I have always loved a good sea story. It doesn't matter whether it's fighting a typhoon with Conrad, rounding the Horn with Chichester or kicking some nautical butt with Aubrey and Hornblower. If it's got a ship in it, I've read it.
But I hadn't actually been on the ocean in almost ten years. And it's not like I live in Nebraska. Fort Bragg is about as close to the ocean as a fellow can get without falling in. I got to pondering this sad fact one day, and I realized that I had been spending all my time sailing a truck on the highway instead of being Out There where I knew in my heart I belonged. So I decided to do something about it.
Once logging season started to slow down, I sent my money to the Department of Fish and Game for a deck-hand license, then I commenced to look around for a boat to sign on with. I spotted an ad for a deck-hand position, called the guy up and made arrangements to meet him at Noyo Harbor.
The Captain of the Sea Wind looked to be about 65 years old, with maybe 64.5 of them spent at sea. If you were to meet this fellow in a bar or on the street, your first thought would be that he was a fishing boat captain. He just had that kind of look to him.
I offered my hand and started to tell him of my vast nautical experience, but he cut me off in mid-stride when he put his face inches from mine, stared me down and asked me if I puked. This hung me up for a moment, then I quickly assured him that I didn't get seasick and went on to describe various storms I had battled on the high seas. But he cut me off again and asked if I could be onboard at six every morning. I told him this would be no problem at all. I figured he would then brief me on my duties. But when he went into the cabin and shut the door, I realized the interview was over.
Apparently he has spotted me right off as a seagoing kind-of-guy. A fellow mariner who needed no explanation of his trade. This wasn't exactly true. But I'm a quick learner. And it's not like I was signing on with NASA. I had no doubt that under the leadership of the Captain — a wise and patient man — I would soon become a first class mate.
I already felt a touch of affection for the old boy. We would go down to the sea together, face Mother Nature in all her fury, and build a solid bond of friendship and trust.
This proved not to be the case.
By the time we cleared harbor the next morning, I had realized that the Captain was not exactly a talkative guy. A couple casual inquiries into the nature of our mission were met with stony silence. And when I asked a question about the depth-finder, he reached over and shut it off. So I decided to head aft and investigate the Sea Wind.
She was made of wood, 48 feet long and 48 years old. Most of her metal parts were heavily corroded and I noticed a fair amount of duct tape and safety wire holding various mysterious objects together. But after peering into her nooks and crannies and observing that there was no water pouring in anywhere, I rated her a seaworthy vessel.
I was still unclear on a couple points. Like where we were going and what we were doing. So I returned to the cabin to pry a little info from the Captain. It was as if I had poked a bear with a stick. He turned to me in fury and loudly explained that we were going out to where he had some black cod traps set. He cranked the volume up a notch or two and went on to state that when we got there we had to work FAST. He expected me to be a blur, streaking from one task to another. then he stared me down a moment or two and returned to the wheel in silence, which I was most thankful for. I wasn't sure what these tasks were that he referred to, but I figured I had asked enough questions for now. Apparently the Captain had two moods — quietly smoldering pissed and loudly erupting pissed.
After about an hour we pulled up to the first buoy, which the Captain snagged with a boathook. Then he barked at me to grab the line, pull some slack in it and feed it over a hydraulic reel. I leaned way over the side, grabbed the line and pulled. Nothing happened. I pulled harder but that line was still as tight as a bowstring. I wrapped both hands around the line, threw all my weight backwards and finally managed to get maybe a foot of slack. I glanced over my shoulder, decided that I needed at least ten feet, and threw my weight back again gaining another foot.
It was obvious to me that we had snagged a sunken ship. But before I could mention this to the Captain, he had his mouth inches from my ear and in a surprisingly loud voice was suggesting that if it wasn't too much trouble and I was all rested up and such, perhaps I could do a little work. I put my feet on the side and leaned back with everything I had in me. And got another two feet of slack. The Captain went on to loudly tell me several ten-year old girls he knew that could undoubtedly take me in a fair fight.
Inch by inch I battled that line. I would gain a foot only to lose it again when the boat rolled. But finally, after what I considered to be a superhuman effort, I managed to feed the line over the reel, darn near removing my fingers in the process.
It had been two or three minutes since we had snagged the buoy and I was covered in sweat, totally out of breath and watching little black dots spinning around my head. So much for the easy part.
The Captain never really did tell me what to do. But he sure got mad when I didn't do it. I soon learned to try different things until I got the least amount of my ass chewed off, and this would be the right thing. I would feed the incoming line into a barrel for a while before racing to the stern and grabbing the buoy just before it got sucked into the prop. Then I dashed back to the line which was by now missing the barrel and spinning around the deck knotting up. I'd slam it into the barrel then sprint to the other side in time to grab the trap and manhandle it aboard. I'd flip the cod out, put new bait in it and throw it back over the side. Then I would run around the deck trying to free the line which was now wrapped around some darn thing or another.
The boat was pitching and rolling, I was freezing cold, soaking wet and covered in slippery fish slime, sprinting past and into countless sharp dangerous things with the Captain nipping at my heels like a pit-bull. By the time we threw the last trap over the side and headed back, I was done in.
I staggered into my house, threw my wet, smelly clothes outside and stepped into the shower, where I discovered something odd. That shower was doing the exact same pitching and rolling that the Sea Wind had been doing for the last ten hours. After bouncing around for a while I braced myself against the wall and tried to soap up. But when I closed my eyes I lost it completely, finally slamming into the shower door and flopping onto the floor. So ended my first day on the Sea Wind, and things went pretty much along those lines for weeks.
Payday was like a cruel joke. If we got our limit, I would gross 40 bucks a day. But sometimes we didn't get our limit. And sometimes unseen people would shut the fishing down for a few days due to some quota or another. Then we'd stay in harbor and work on the boat. On those days, I earned nothing.
Nonetheless, I was on the Sea Wind every morning. It wasn't for the financial reward. And it sure wasn't for the good company and pleasant conversation. I did it to get out on the ocean, plain and simple. After all, some people pay good money to go to sea, although under considerably different conditions one would hope. If you are the type of person that is drawn to the sea, you know just what I mean. If not, you never will.
But physical exhaustion, verbal abuse and poverty are hard cards to beat, and I eventually had to fold. Being on the ocean is one thing. Making a living on the ocean is something else entirely.
I'm sure I'll get back Out There again soon. In the meantime I can sail the seas through books. And now when I read of salty old sea captains and their wet miserable crew, I have a pretty good idea what they mean.
Thanks for the story, brought back memories. I fished on a number of boats out of Albion and Noyo, back in the 80’s and I soon learned that the highliners didn’t need to advertise for deckhands. And their boat parts weren’t usually held together with duct tape.
The surfers describe it best: They refer to it as “Answering the calling”. I got it from my dad whose family had been in the oyster business in Chesapeake Bay. Then there was Uncle Merrit who as a marine had gone through five major campaigns in the South Pacific before being wounded. His war story was about how beautiful it was to go out on deck at night with a quiet ocean and watch the flying fish skim over the water in the moonlight. Then there were the classic American authors like London, Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc who shared their love of the ocean. Of great influence was Lenny Bruce who in his autobiography “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” talked about how it soothed his troubled soul to go out on deck at night.
I tried to get into the US lines and found out that the American seaman’s union would no longer exist if there wasn’t a law that required goods being shipped between US ports had to be shipped on US ships. It was primarily oil from Alaska and the union was over loaded from scaling down after the war in Vietnam. Down at the port on the Sacramento River I ran into an old seaman who understood perfectly that “I wanted to go to sea”. He told me that I could get work with the Scandinavians who had a hiring hall in SF at Pier 37 I think it was. I got a cheep room in a flophouse hotel and showed up at the union hall every morning at 10 when they posted openings. It didn’t take long for me to land a job as a deck hand on a Swedish oil tanker. They flew me into Seattle where the ship was making trips between Arica, Chile to pick up a very high grade of oil and deliver it to the refinery in Anna Cortes, Washington. It was exciting to go through Puget Sound and the store shelves were empty in Chile since the US had engineered an embargo of Chile over the election of Salvador Allende.
The interesting thing about the oil tankers was that they never knew where they were going next. It all depended on where in the world they were going next. It all depended on where they managed to buy crude. So we went through the Panama Canal and it was quite a thrill to be out on deck handling the ropes and winches on the passage. One exchange stood out: We were passing close to a Norwegian ship in the adjacent canal and I expected the Swedes and Norwegians to be glad to see each other. They weren’t and only two words were disgustingly uttered by the Norsk deckhand: “Javla Swensk” which translates to “Damn Swedish”. It turns out that the Norwegians were (are) still bitter over the fact that neutral Sweden had allowed the Nazis to charge back and forth undeterred across Sweden while so many Norwegians died fighting them in Norway.
We picked up this crude in Venezuela that looked like road tar and had to be heated all the way across the Atlantic so it could be pumped out when we got to Rotterdam. From there we went to Lisbon, Portugal for two weeks in dry dock. I had a good time there. It is a wonderful city plenty of nightlife, good food, bullfights where they don’t kill the bull, and beautiful women.
Then the worst happened: We headed for the Persian Gulf. All the way down the west coast of Africa, and up the east coast into the Persian Gulf into Karg Island, Iran. They knew better than to allow a bunch of horny seaman around their women so we were restricted to the Seaman’s Club where we could surprisingly get beer. In the heat it was good, but it wasn’t like “going ashore”. There were a number of large pipes about 18 inches in diameter so it took less than 24 hours to fill our small tanker, 50,000 tons as compared to around 200,000 tons for the super tankers. We headed back out of the Gulf and into the Indian Ocean where things got exciting.
The ocean had roughed up considerably and we were headed directly into big waves that were some where about 50 feet from trough to peak. Since oil tankers weigh little more than the load they are carrying they ride very low in the water when loaded. Thus when the bow would bury itself into one of those big waves, a big part of the wave would wash totally over the entire fore deck and once in awhile the twin propellers under the back end would lift clear out of the water and the entire ship would rattle like a tin can with rocks in it. I was glad to get around the cape and into the quieter Atlantic. It was six months at sea and I had enough of the seaman’s life for awhile. I paid off in Rotterdam, got a room in the seaman’s club and hung around for awhile. The Dutch are really nice people, the cities are beautiful, and they are a model for the world on how residents from all over the world (primarily former colonies) can live in harmony with one another.
However, I needed to get home and the pay on the tanker was very low ($2,000 for nine months). Someone told me that if there was an American seaman who needed to get back and a snip going to the states didn’t have a full crew, then that ship had to hire that seaman. I went to the US embassy and talked to them. Within a few days there was an ocean going tug boat heading out without a full crew. I went down and talked to the captain and he was relieved that I wasn’t a drunk so I signed on. It turned out he was a “coon ass” which is some what of a term of endearment for a caejun. The boat and crew had been up in the North Sea helping the Norwegians develop their off shore oil. We were headed back to Louisiana and pulling this enormous barge that had been used to ferry parts out to the oil wells. The barge was somewhere around 50 by 100 feet in size and we were pulling it with a cable about an inch and a half in diameter. Things were fine until we crossed the English channel and got into the open Atlantic. where it roughed up to about 10 foot waves we were headed into. It was the middle of night when Harry Jackson, the Honduran engine boy came in and woke my up since he needed help out on deck. He explained that the cable was too short and in the rough seas would break in two from bouncing up and down on the back railing. We were going to let out more cable so that it had more slack and give, then put a chafing board on the cable. The boarde was a 3 foot long curved sheet of cast iron with two U-bolts that we would tighten down on the cable to hold it in place. The plan was that once in place the cable would be run back to where it would bounce up and down on the cast iron board instead on the cable. Before heading back to do the job Harry showed me a large scar on the side of his neck where the cable had hit once before. It turns out that when the boat is not running it will slowly drift around, building up pressure between the cable and boat, end then the cable will quickly slip with a deadly potential. The correct mode of operation was to crouch down and attach the chafing board while keeping your head below the cable. That scar inspired me to do it.
The rest of the trip was largely uneventful. I did two six hour watches with the captain and he would often go below, get drunk, and fall asleep during the night watch. I liked it since with the rough ocean the most comfortable place on the boat was in the captain’s chair. The boat was running on autopilot and all I had to do was watch the radar. Our progress against the waves and Gulf Stream was slow so we all agreed it was more important to have drinking water than shower. I even got sinister looks for washing up out of a bucket. Luckily, we did hit a heavy rain shower which meant we all ran naked out on deck to scrub down. The barge had a one ton suicide anchor with the plan being that if the barge broke loose and was drifting towards Miami, then the anchor could be dropped to stop the barge before it crashed ashore. Somehow in this rough ocean the anchor broke loose and was hanging down below it. This could definitly be a problem when we wanted back into land. The captain slowed our boat down, circled around the barge hoking the line of the anchor, and off we went. This allowed our 1.5 inch cable to rub up and down on the anchor cable, and cut it in two. That anchor is still out there. The only thing we could get on the short wave radio was Arabic music and long winded fundamentalist preachers. Once we rounded Florida and entered the quiet, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico we stopped and went swimming. Nothing quite like cool,clear water. It was impressive to watch that captain tighten up the cable to maneuver that barge through those narrow channels and into Morgan City. I paid off at $25/day after 26 days at sea. I spent a few days in New Orleans and then headed for home on the dog. Nothing quite like home, sweet home.
When I signed on the oil tanker I became friends with a man from Chile named Ramone. He didn’t like the oil tanker and told me about how nice it was to work on the Royal Viking Line cruise ships. In a glamour port on a regular basis with good food and beautiful Scandinavian women on the crew. I wrote him a letter in English and he got his job with Royal Viking back. That part about working with lovely women made a real impression on me so I went back to the union hall and told the guy in charge I wanted to work for Royal Viking line. He wasn’t to helpful since they had bad experiences hiring Americans on the cruise ships. It was because all too often they were there for the love boat travel experience and didn’t expect the work to be as hard as it was, usually 10 hours a day on a split shift and seven days a week. I was lucky in that another guy agreed to take the job and then changed his mind at the last minute. I was the only guy hanging around. The Norwegian took me into the back office, looked me in the eye and said, “Are you sure you want this job? It is washing, washing, washing all day long”. Then he repeated it. I recognized it was my chance to break in so I took it. I went into the pot room, (not what you think) where Ausberto and I were going to wash all the pots used to cook the food for about 450 people a day. Ausberto didn’t speak any English, but it didn’t take me long to pick up the pot room vernacular in Spanish. I have gone on too long here so I will save the cruise ship stories for another day. They include going all the way around South America, likewise the Mediterranean, into the Baltic including Russia, around the South Pacific, and across the orient and into China while they were still wearing Mao hats. That year I lived in Sweden was a real highlight. And then my attempt to get rich catching salmon. . . It is hard to beat a good sea story.