suited up as one of the 4 firemen, meaning that he had some experience on the high seas that was noticed. So I had decided I liked the guy, so when he invited me to his birthday party in the crew club, literally 4 feet from the crew mess I had taken to eating in to escape the endless pseudo dramatic banter of the Romanian officers I am supposed to eat with, I consented, although I planed to stay about two second flat.

You see, I know what a Filipino party means.. I had been listening to them for days on the ship, and I had been avoiding them in various forms for the last ten years as I roamed the earth.. drunk and geeked out coke smugglers on the coast of Colombia, morose Chinese tobacco workers in southern Yunnan, Mozambiquan Yuppies trying to forget that they are too educated to be in such a backwards place by singing Tupac, all fucking karaoke parties are the same.. it’s dudes singing bad music off pitch acting sad about things that I would likely not think more than a second about in the course of my life…the room always smells of smoke, and especially in Latin America, it usually lulls people drunk and sad enough to come out of the closet to me in ways that are as horrifying as my mom telling me my cat was dead for the 6th time by the time I was 10.

I had decided to join the German Technicians for dinner hoping they could help me vent some of my vitriol for the night… one of them actually speaks English like a thoughtful Welshman (due to his favorite band, The Streets I learned, an interesting white hip hop crew from Brixton and Birmingham), even though he and his crew are 6 huge  former merchant mariners turned welders and electricians who picked up a gig installing a 7000 volt shore service plug, the first they have ever done, as part f the fight against global warming.. it’s gunna take them 17 days, about the time it will take us to get to out first port in china, to basically wire a plug, turning this 360 m vessel into some weird massive version of a Prius plug in. I had been avoiding eating with them until recently, knowing they needed to bond, plan, and decompress after their shifts working in the ear splitting noise of the gear box room on the tail of the ship, but I figured by now they had their shit together and could handle me the interloper. As we were casually joking about my lack of German Language Skills, and Viking sacks of Rotberg, all of them but one the size of Refrigerator Perry and looking like a Norwegian Death Metal Band, Ronald showed up at our table and made the invite..

I decided if they were actually going to go, it wouldn’t be so painful, and we had been on this boat long enough there was no way out of me hanging with the Philippine portion of the crew this way.. anything else would be like kicking a puppy. Painful as it would be, there was no way to politely get out of it.

After all of us peeking in, the Germans made the excuse of needing to shower.. it was obvious to everyone I didn’t need to shower.. I sit around al day, and the nearest female is a whale, make that I didn’t shower, so that excuse was gone, and I found my way to a seat and worked up the courage to embarrass myself with a little Karaoke, figuring that if I could do an Eric Burden song, We Gotto Get Out of Here by the Animals, it might kick the party into another zone with me the crazy white guy passenger making an ass of himself for the hope of the team. My biggest fear was drunken puppy sadness for round after round of Filipino equivalents of Celine Dion songs until I could crawl out. As I came into the lounge, half the guys, about 6, were playing cards and the birthday boy and a few of the others were around the couches and the bar manning the machine. There was the regular endless supply of Milwaukee’s best which they delighted in me calling ‘The Beast’, which must have been the cheapest beer they could buy through the supply services in Long Beach or Oakland, but there was the additional wild card of a 50 dollar bottle ( the label was still on it, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the foggiest) of Ketel Vodka that made me realize this party might go someplace.

Somehow as much as I might cringe I this situation under normal circumstances, my social isolation, our collective isolation from all humanity ( I can calculate that the one building air base on Adak in the Aleutians might be the closest collection of humanity, 1000 miles away, and likely in a similar state, as I had read that the whole base lives in one large building that they only rarely leave during winter. That or Kirabati or Midway.. someplace like that..) made this mission to Mars a good time to perhaps get over my fears of Karaoke, just give in to the lowest common denominator, before I travel once again through the wilds of Asia where it will be frankly fucking everywhere. I can’t beat them, so I am joining them.

I’m on the couch with Ronald, belting out sad sad songs.. about girlfriend leaving for Manila, and rice farmers with broken hearts… and I uncharacteristically volunteer for the book, more as a way to stop the bleeding of whatever song he’s is singing in the dim light of our plastic wood lined parlor. My plan comes to fruition when I find We Gotto Get Out of This Place is in the system.. I can lead a little self righteous baby boomer rebellion of my own after months of rejecting their arrogance from one end of California to another, thankfully with Eric Burden being the least affected of all of those 60’s voices. The crowd goes wild… Tom the Passenger can sing a little Karaoke, in English of all things!.. he can lower his guard… he can be goofy… he’s one of us now…

The Germans make good on their promise to actually show up a few minutes later, (yah… why not.. where else could we go?) and it’s on… a thousand miles from nowhere and we roar.. toasts and cheers and jeers… and lot’s of yuk yuk yuks…

I conclude my night a half hour later with New York, New York, to round applause… for some reason I can’t sing it without doing a Sinatra immigration, or Piscapo from the 80’s ding Sinatra (the only thing he did well on Saturday Night live if I remember).. it’s in my blood from seeing too man Yankees games to the final out, and make my leave… the Filipinos go back to chocking cats sadly and calling it music, and the Germans tap along with a wry smile, and I understand now the wisdom of the Romanians never to come to the crew lounge… but I’m almost half way to Hong Kong and I can’t help but admit I am having fun…