Big Doings in the US Merchant Marine

It's been an exciting month for those of us in the seafaring trade... But first the bad news with a side of digression. 

  

       There's a private equity company that got into the Jones Act shipping (US coastal trade) trade by doing the shell company game the way that Private Equity does, with a twist that this company is just rotten with a layer of beltway insiders on top of it... has failed. No matter how many layers of company titles you have, you still gotta produce, and if the shell company staff don't get along... things implode. 

      Marshals came and turned the lights off for most of the units they bought at auction from Morty the rich asshole. 

    For background, Morty's story is that he's a bad person. A shit born with daddy's checkbook in hand who himself rode his father's tug and barge company into the ground. Morty is a foul human being and is hated by everyone...and is a spoiled little tyrant degenerate who got what he deserved, which is to lose everything... that being said, his former employees, toxic themselves, some of them, but mostly decent people living with PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome from exposure to Morty, are victims. There were plenty of middle aged guys working who had to start over somewhere else very late in life when the company cratered. It's really hard to Rise And Grind to reestablish yourself when you're at the tail end of a career that is enormously wearing, physically.

     

      Strangely enough, my employer, who also runs a multigenerational family-owned shipping company, is doing just fine. Being a decent human being and having a family policy where every son starts out by sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and taking their turn working their way up from deckhand to management has something to do with that.  

       But, sadly, this batch o' bankers and investors is in a bad way at the moment. Infighting and what seems to be a contest in backstsbbing and who can fuck each other over more. At least it looks like that from the outside. As a result there's some skilled mariners headed out hat-in-hand looking for work this week. 

     So, the bad is bad. I hope one of the bigs with actual shipping experience rather than a combo of investing and lobbying experience will either buy some of these big boats or get hired to right the ship. 

    I just don't think it's possible to own a maritime business without longevity being the first or second priority.  If, as the saying goes, the purpose of business is business, than making MORE money over time, vs short-term gains, tortoise v. hare style, isn't antithetical to good business practice.  But good luck explaining that to the scumbag circus out there. 

 

     Now the good.  But first, more bad. 

 US shipyards are in a bad way. Obsolete tech, minimal automation, insane labor costs (a moderately experienced shipyard worker is at least journeyman-level equivalent in 2 or more skilled trades and thus can just work in one of those trades, so they need to be paid!). It costs 3-5x more to build a ship in the US than it does in Asia, but ships that travel between any US ports MUST be American built and American crewed, per the Jones Act, our cabotage laws. 

      This is done because we NEED to know how to build ships as a nation (we currently suck at it, which is a massive gaping nightmare), and we REALLY NEED people who know how to crew them.  We're currently about 100 fleet oilers (ships to run fuel for military use) short of what we'd need in a major war just to keep the lights on and bellies full. The beltway neocons, scumbags like senator Mike Lee, are screaming bloody hell because our present admin was able this year to put 10 civilian tankers on retainer as willing to jump in if ordered to help.  Senator Scumbag wants to import 3rd world foreigners and foreign companies to move all our oil, food and goods, internally and externally, including taking over our military's logistics, and getting the US out of moving things by sea as a trade. 

  Imagine just the 1000+ tugs on the Mississippi and connected rivers, moving oil and goods into the midwest and grain and beef out, all controlled by Europeans and Asians along with ADM and a few big ag companies that want to fly in Indonesians, Indians and Pakistanis, and hand over the keys to our food and energy so they don't have to pay lower- and middle-middle class wages to American mariners, or buy boats from American shipyards. 

 

Yeah. That's not even the least bit exaggerated. It's that fucked up. No security as a nation, whatsoever. No knowledge of how to build a ship.  A bunch of foreigners, some of whom are hostile to our interests, in charge of our oil and our food supply. 

 Globalists, lobbyists for big ag, and scumbag politicians, like that feculent shitbag senator Mike Lee, like and want America to be weakened, because it's profitable for them and their buddies and they LOVE the destabilizing effects. 

     So, that's the bad part of the good part. 

    

Now, the good part: with our shipyards being in a bad way, in conjunction with the present presidential admin's goals of improving our maritime security, one of the Korean megashipyard conglomerates, who can build damn fine ships damn fast, bought the Philadelphia shipyard, one of the only 3 (!) American shipyards that can build merchant ships. 

 Well, for values of 'American.'  It was owned by a billionaire family of Norwegians as one of their several shipyards globally, then spun off with the usual shell games that bankers get all on about... but still owned by Europeans, titles aside. Like most of our shipyards. Newport News is BAE, the Brits. Great Lakes has Fincatieri, Italian. Philly had Norway, now Korea. You get the idea. 

            But, Hanhwa Philly, now, is looking interesting. They're almost done with building 5 schoolships for our maritime academies, which double as disaster relief ships at need. After that I think they've got a couple of containerships on order for the Hawaii/ Alaska and Puerto Rico Jones Act service. 

    Hanhwa, on sealing the deal, is gonna throw 9 figures into modernizing and expanding the yard, which means local jobs and vocational training for Americans, and immediately put orders for over a dozen ships on the books, including building the infrastructure and training to build Liquified Natural Gas carriers, something the US currently can't do. They've already ordered 3 of those, so you're talking about over a billion bucks already. 

 This is huge. 

       Now, I have no idea if any of these ships will enter Jones Act service, although I assume some if not all will. More than anything else, it's the institutional knowledge that is the treasure here. Hanhwa is going to have to fly in experienced people to teach, and I'm ok with that. Aside from the international relations aspect, which has something to do with Korea wanting to cement ties and placate president Trump, it's also a good way to keep America invested in Korea's security too. 

 I hope Japan is watching.  

Anyways I'm much too retarded and willfully ignorant to really discuss such things at length. Still, it's a big step forward, and if we can put a boot on the insanely anti-American neocons' necks and press until our feet touch dirt and enjoy the music they make trying to breathe, perhaps we'll be ok. 

 

 

Father Time Is Not Kind

That's me, age 38 or so. 

 

  Here's me yesterday, at 51. 

Fffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.... 

              As I'm elbow deep in the longest tour I've done since I left blue water shipping, and I haven't buzzed my head or shaved since June, I'm really hoping I won't look like a caricature of myself when I get home and 

clean up again. 

   You know what's weird? I was a reddish blonde until 40. Now my hair remaining is brownish. And white, obviously.  Generally I keep the hair on my head at a #2 buzz, as I lost the male pattern baldness and my hairline is more like... ever see a coyote with mange? Yeah, like a mangy coyote's ass. 

 The white beard is a bummer. More smelly homeless guy than Sean Connery in Red October. 

     Also as I age, the gin blossoms I've carried since age 8 look more and more like a garden-variety alkies' face.

       I fell in the water in January when I was a kid and my idiot friend and I decided to walk out about 1/2 mile offshore when Boston Harbor froze over.  Ice broke under me, etc. etc. by the time I got out and walked to my parents' house I was blacked out and my father, to his credit, threw me in a tepid shower fully clothed until I came to, started screaming from the burning water, and spent the rest of the month grounded while my ears and cheeks turned black from the frostbite. 

   My father knew a thing or two about it, which was why, as mad as he was, I never got more than grounded and a talking-to.  He got knocked in the water in Antarctica, as he was on oceanographic ships before he swallowed the anchor, and got flash frozen himself.  As an adult, he told me he was most angry with himself, as I was the son he didn't expect to die dumb, my brothers being somewhat feral as kids. 

           Seeing myself in that picture, maybe I shouldn't be so mad that everything hurts when I get up in the morning now, until I can stretch and then the hurts recede to their homes in a couple of spots to their background susurrus. Ah well. At least the phase at 45 where I looked like Dollar Tree Louis C.K. is passed anyhow. 

Hip deep

 Not much to report. B returned on Wednesday, so I've been able to sleep through the night, which has been good.  It's busy, though for some reason only truly busy during the day, so while.I'm running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor, B has been more or less just ballast thus far, standing his watch and, well, watching, as the loading and discharging ops have been smallish parcels of cargo and the moves mostly in daylight. 

 That's the way it goes sometimes. It'll swing the other way in my favor at some point. Always does. We have 3 grades of oil for 2 different ships at thebl moment and if the schedule does not change, B will handle some or most of the 2nd ship tonight and I'll finish it tomorrow morning. 

     The sun's rising noticeably later these days. 0615ish now. Quite a difference. 

    The late sunrises at home (and earlier in the winter I suppose) are always an adustment, as is the much shorter twilight period. The sun always rises somewhere around 7am, year round, as we're further south. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is a night person, so I'm pretty much stuck in bed in the mornings, my own preference being to rise with the sun, but we try to start and finish our days together, they being so limited. 

Training Day

 I've had a fill-in guy on board the HQ this week, and he's pretty green as a proper tankerman.

    I say 'proper' in that he was an Inland and Mississippi river tankerman... different animal from what we do. 

 So, in inland waterways, oil is moved by barges small enough to fit through the canals and locks, which limits their size. For the most part, filling and pumping off tanks is a matter of sticking your head in a tank and filling it up as you're told by the office, often a matter of filling it up to a rung on a ladder in the ladder nounted inside the tank hatch. It's a job that any idiot can do... but one requiring strength and stamina, as getting large multi-barge tows through small locks is physically demanding in a way that a tsnkerman in ocean service does not have. We don't do multi-barge tows at all. Ocean waves prevent it. 

     So, to contrast, in ocean or coastal service, we have more constraints and considerations, larger and more complex equipment, and more to do... not to say it's a particularly complex job; it's not.  We have more training and more responsibility sure, but I still work with some idiots... just better trained ones, and someone only half-retarded like me can feel superior.  

   At any rate, now that my company is recruiting river rats, men who pride themselves on their experience suddenly find themselves inadequate to the work, which creates a dichotomy; men who are resistant to retraining, and try to justify feeling stupid by being resistant to learning...and those who are not. 

      My fill in guy? He's young, able and learning. Pleasant company.  Of the things he knows he is very particular; but of course of the things he doesn't know, he has to be taught or learn by painful experience. 

 Thankfully he has no problem waking me up to verify, ask questions or seek help. Consequently I'm not sleeping much. It's a quirk of my personality that I don't wake up grumpy when woken up. I WANT him to be careful. But he doesn't know what he doesn't know, and so around midnight last night I woke up to hear a very stressed out mooring line singing out that it was thinking about a divorce from it's other half. 

 I got up, shoe'd up, and went out. I saw the new guy running around and way past the point of task saturation and firmly in the middle of analysis paralysis... Inexperience prevented him from managing the workflow, and the barge was working him, not the other way around.  So I came out and told him to shut down for a few minutes, and we slacked mooring lines, adjusted the fendering between us and the other ship, changed how he was pumping off tanks, had a look at the documents, and took the pressure off him. Since it was a teachable moment, and not a near miss, we talked about managing the workload, being a seaman first and a gas jockey second,  working at a safe pace vs a fast pace, and I was able to pass on I think (I hope) that workflow is something proactive, not reactive. I mean, shit happens to everyone sometimes. Shit mitigation is a part of every job and situational awarness is a learning process. After we unfucked the deck, I hung out for an hour with him while he restarted and worked at a more humane pace, while the guys on the ship, who were pressuring him to hurry up, looked on bitchfaced 

 The kid gives a fuck about his job. That alone puts him on a positive track.  I don't have it in me right now to be a designated trainer, but I'm hoping him sort of getting a trial by fire from the HQ, which AFAIK does the most blending and mixing and small-parcel oil deliveries in the area, so green tankermen suddenly have to juggle more variables and work through informal decision trees to  manage 3rd and 4th order effects, which, on rereading, is just a fancy way of saying we have to account for things that might happen 3 or 4 cargo moves and/,or transfers and gravitations ahead, that just can't be planned in a loading program. 

      Anyhow, he's doing well enough but tomorrow B returns and maybe I can get some damn sleep. 

Yup

 

7/10, would poop there

Things in the ongoing fustercluck that is the house project at my house in Brazil are starting to come together. 

       As I've mentioned, the house is pretty modest. Around 1400 sq ft, with 3 guest bedrooms, 2 with their own bathrooms and then one general bathroom off a hallway. As I think I wrote about, we don't intend to live in the main house, rather we have a little separate outbuilding that will be a master bedroom, sitting room and the head. About 700 sq ft all told between the 3 rooms there. 

     With the civil suit still pending  with the embezzing scumbag builder who stole all my money (well, building materials and money), much of the interior work is a redo of the original efforts... and the sad truth is that the big money we spent on marble, bold Italian tile, etc, was used to buy close-outs and seconds worth about 10% of what we paid for. So we had to demo everything, anyhow. In the end we bought neutral colored granite and tile, as we just didn't have another 100k floating around... It's... very beige. Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife says that with the cabinets, mirrors, brackets, lighting and hardware it'll come to life, but right now it looks like a pleasant if uninspiring place to bark one out... and in the end, they're guest bathrooms, meant to be simple, easy to clean. 

One of the weird things I'll never get used to in Brazil is that they don't have a raised footing for the shower doors. They get bolted right into the tile and subfloor, as bathrooms usually have 2-3 floor drains, one inside the shower, and 1-2 more outside.  Brazilians in general prefer to shower twice a day, morning and night, so bathrooms get used a lot- condensation and water puddles collect mildew and mold, so they don't let standing water stand. Sloping the floors subtly enough to not make you fall on your ass is a bit of an art there. 

Still, giving the utter shitshow of the past 2 years, it's good to see the place finally taking form. 

Nice night.

 I'm in Bayonne NJ tonight, but despite that, it's still really nice out tonight.  We're loading up a couple of grades of oil, slowish, so there isn't the rumble of 60psi oil cavitating in the pipelines and vibrating the shit out of us. 

      Air temp is great. 68? 70? Whatever it is, it's nice and not too humid... it's the first night in a few months that reminds me that the summer won't last forever. 

 Sadly, I gotta switch back to day watch on Wednesday. 

The decline in conscientiousness

   I thought this was interesting, and it tracks from what I can see in general.  People, younger ones especially, are not grinding, not following through, and not maintaining social cohesion. 

 Yeah, so I was introverted long before it was cool, and I don't appreciate all these douchebags trying to copy my style. 

 Look, I view going out in public like a trip to the zoo. I chose my life and lifestyle, and THEN I deliberately cultivated it in such a way that I have to deal with people mostly ONLY when I am in the mood to do so... within limits of course. 

     That being said, I try pretty damn hard to be agreeable when I can. It lubricates the wheels on which I roll, which generally translates to I have a timeline in mind when I want the time to be social to end, and this time is a target for me to try to hit. 

          I think that's part of the reason I enjoy traveling to Brazil so much. The above? Not possible. Life from what I can see down there, revolves around moving people in and out of your circle, like a team-building exercise that doesn't end, and it doesn't matter if the team is trying to win on joy, work, pleasure, what have you. You do it together... and damn, it's something I really enjoy down there. A counterbalance to my ways at home, maybe. I can be very social when the mood is right... but there's something to be said for existing in a condition where your mood doesn't matter much. 

    ... and that sort of dovetails into being able to keep promises, to grind at and finish something that you start... that's a side of conscientiousness that is also being lost.  It's also one of the few things that I considered beating into my kid, as he started out with that same issue, and it wasn't until adulthood that he finally listened and started changing when I explained how much of life depended on him never, ever leaving the right thing undone. By the time this came up, several of his friends were already on a bad path to sucking at life, and I was able to parlay that into a warning message right before he hit the age where it's no longer appropriate to command and the best you can do is to suggest. 

 As for the why behind it, go look it up. Social media, multimedia, ease of avoidance... all that. Smarter more patient minds than I have written think pieces on it already. 

          As far as agreeableness, you know I've never punched anyone in the mouth since I started working at my present job, 17 years ago?  Oh, it very much still happens on occasion on boats. Sometimes people forget that a punch in the mouth is a very valid response to a disagreement.  In many ways I believe that it should perhaps be more common, as awareness of this fact does a great job in preventing escalation of conflict in isolated work environments. Some people just haven't been punched in the mouth in too long.  

      As a result of this, and the line of punch/no punch being a bit subjective but very individual in nature, being polite becomes a survival trait... which is exactly what it has always been. As a result of this unspoken awareness, disputes are settled more amicably, where, if not with smiles and rainbows, the ability to walk away and maybe even resolve something is possible. 

                 One other reason for me not to work in an office, in that I believe in natural justice, the sort where bad actors certainly deserve a beating to reestablish the social hierarchy and proper decorum in social intercourse. That's not cool among the people who wear ties to work, who seem to prefer seething followed by resentment and maybe followed up with some angry masturbation at home. 

       The information on the graph is worrisome to me. I think of modern day Japan when I see those figures. The disaffected, unhappy, disengaged men and aggressive overbearing women who like them... and very, very much vice versa.  I don't want that for us. But I also grew up somewhen else, the past being a different country, as the saying goes. Maybe this is social evolution... and if so, just as I am now, I gravitate to those who gravitate towards the counterculture. 

     Not the sort of dick and fart- related content you've come here to roll your eyes at, sorry. As always, just because I am writing superficially and sillily, which is now a word, that doesn't mean anything except that I don't share my deepest thoughts with anyone online. What you see ain't what you get, is what I'm saying, unless you see I'm retarded and juvenile, which... yeah. Guilty.

          

Night time is the right time

 I'm in the middle of a marathon hitch. Not even in the middle, but getting there. 

         With projects in Brazil ramping up again, it is the right time for overtime, and this will be the longest hitch I've done since I left ships to work on tugs and barges.

    I have the opportunity to stay right on the HQ rather than jump around in the fleet for my OT.  Partner Big E is doing physical therapy after orthopedic surgery and has been out since this spring. So we have shoes to fill aboard. 

 Now I've been baking my balls off daily in the heat for 12+ hours a day, and now it's my time for the next few weeks to stand the night watch, 1800 to 0600, away from the heat of the day. It's better.  Night watch in the winter is brutal, but in the summer it's welcomed. 

   This week in Brazil, it's lamp and lighting buying time. So Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife bought some foofoo overhead lamps and shit for the indoor kitchen, entryway and living room, as well as lighting for the bedrooms and bathrooms.  I haven't seen any of it but then again I don't really give a shit so it works out. The plain truth is that the outdoor living part of the house is what interests me, as for all the drawbacks this city in Brazil has lovely temperate weather.  Low 80's in the winter. Mid 60's in the summer.

    I did take part in the landscape lighting and design of the outdoor areas, though. The future Don Paolo needs good ambiance to sit and smile and try to understand the big words in Portuguese without looking retarded.