Did anything happen while I was away?

 When I am not at work, I don't read the news or engage in shitposting and doomscrolling online. And so only big things make it through my filter of  utter indifference to all things not related to friends and family. It's datin' time with Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, time with our kid, B family members, my friends, and to do chores and relax too. 

 I guess the pope died. Best not to speak ill of the dead. 

  it's been an amazing 2 weeks. We flew to Boston, I got to see one of my neices get hitched, saw family, reconnected, and then mostly tuned the world out and spent 90%+ of my time with my wife. She's not working right now- after almost a year of 80-90 hour weeks, she finally can rest and so we've been welded at the hip since I got off work. 

 Sadly, I returned to work this morning. On the upside I am again not bunkering for the next 2 weeks. I'm on a straight diesel run and in fact ai am at anchor right now, spending the night hopefully quiet tonight. 

 Monday I was hard at it all day- chores and preps, packing my bag, etc. We finally got freed up about 4pm, and spent 3 hours drinking caiperinhas and swimming in the pool. I got just the rught amount of sun exposure to not be dead-body white anymore...but also didn't burn. 

    Yesterday was travel day. It was unexceptional.  

 This morning was the single longest and most arduous bad drag I've ever done, carrying all my clothes, bedding, food, water and soda about 1/4 mile- 5 trips back and forth, between shore and the dock. Got it done, though. Mighta burnt off my blood pressure meds, lol, but it got done. 

     Anyhow, back at it. 

     

Reports from home

 Goddamn, I've lived. 

       I'm at home, doing home things. I attended mh neice's wedding in New Hampshire; it was beautiful and perfect and emotional. How many times can a guy who is NOT comfortable with crying stave off a whole-ass jag? 

 At least 7-8. I absolutely overflowed during the ceremony. But fuck, so did the groom, a 6'6" gorilla of a guy who got outmatched by his wife, who just sandbagged him every time. It was wonderful to see 2 kids deeply in love get hitched. 

 My neice introduced her bf to me before... it was nice to NOT see him at a funeral for once. 

   The wedding was well done. My oldest brother, the family's rock, was absolutely overwhelmed giving away his little girl; but he did so with grace. 

    We flew home a few days ago. Today was my kid's bday. We had a nice day but my sister and nephew, who live 10 mins away, didnt show up. Bit of a fuck you but so be it. I'm glad I flew 1500 miles to be there for my neice and my brother, who both noticed.  

 It's been an emotional time. But a good time. 

Shipping up to Boston

Well It was a good last week to round out a good tour. The Ghetto Sled remains a decidedly uncomfortable vessel and I am happy to see the ass end of it but the light workload made the time pass by well enough. 

 Crew change, though. Fuck. 

 I couldn't find my MMC, my Merchant Mariner's Credential, a passport-type booklet with my master's licence and assorted endorsements. Panic struck. I found it in a jacket pocket I don't ever use while we were in NY rush hour traffic for 2 hours. Weird.  

 The Precheck line at JFK airport security was 45 minutes, so people were extra spicy in the terminal. Not a smile to be found. I had a shot of whisky with powdered eggs and freezer-burnt bacon before going to my gate... which was $55, turns out. Wasn't that a bit of an eff you? 

     After that, though, the sun came out. I had nobody next to me on the plane, my rental car in Boston is a really nice F150, and I drove to the old neighborhood where I grew up. Only a little has changed. My parents' little 900sqft raised ranch house got torn down and a little McMansion put up. All the neighboring houses look the same, but the names on the mailboxes are all different. The old neighbors have all died off. Nobody escapes anno domini. 

 Still, before going back to Boston to pick up Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, I hung out for a bit with a childhood friend, checked into my hotel, and after fetching the Mrs we had a late dinner with the friends who introduced us. 

   Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I met at a wedding. I caught the garter, she caught the bouquet (no shit, 200+ witnesses) and that was that. My wife worked with the bride, who became a close friend, and I grew up with the groom. 

   So it was great to catch up here almost a quarter-century later. We've always stayed in touch but it's not the same when you're not face-to-face. Try telling that to kids today, though. 

      Anyhow, today's a free day before we meet up with my wife's cousin (who is posessed of possibly the most spectacular decolletage on planet earth and very pleasant to look at) and her husband, a fellow American and genuinely good fun dude. 

   There will be high-fives at our mutual good fortune I'm sure. 

 For now though, today is for reminiscing. 

Ummmm....

 I just got called 'big daddy' a few minutes ago by one of our tugboaters.

 I don't know how I feel about that. Damn kids. 

The last of the good times

 Well, it was a good run. 2 weeks of good work at work. But that's over for now. 

        My final week this trip sees me back in NYC, back to bunkering ships aboard a manned bunker barge, in the smallest quarters imaginable.  It's been about 10 years since I've been aboard one of the Ghetto Sleds. 

 The Ghetto Sleds are some elderly trunk deck barges- barges with an elevated maindeck that stands taller (about 5 feet in this case) than the perimeter of the barge, basically leaving a 2 1/2 foot wide walkway around the perimeter. 

   The house on these things is TINY for 2 men. The office/galley is about 8x10, the head is 6ft by 6 feet, and the bunkroom, with 2 beds, is also 6x6.  Luckily I am about 1/8 inch under 6ft tall but anyone taller has to sleep with their knees bent.   

    It's uncomfortable. When you're sleeping, the guy on watch is 3-4 feet away, as is anyone else like deckhands stepping in the house, cargo surveyors, etc.  

     The Ghetto Sleds, there being 4 of them around the east coast, are actually good training platforms.  The cargo pumps, piping and tanks are simply laid out and easy to operate and for some reason, very forgiving if you let a tank run dry and suck a little air into the pumps.  On the HQ you get 3-4 seconds max of sucking air and the pumps lose prime, and repriming can be a bear when it works at all on a near empty tank. On the Ghetto Sleds?  10 seconds. Big difference for a newer guy who is learning the ropes. Plus, the small uncomfortable quarters make one more grateful for the standard somewhat larger quarters found elsewhere in the fleet. 

So here I am.   Next week I get off early, one week early. Innapropriately hot foreign wife is flying up to meet me in Boston to attend a family wedding and do some visiting before we head back home. 

 

A great day makes you think...

 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: 

https://gcaptain.com/moving-beyond-mental-health-a-smarter-approach-to-human-risk-in-maritime-operations/

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.  

Tour de farce continues

 

        Whoo, I am SORE today. 

          I'm back in beautiful Bayonne New Jersey, the French Riviera of New York harbor, this morning. 

     I finished up my last week in Philly yesterday, and it was a damn good week... it reminded me of what my job USED to be like, when I truly liked my job. Interesting jobs, smaller ships, time to do what we needed to do. 

     It was just as busy in Philly as it is here for us, but as there is almost always a slightly longer steam in between load and discharge, it allows you to recharge your batteries in between ops... just 30 minutes more sometimes, and that's enough. And I mean, the weather was fine too, mostly.  I saw bald eagles just 1/2 mile from the company's office.  The most startling thing of all, and it was a minor thing, but the oil terminals are so SILENT there. No scream of pumps, or steam lines hissing, no having to compete with 30+ people on the same radio frequency to talk to the dockman... all good. 

        So, just as the ride last week from NY to Philly was a trial that ended up being ironically humorous, the ride yesterday from Philly to NY was terrible again, but this time not funny in the least. Frightening and infuriating this time. 

     My day started at 4am yesterday, which is close to normal- I got about 3 hours sleep since I was doing an odd watch rotation last week, but so be it.  I got a ride by tug to the company office/HQ, which is a lot larger than the NY office HQ, real estate being what it is in NY.  The philly office has 1/4 mile of dock space, and it was absolutely jammed up for crew change. There was literally no space whatsoever for me to get ashore, but in the middle were 4 tugboats all rafted up side by side, so with my Large Collection of stuff, me being homeless at work with my barge in shipyard, my worldly posessions at work and I did a 4 tugboat bag drag, which is a ballbuster.  Literally. The bulwarks, or gunwales, are 4 feet tall or more, and canted inward, so you end up crushing your nuts as you get a leg over, and with the inward cant, plus the tugs' bumpers (our tugs have a rubber bumper about 12 inches thick surrounding the hull at the waterline), it's 5-6 feet from one bulwark to the other, so passing a heavy seabag, a trash bag of winter clothes, a trashbag of summer clothes, leftover groceries, a bag of frozen meats, my bedroll, my laptop bag... basically 8-9 bags of shit, it's a workout. 

 X4. 

 THEN I climbed up a ladder to get ashore, back and forth with my shit... which I then could drag to the parking lot. 

 If that was tedious to read, I assure you it was tedious to actually do. 

        I got to the Philly office with time to spare, and I got to see some shipmates and had a nice talk. One of them, one of our senior tug captains, was going in the same crew van to NY as me. I even got to see one of my former trainees, now an experienced tankerman down there. It was a good time. 

 But the van ride... there were 5 of us in the van, and our stuff, and it was pretty tight but we fit everything.  The van driver was a tall black guy, hitting his vape pretty hard while we were loading the van. Different company from the one we use in NY. 

   What was in that vape?  I'm guessing the good stuff because the driver was TERRIBLE.   He cut people off, and jerked the wheel, drifted within inches of other vehicles, and got lost repeatedly WITH THE GPS OF HIS PHONE ON!   He kept driving when the GPS told him to turn, missed highway exits, even got off the highway and into an office park before I realized we were fucked up, and when I piped up and said 'Hey, where the fuck are we?' He said 'My bad, I was following the GPS.'   

 No, no you weren't. You were driving while high, and not looking at your phone, and only half-listening to it as well, you fucking retard. 

 Being an idiot AND high is a terrible combimation. 

 After this pretty much all of us yelled out directions, which he sometimes got right.  There was cursing. 

    As we approached NY his high peaked. 

    We were somewhere near Staten Island when the drugs began to truly take hold.  The driver weaved, drove 2mph in traffic with an empty HOV lane next to him (until I gently said 'bro, take that left lane next to you, please'). Then once we got over the Tappan Zee bridge he ran through some red lights until we all chorused 'Red Light!' every time. He then smacked his side mirror off a parked truck's mirror. And missed the turn off to the side street to our office, and was headed for The Battery tunnel entrance until we all got yelling again. 

       I got off that van drained, ennervated and pissed off.

    Oh. And also, the whole ride, rap music and black radio dj's, dissing each other I guess, and saying retsrded shit. He wouldn't turn that off. Imagine 4 hours of those fake court tv shows made a baby with Jerry Springer, plus a bunch of idiots bragging  about themseves in rhyme set to a drum track. For 4 hours. 

    Made me happy to get out of that van.  4 hours for a 2 hour ride.   

     When we were 10 mins from the office, the NY crew scheduler called me and changed my assignment for the week.  I had a pretty good gig lined up, a diesel barge normally left for the fuckups, elderly and lazy, as it has simple jobs and not many of those... but I went instead to the OTHER diesel barge, which works a little more, and better, goes out of town a little. 

   So I had some luck.  I'm on there now. I came aboard at a busy terminal in Bayonne NJ, and 5 seconds after putting my bags down in the house I was at the desk starting the calculations for a 3 part cargo blend, something I'll share at some point... anyhow  I got the figgarin' done and the signoffs signed, put on a poopy suit, (a boilersuit, coveralls, speed suit, whatever you want to call it), and fired up the hydraulics to pick up a cargo hose and swing the crane ashore, got us started and the 1st product loaded before getting relieved by the night guy. 

    By the time I was putting my clothes away, it was after 1800, and I was getting sore AF. I got my stuff stowed, my bunk made up, talked with my wife a little and absolutely DIED to the world for 8 hours. 

     Today? I feel my knees and shoulders. We're waiting on the next tide to sail to a lay berth to sit for the day and let the squally winds die down a bit before we try to catch the tide tonight for the ride through Hell Gate (NY's upper east side and the entrance to  Long Island Sound) and The Race at the other end tomorrow, ultimately  to Providence RI to pump off before riding home to Brooklyn again. 

 Should be fun. But most fun of all I think I can sit my fat aching ass down today for a few hours.