'Honoring the Mariner' (by discouraging him)

I've still got about a year to go before I have to renew my Coast Guard license and Merchant Mariner's Credential. This will be issue number 4 for me, marking 20 years for many of the original certificates I hold. Many of which the Coast Guard no longer recognizes as being valid in my continuation as a professional mariner.

    The Coast Guard is doing a tough job and if you judge them by anything but their Search And Rescue reputation, appears to be a big, sucking bag of suck.
        I'm sympathetic- in doing their job, they often do their best. But what IS their job? SAR, OK, they're the best in the world, and there's no one whose booty deserves more polishing than Uncle Sugar's Post Toasties when it comes to search and rescue. I feel a hell of a lot better in my professional capacity, knowing the're out there with underpaid men ready to risk their own lives to save mine, using rubber rafts, ancient boats that want to break in half and other equipment that, ironically, they'd be the first to suggest not be used in heavy seas, if it were civilians using them.

 So, where I'm critical of the coast guard, it's specific to where they're NOT making heroics and where they're also NOT free to do what they'd actually like to do.


 Let's start off with a softball- Marine Inspection. Marine Inspection used to be where the coast guard saved lives BEFORE they were at risk. Dockside inspections, drydock inspections, paperwork compliance inspections... you name it, these guys gotta be able to do it. When they do their job right, boatowners and mariners, the guys they're looking out for, grumble and resent them for making their vessels safer. And the reward for a diligent marine inspector was that it used to be a career killer, apparently. Not much glory and recognition to be had where everyone hates you for saving their ungrateful ass from disaster. Supposedly it's no longer a career killing job, as the Coasties underwent a cultural change, and having been an inspector is now good for one's career advancement- but that's tough, too, as it takes years to be competent, and decades to master being a good marine inspector, and with but 40 years or so to climb the ladder, an ambitious inspector may not have time to be a masterful one.

 Oh, and I speak under correction here- I'm going by scuttlebutt and shit I read online, and mariner websites are mostly modeled more after Mother Jones  than Science when it comes to peer review.

 So, I've got a soft spot for Marine Inspection and the SAR guys, yes.  Even though I think it's a joke how very, very concerned they are with my air compressor. No shit, they absolutely lust after monitoring the condition of the machine I use to power pneumatic tools with all the attention and fervor I used to devote to Playboy as a teen. I don't know. It even has it's own special inspection date set aside. I once stuck a big cardboard box right in front of an escape hatch during an inspection (a massive no-no), and the inspector rested his gear on it while he looked over my air compressor nearby, completely singleminded, like a 12 year old seeking out the bra section of the Sears catalog back in the old days.

 Now, the Coast Guard has it bad because we love New Laws here in the US, and if no one can figure out who among the hundreds of government agencies has oversight of every one of these laws, the Coast Guard has to do the job singlehandedly on the waterfront. The EPA even gets a piece of the clerical cake on my barge- noncompliance with their deeply stupid, repetitious and unnecessary compliance paperwork falls to... you guessed it. While I already do the stuff the EPA requires that I do when it comes to environmental compliance inspections, the Coast Guard is the one who has to stop their safety inspection and make sure that I'm filling out the EPA forms correctly, even though the EPA's requirements are already the same as the Coast Guard requirements. Well fuck it, I'm no stranger to repetitive logging. Just to start a cargo pump, I have to log the event in the Official log, the DOI (another form), the charterer's paperwork, the company's remote access scheduling program and an ullage report, so what's one more logbook on top of that?

 Now, how the Coast Guard handles individual mariner credentialing and licensing is no longer how the Coast Guard WANTS to handle credentialing and licensing.

     The US no longer gets to make our own rules when it comes to most aspects of training and credentialing for mariners. We signed onto the STCW convention like a bunch of assholes, and now it's done bit us on the balls repeatedly, like a pitbull wih a particularly juicy baby.  The Standards of Training , Certification and Watchkeeping convention is an international agreement made to standardize the fielding of competent mariners.
 ... and, well, it does the exact fucking opposite, but that's a conversation for another day. Anyhow, the Coast Guard no longer has a say on how they want to see American mariners' trained up. We all know that the 3rd world is famous for being awesome and efficient when it comes to training skilled workers and managing vast bureaucracies efficiently, right? I mean, that's why Apple, IBM, Intel, GE and the Manhattan Project was all completely organized and staffed by the same 3rd world wunderkind who can't get running water or hand soap to their hospitals... and yet these are the people whose policies mostly guided the formation of the STCW regs. Well, to be fair, most mariners are from the 3rd world, outside of the US, anyhow, and the liberals and foreigners froth at the mouth because we require that Americans handle American ships built in America when doing business in America.
        Well, judging by the 50/50 mix of masterful mariners and retarded short-bus seat-warmers that most foreign shipss employ as crew, the Standards are anything but. Well, 3rd world being what it is, any regulation means there's a money-making opportunity to be had for those with oversight of regulation to find a way to circumvent it for the right price... except for in the West, of course, because we actually ARE more law-abiding than the 3rd world.
 Anyhow, long story short, the Coast Guard can't do the actually pretty fucking good job they used to do in seeing that mariners are qualified to do their jobs. Now there are classes and courses that have to be taken, along with refresher classes and courses. This creates a whole new oversight industry, and and takes away the ability of the trained overseers to do their jobs, in favor of money-making for-profit schools to replace trained assessors with lifetimes of experience, and instead give that job to young junior mates with no experience who prefer wearing ties to actually working on ships, or retirees, failed mariners, part-timers, and other folks who, for whatever reason, want to try teaching, even if they suck at it.
     I'm doing a disservice to some of the great instructors I've had, but, to be fair, many of the instructors I've had in periodic refresher classes, upgrade classes and the like, were just awful. And, if it's bad here, it's probably 20 times worse in, say, India, where you have to mortgage your house to bribe a recruiter to get you papers and a job even after you went to maritime college. Shit, they have to pay a professional briber to manage their bribery to ensure that the right people are receiving the bribes, just to get the opportunity to bribe the right people.  Poor bastards.

... and these are the folks we empowered to provide oversight of our regulations governing what used to be very successfully and competently done by one or two guys at every Coast Guard exam center. So, if I'm occasionally annoyed by the Coast Guard anyhow, chances are it ain't even their fault. 20 years I've been holding seaman's papers, taking classes and maintaining certifications, skills and such. Next year, some of those certifications are going to expire, because I'm not going to spend $5,000 to maintain certificates that do not apply to my job and the job above mine. I haven't forgotten how to do these things, and in fact I do them all the time. If anything I'm better at them than the instructor, because I do them, not just sit in a class and talk about having done something similar on my training ship 8 years ago, the last time I stepped foot on a boat, and now that your check has cleared, here's your certificate, next in line, please.

 No, that ship has sailed. No pun intended.


         Note: This was posted using facts, innuendo, tongue-in-cheek, and  a little hyperbole. If you can't take a joke, why the hell are you a sailor? More saliently, why did you read this all the way to the bottom? I no longer cater to the perpetually offended. If I offended you, good. That was my intent. If you enjoyed it, or merely tolerated it, thanks for sticking around, and I promise to feel ashamed of myself eventually, most possibly when I get home, where I have a full length mirror just opposite of my shower.

Opportunity Lost (The American Phoenix job)

       It's been a busy time here. I'm working as second fiddle on a large barge that has been engaged in reverse lightering- running between a refinery and an anchored ship. Everything's fine- a little more stress as I deal with differences in scale, paperwork and vessel characteristics- figuring out how to accurately load the tanks and tweak the loading rates of individual tanks so that they finish in sequence, things like that. The sleep schedule is kicking my ass, as this barge works a schedule mirroring that of most tugboats- 6 hours on, 6 off, which equates to about 9-10 hours on, 2-3 hours off. No bueno. Add to that the fact that I jumped in at the start of busy back-to-back double loads and there wasn't much rest to be had for yours truly. At the end of the day, however, the job is what it is, and after running one load and one discharge, I am competent enough that I am no longer scared to death of an incident occurring while I have my face stuck in a tank trying to see the bottom.

         So, aside from the excitement and strangeness of the week spent on a new vessel, what was truly unique about these past two jobs has been the fact that we were working with the oil tanker "American Phoenix," the newest ship in the United States' merchant fleet. I have a personal connection, you see, with this ship. When built, she or one of her sisters was supposed to become my new home.

 I worked for AHL Shipping Co. (American Heavy Lift) for 8 years. I started on my first voyage in the engine room, or, more accurately, under the ancient steam engine in the engine room, chipping rust and painting in the double bottom between the underside of the floor of the bilge and the hull of the ship, 10 hours a day in the dark, for 120 days. AHL was a can-do operation, probably doomed from the start due to under-capitalization, but one that fielded 4 tankers for years and years and kept myself and hundreds of other mariners employed gainfully. The economy tanked during the construction of three new ships, and a hurricane wiped out a staging yard containing much of the material for said ships, which, with insane cost overruns by the shipyard, did for the company. I, luckily, saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship about 6 months before things started getting ugly, and landed here where I work (mostly) happily to date.

    At any rate, a venture capital firm that dabbles in shipping picked up the half-finished ship hull in passing after AHL went tits-up, and had the badly-managed shipyard (barely) finish her over the course of a couple of years, which is a couple of years longer than it should take to finish a ship, and pretty much explains why there is no AHL today. And the finished vessel entered service weeks ago, and we reverse-lightered her twice these past few days, loading her deep.
     She's a pretty enough ship, stubby and shiny, and looking not-quite finished in her primer-coated hull and topsides. The crew on board were friendly and the officers seemed very competent, but a small part of me hoped that one of my former shipmates might have been aboard. No such luck. The ship itself is mechanically interesting, taking the best features of the old AHL ships' deck layout and incorporating them into the design, while seemingly cutting out some of the worst parts- no stooping and crawling and hitting of heads to get at discharge valves, for instance, and no "up two flights and down one" to carry stores 400 feet from the deck crane to the stewards' storeroom. There are some classic AHL-style oddballs, of course- the ship has grain hatches for loading bulk solids, and there's a lot of thin-walled stainless steel piping, which will be interesting in 10 years after a few hurricanes (stainless steel doesn't like to flex like good ship-quality steel will, and is relatively brittle).

 Anyhow, look for yourself:

Cargo Surveyors measuring volume transferred

We had already taken in the cargo hoses when I snapped this picture. You can see them on my deck. We can transfer about 12,000 bbl/hr (500,000 gal) through one of them.

Traditional raised fo'c'sle vs our spoon-shaped bow

After a few months, the deck gang on that ship has to know the name of every pipeline, valve and piece of steel visible. I don't miss that learning curve.

All in all, I prefer my life today to that of a few years ago while I was with AHL. All the same, I feel a certain tug on the heartstrings to see this ship, and all the dreams that propelled it from a little company's strategy session, into a shipyard, then a bankruptcy court, breaking up, among other things, a great crew aboard my particular ship. This was a glimpse at the road not taken, for me. No regrets on my part, but some sobering thoughts about the pain it caused others through little fault of the people who envisioned her.

New Day

It's Sunday, we're at a lay berth awaiting orders for the next job, and I feel I have earned the rest. For the first time since I came aboard on Wednesday, I got a decent night's sleep- 6 uninterrupted hours' worth, which was wonderful. I find that without the regimentation of standing watches, I tend to work 20-hour days, which is harmful out here- we can't work more than 15-in-24 without a damn good reason under the law, and are supposed to have 6 hours' rest after 12. At any rate, I'm feeling good again, and enjoying the prospect of spending a day aboard this tub where I'm not running around with any sort of situational awareness.
     Coming aboard a new class of tank vessel, everything's familiar-ish, but the little differences are disorienting. I can't sit in my bunk and listen to the engines and work up a mental picture of what's going on on deck. The engines are larger and different from those I'm used to, and they don't change pitch like mine do. I don't know where the rope locker is. I can't time cargo discharges so that I know that I can go grab a sandwich between stripping out cargo tanks. If I need a tool, it might take me 10 minutes to find it. Little things.

 But some good things are happening too- I am enjoying New York harbor again after a few months away. I am watching the traffic, seeing familar faces, saying hi to friends out here. Good stuff.

 This, like Salma Hayek's underwear drawer, is where the good stuff is at. The Cargo Control Room.

Like Salma, herself, I feel that I look better with longer hair. This is the longest my hair has been in years. You can tell I took the picture after a few weeks at sea 'cus o the beard. 

 Tug "Oyster Creek."  One of the small (3,000hp) class of boat that my employer fields in NY harbor. The pulley and lines on the back deck that lead to the winch are the push cables, used for shoving barges from behind (as opposed to towing them). The Texas Bar across the stern is for towing- it acts as a fairlead for the tow wire as it stretches out behind the tug. 

 HORIZON NAVIGATOR. Outdated, small, ugly as the south end of a northbound donkey, but she's one of the few American container ships out there, and pays very, very well if one works on board.

 The view from my office yesterday. Beats the shit out of waiting 10 years to get a view of a frigging parking lot, don't it!

 Both a submarine AND proof that drugs are bad. "We take a sub, right," *snorts 3 lines of cocaine* "and then, we put, like... a jet on it!" 

USS Intrepid- next time I see this museum ship, she'll have a goddamned SPACE SHUTTLE on it. How cool is that!

 Lay berth- on the right is an old concrete hulk, a storage ship that is no longer used. I climbed the mast to take this shot. 

*needs work*

Ankah Da Tankah!

When I was sailing as an AB (Able-Bodied seaman) on the cranky old steamship SS New River, the captain used to goof on my Boston accent all the time. Between me, the Chief mate and Chief engineer (both from downeast Maine), there was plenty of fodder for his work. "Ankah Da Tankah" was one of his favorite phrases while I was up on the bridge at the wheel. Always, when it came time to anchor, that meant that our schedule was going to go to hell. We'd never leave on time, or, 15 minutes after the anchor was down, it would be on its' way up again from a change of plans.

    So, yesterday afternoon, I'm making chili (!) when I get the call that the terminal slated to discharge our latest cargo didn't want it, but another one would take it early- as in right now, get underway. So, we did.
         Someone in an office somewhere decided to play games. The tug that was shoving us got told to drop us and run south for work in the mid-Atlantic, and another tug was going to meet us, so we'd drop anchor, make the switch, and get underway again. This seemed counterintuitive to me, as we were 30 minutes from the dock at this point, and it would take an hour to make the switches and get our horrifically slow anchor windlass to yank the hook. But what do I know.
    Of course, once the anchor is down, the delays make a slow march across the board, which is why I'm typing this after midnight, reheating chili. One more reason to hate Philadelphia- we never, ever anchored in New York.

EDIT- so, about 2 hours later, now. 5 minutes after posting that last entry I got word that our berth was available, and so we heaved anchor- the tug with us did a great job of swinging us into the anchor rode's sweet spot-a place in the water directly downstream and only slightly aft of the anchor itself, so the rode slipped onto the capstan with just a whisper.
As an aside: tugboaters don't use the point system for giving relative bearings- they use the very lubberly 'O'clock' reference. Friggin' shoemakers. 

       To point out an object's bearing, it's all based on your bow being 'dead ahead' but it goes like this:

 

This is the way of things for a good reason, besides tradition. It accounts for parallax (the error caused by the difference  in vertical and horizontal angle between the eye and the object in question) errors caused by the lookout's vs. the OOW's position, since the o'clock system gives only 30-degree increments, while the maritime relative bearings listed above gives an 11.25 degree increment. One simply has a better idea of what you're looking at.  But I digress. And no, I don't box the compass. 

 Also, while in our modern era things can be wonderfully convenient, handheld radios are not. They're susceptible to interference, static, and getting 'blown out' by the wind. Hearing every other word, which happens all the goddam time, is an issue that must be dealt with- as an example, hearing "bearing (static) points on the port bow" gives you a 45-degree arc to worry about, while hearing "it's at (static) o'clock" gives you exactly jack squat. You just get better info, at the end of the discussion. 

      But I'm certainly not going to try to teach that to another boat's deckhands. Many of them were working this area while I was in grade school.  All I can do is make suggestions, remind them to tie their shoes, eat their veggies, and call them names in a good natured way, hoping to inspire them to be more curious about the weird-ass way I talk sometimes, accent or no. I've got to admit, seeing the blank look in their eyes is fun when I say "look 2 points abaft the port beam." It's the exact same look my nephew had when he was soiling his diaper as a baby. 

Book review: SEIZED, by Capt. Max Hardberger

www.maxhardberger.com

When I was asked to write a review for Max Hardberger’s Memoir, “Seized: A Sea Captain’s Adventures,” I was both excited and flattered to be picked to receive an advance copy. In retrospect, based on what little I know about marketing, I believe that I was a clever choice. Ships’ libraries are in decline, but the lending and passing of good reading material while at sea is still widely practiced. Rarely have I ended a voyage with the same books I started with, and, among the mariners I call my friends, Capt. Hardberger’s works have been universally well-received.

If you’ve read Hardberger’s books “Freighter Captain” or ‘Deadweight: Owning The Ocean Freighter,” you know that Captain Hardberger doesn’t easily back down in the face of opposition. A writer-turned-mariner, Capt. Hardberger is a man who has built his career in the labyrinthine and often startlingly corrupt world of merchant shipping. In “Seized,” fans and new readers finally get an inside look at Hardberger’s eyebrow-raising and sometimes exceedingly dangerous business as a professional ship extractor, a sort of re-repo man who returns illegally-seized ships to their owners under cover of darkness, from ugly, lawless places in the developing world.

Hardberger’s early books hinted at his well-developed sense or right and wrong coupled with a propensity for retrieving stolen property, even when the thief was, say, the trigger-happy government of a Caribbean nation. An expert on shipping matters (the author is also a shipping agent, maritime lawyer and port developer for hire), especially in places like Haiti and other ungoverned busy ports where rule of law either exists only in theory or not at all, a lifetime of experience in international trade has allowed Hardberger to carve out a niche as a ‘fixer’, a man with the personal network to get things done.

The first time I ever stole a ship out of port was on the sturdy old bulk carrier Naruda, lying at anchor in Cap Haitien Bay, Haiti, at the end of 1987. (Click here to read an extended excerpt from Chapter 1)

”Seized” is written matter-of-factly, in a manner which non-mariners can easily understand, but the author also introduces the language of merchant seamen, so that by the middle of the book, even the most lubberly of readers can hear and understand the Caribbean patois and salty language used by mariners the world over. In the process, even master mariners learn just how frequent and extensive corruption, bribery and illegal actions exist as part and parcel of the regular course of merchant shipping. It’s a dirty world out there, and Capt. Hardberger tells it like it is, from his own experiences as a ships’ captain, but also as a man who must use the tools at hand to get the job done. Whether it’s hiring hookers to distract security guards, or hiring out an entire brothel to create an impromptu block party to cover up the noise of starting up and sailing a ship out of port without anyone noticing, or dealing with port officials that must be bribed in a bidding war with other parties simply to load or unload cargo, or befriending a witch doctor and underwriting the costs of a voodoo ceremony to keep port officials away from the one place they can make phone calls, Max displays the mental agility that keeps him in business in places where prison or a back-alley execution are only a phone call away.

The events described in ‘Seized’ focus quite frequently on the people who make up Hardberger’s extensive network of personal contacts in the shipping trade. His warm descriptions of the friends and associates involved in these affairs only allude to the depth of friendships and alliances- the loss at sea of a friend whose career was jumpstarted by Capt. Max is only mentioned briefly, but the terrible personal impact of the loss is not lost to the reader; Hardberger’s understated style of writing is part of what makes this book a gem. And no surprise, perhaps; coming late to the maritime world as a career, his experiences as a crop duster and high school English teacher are mentioned only briefly. The story of how a geeky kid from the Bayou ends up in grad school in Iowa, then in the middle of Guatemala during a revolution could be another book in itself- this book is about living and working in the dirty corners of the world where maritime business is mostly conducted, and how Hardberger has managed to free up ships illegally seized in foreign ports where possession is the only rule of ownership.

“Seized” contains episodic stories from the author’s long career, and these stories span the globe, taking place mostly in the places where fortunes can still be made and lost by those looking for fast money- the developing world, the Eastern Bloc, and the chopshops where stolen ships are given new identities, or where shipowners with troubled histories or high debts can sell their ships back to themselves miraculously free of encumbrance.

The stories told in this book are too crazy to be anything but true- The memoirs of Hardberger’s early maritime career, (when restoring stolen ships to their owners was a hobby rather than a career) seem to display the basis for Capt. Max’s philosophy of working a dozen projects at any one time, but focusing on just the job at hand. Although “Seized” is billed as Max Hardberger’s memoirs, the ending hasn’t been written yet.

If you're like me and don't want to drive around an unfamiliar seaport, you can order the book from Amazon.com right here.