Yesterday was a good day.
I've been having some of those lately. I don't think I'd had a nice day at work since last September. And here I am, several of them now recently.
Midway down Long Island Sound, in beautiful calm water, our assist tug broke out of push gear, swung up to the bow and took our tow pennant, and swung us out on a short tow, staying about 600-700 feet ahead of us.
It's been YEARS since I was towed. The silence was amazing. I could hear the water running along the hull, with just the drone of our generator in the distance.
I must have stayed out there an hour, just communing with the infinite.
Today we're in Providence RI, and tonight we'll head back to NY. Tugboats being built for power not speed it's about a 22hr ride, but it includes a coastal passage with exposure to ocean swells for about 8 hours....and that's where we were last night when I was just falling asleep. Maybe 8 degrees of roll, just perfect. I slept AMAZING and I'm a horrible sleeper. I never slept well in a heavier swell, but this was perfection. I rose up to being almost awake once or twice, and the swell was comforting AF.
I've really been feeling awful lately. Nonstop work, broken sleep, harassment by shoreside workers wanting my attention at all hours, often repetitive because they don't all talk to each other, not enough time or opportunity to decompress, inability to maintain personal hygeine due to defective, broken or nonfunctional equipment, and increasing demands for work-based minutia that must be addressed in free time. Plus some stresses in my personal life, the fiscal disaster we're trying to unfuck in Brazil... it's adding up. I'm not depressed or anything, just miserable and I feel like a massive pussy just admitting that.
Thank God for my wife. She's keeping me sane, and a good wife makes the unbearable bearable for a little longer.
I've noticed I'm not the only one here.
It's not just me. My peers at work are feeling it too, and we're starting to talk about it, because it seems nobody ashore gives a fuck. I've had a young but very capable peer reach out to me twice now, and I don't think he even knew why he was compelled to call me beyond the need to feel unalone. I'm personally seeing more incidents happening to experienced, senior tankermen, not the low-quality new guys we're being inundated by, but the senior cadre, the guys trying to do the jobs and who can be trusted to do them well. It's distressing to see mistakes, sometimes severe and even career-ending, made by bewildered men whom I KNOW to not be fuckups.
Turns out, there's a name for that. Situational distress, and while it seems to be common now among peers and shipmates, it was not, up until the workload went through the roof and the work lifestyle went in the toilet.
As we work 24/7/365, these things ARE a work-related issue, and something I hope employers will address. My off time while aboard is theoretically NOT my own time. I'm being paid to do a job... but if every day is a sucking hole of misery, something has to give, whether it's me... or me, I guess.
There's a great article here on the subject:
Most maritime incidents don’t happen because of undiagnosed mental health disorders. They occur due to momentary lapses in judgment, exhaustion, and impaired decision-making. The problem isn’t just mental health—it’s the silent accumulation of operational stressors that lead to situational distress: cognitive fatigue, emotional strain, and performance degradation in the moment. These human factors are subtle, dynamic, and often invisible to traditional mental health tools, yet they’re the most common precursors to errors and accidents at sea often resulting in loss of life, environmental impacts, and asset damage or loss.
Situational Distress: The Missing Piece in Maritime Safety
Situational distress is not a clinical condition—it’s a temporary but critical stress response to the working environment. Research suggests that while only a small percentage of seafarers start their careers with clinical depression or anxiety, the demands of life at sea lead to a significant rise in reported psychological distress symptoms over time.
Many cases emerge due to accumulated stressors—like fatigue, unpredictable weather, and high workloads—rather than pre-existing conditions. Unlike depression or anxiety, they don’t require psychiatric treatment, but they do require proactive intervention to prevent it from escalating into chronic fatigue, burnout, or operational errors.
Despite this, most mental health assessments in maritime settings treat distress as an individual issue rather than an operational risk factor. A captain under extreme fatigue might not meet the criteria for clinical depression, but their exhaustion could still impair judgment at a critical moment. A traditional self-reported survey won’t catch this, but behavioral risk assessments can.
Well worth reading.