Sittin' on the dock of the bay

I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time ...

-- Otis Redding, "Dock of the Bay," 1967

Things are quiet in Theodore, a compact and capable deepwater port on the western shore of Mobile Bay, about halfway between the Gulf and Mobile proper.

We're waiting for the liftboat we are working with to get situated at a platform just southwest of the sea buoy, and then they may or may not call us for some of the equipment they put on our deck before they left.

We've passed the time catching-up on paperwork and a bit of deferred maintenance, cooking meals appropriate to the weather outside (yesterday was my turn: pot roast), counting down the days 'til next we go home.

Which, for the officers anyhow, is sooner than some would like. That voluntary 14/14 schedule I mentioned last post? Well, it's mandatory now. Suits me and the family fine, I can tell you. Even if I did have to come back to work two weeks early.

The boat now essentially has two crews, and I'm happy with the one I'm working with.

Back at the office, seven of our shoreside staff were let go this past month as a cost-cutting measure. The supply list is being trimmed. I'm fighting a rearguard action to keep water on the requisition and not have it transferred to our ever-shrinking grocery budget. It's a safety issue, to my mind.

It's awfully quiet over here, at least compared to Port Fourchon, where the radio chatter never stops and there may be anywhere from 20 to 40 boats in motion at a given time. What radio traffic we do hear is remarkably polite and friendly. Even the shrimpers in the bay routinely come up on Ch. 13 without any prompting. 

There are live oak trees literally a stone's throw from the back deck, and a curtain of tall pines behind those. 

An osprey is building a nest in one (is it that time already? Maybe that was a snake it had clutched in its talons ....).

Coots and cormorants bob around the boat. Someone caught a sand trout -- they call them "white trout" over here -- off the back deck the other night. And this morning there were snow flurries.

It's good to come to work at the beginning of a job, for a change. We had opportunities to meet the crews of the other boats and the customer representatives we'll be working for. We reviewed JSAs and traded phone numbers and email addresses and got a jump on some of the confusion that ineveitably happens once a job is underway.

The field we'll be working in is an active hydrogen sulfide field, which necessitated trips to the occupational health clinic on our way to work. 

It also necessitated the delivery of a dozen self-contained breathing apparatuses, two big supplied-air cascade units and a whole bunch of H2S sensors and alarms.

The other captain on my hitch worked over here for 13 years on a production boat, so knows the field and waters well; he even spent a few years working with the company man on this job, which makes everyone happy. 

This job, which is slated to last up to three months, is for one of the majors -- I guess it's actually the major oil major -- and I think our sales guys have high hopes it will lead to additional contracts.

We'll do a bang-up job, because we always do. And because this is an easy one, and the sort of fun, standard OSV stuff we all signed-up for.

But until they call us to the location, you can find me ...


Sittin' in the mornin' sun
I'll be sittin' when the evenin' comes
Watchin' the ships roll in
Then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooo
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time ....

And now for something completely different

Well, we’re back on the job and I can’t decide if it’s the best job ever, or the worst job ever. My opinion changes with the weather, mostly because our heading and speed over ground do not.

We are one of a fistful of support vessels for a five-ship seismic fleet searching for buried treasure about a hundred miles offshore from south of Pensacola, Fla., to off of the South Pass of the Mississippi River.

Sometimes we act as a guard vessel, ahead and outside of one of the big boats, warning approaching and crossing traffic that we require a 7nm CPA astern and 3nm abeam and ahead. Other times we are chasing the tail buoys at the end of five miles of steerable streamers.

On yet other occasions, we act as the safety standby vessel when one of the survey ships launches a workboat to service their cables underway, or crew changes via helicopter. Sometimes they send us out ahead of the fleet to scout for reported obstructions or to provide current readings at a given location.

The planning that goes into something like this – both ahead of the project, and during operations -- is mind-boggling. The two seismic survey ships have dedicated navigation departments. I imagine them to look something like an Aegis missile cruiser’s combat information center.

Anyway, it’s good to be working after too many weeks pushed-up on the mud. An idle boat + oilfield slowdown = one nervous crew.

It’s hardly worth mentioning – but I’m going to anyhow (send the cheese care of my wife) – that with the new job came the promise of my third-in-a-row late crew change.

My first hitch I voluntarily worked-over for another captain and the customer then held us over in the field. I can live with that … weather, customer whims, emergencies – these things make our crew change dates and times a rough guide rather than an actual schedule.

At the end of my second hitch, we were off-charter and at the dock two hours ahead of the relief crew’s arrival. About 30 minutes before they were due to show up we got a call from the office informing us that one guy wasn’t going to make it, but a fill-in was on a plane, and we could expect them in “a couple of hours.”

Mmmmm … not so much. Twelve hours later I was actually, finally, on my way home, by that time going on 24 hours since I last slept.

This time we knew a good 30 hours in advance of our departure from the dock that we would not be back in time for our scheduled crew change. That, in fact, we would miss it by at least several days.

“If you need to get someone down here early, you’d better call your office now,” the company man said. I concurred, and listed the reasons, including the fact that the deckhand who has been on the boat 70-something days at this point had a ticketed international flight the day after we were scheduled to be home.

Anyway, I went to bed thinking it would be resolved through the chain-of-command. Didn’t happen.

I spent, literally, many hours scheduling everything I needed to do in my “off” time so that it did not interfere with the boat’s schedule. 

Two surgeries, two endorsements for my license upgrade and a week-long vacation with the family.

The procedures have been rescheduled, the vacay reservations amended.

And now I’ll have to take extra time off of work to make all this happen, and the company will have to find someone to fill-in for me. I am assured by my crew coordinator it won’t be a problem, but it’s still less than ideal for everyone.

There is no guarantee our crew coordinator could have found fill-ins on 24-hour notice, but he sure would have tried. 

The bottom line is that this little delay is costing the family thousands of dollars. Possibly as much as $6,504, depending on when I get back to the boat. (The $4 was the change fee for my plane ticket home.)

Waaaa, right?

But hey, we’re working. And that’s a good thing. It’s about to be an uncomfortable good thing – a norther blew through at 0552 with 40+ kts of wind. Seas are forecast to build to 10-12 with the occasional 16-footer thrown in for good measure. 

The entire fleet is running before the weather now.

Diversity in the Workplace

A workboat is a pretty self-contained and limiting environment. While the boat itself may touch down in three different states (or, alternatively, sit in one place) over the course of a month, the crew members typically don't leave the vessel.

Pink-spotted hawk moth, Agrius cingulatus.

Sometimes we have to to hike across a cement or gravel logistics yard to deliver paperwork to a dispatcher. But that's about it.

And for someone like me -- someone who has always been curious about the world around him -- that is sometimes a hard way to live.

My paternal grandfather was an enthusiastic taxonomist and amateur naturalist: plants, fungi, rocks and minerals, artifacts ... he enjoyed searching for, identifying and collecting found treasures.

My favorite activity with my father, as a youngster, was "going to the flats" (the tidal marsh across the street, on the banks of the Intracoastal Waterway) or to Padre Island National Seashore where we could find everything from horned lizards and king snakes to olive and sundial shells to glass fishing floats.

There are some professional taxonomists in the family as well, and they served to heighten my interest in the natural world over the years.

In college, exploring the Trinity River bottomlands when I should have been studying, I was delighted to find beavers on campus, in the heart of one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas.

Black Witch, Ascalapha odorata.
.

When I lived in deep South Texas I was charmed not just by the austere beauty of the Tamaulipan thorn forest and the vast Laguna Madre, but also by the rich procession of tropical species, many of which are found nowhere else in the United States.

I was so enthralled with the flora and fauna of South Texas that I enrolled in a program sponsored by Texas A&M University and the Corpus Christi Convention and Visitors Bureau and became one of the early certified wildlife guides in the area.

On the boat we spend a lot of time in South Louisiana, which is an interesting landscape, but aside from resident bald eagles and black bear crossing signs on the highway doesn't offer many s)urprises. That is to say, it's not so different from where I grew up: the same Gulf of Mexico, the same spartina and black mangrove marsh, largely familiar and predictable shorebirds and marine life ....

Banded sphinx moth, Eumorpha fasciatus

Being stuck on a boat for 28 days does offer two advantages, though: the first is a couple of 1,000-watt halogen work lights illuminating our deck.

The second is that for 27 nights in a row I have nowhere else to go and nothing else to look at, other than what those lights attract.

And what they attract are moths. Sometimes hundreds, sometimes dozens, sometimes just a handful, but every night it is not pouring rain, there are moths on the deck.

Often there are scores of tiny moths, "micromoths," that are probably intricately patterned or delicately formed, but are too much of a chore to identify with my 45-year-old eyes.

Tersa sphinx, Xylophenes tersa

Sometimes, maybe once a week or so, there are macromoths -- hummingbird- or even sparrow-sized insects that are intricately and beautifully patterned.

Until recently I hadn't thought much about moths. I was familiar of course with a couple of the large and obvious hawk moths from home, and I certainly paid attention to the occassional saturnids -- luna moths and imperial moths -- that came to a porch light.

But I always sort of assumed that butterflies, the daytime showboats of the order lepidoptera, where more interesting and glamorous than moths.

I've recently learned, though, that of the roughly 175,000 species of butterflies and moths, the former account for only about 18,000. All the rest are moths.

And while plenty are drab or vaguely patterned (the mostly nocturnal moths typically find their mates through pheremones rather than color and pattern, as do the diurnal butterflies), many sport incredibly beautiful colors and patterns, particularly on their often-hidden hind wings.

Ello Sphinx, Erinnyis ello

There are two fun groups on Facebook that I turn to for entertainment and education; the first is a group of working mariners and ship spotters called "Supply Boat History."

The second is a collection of amateur and professional lepidopterists called "Mothing and Moth-Watching." Both have active members from around the world.

Who knew?

The moth-watchers have been particularly helpful and encouraging, mostly confirming IDs (Mississippi State University has a terrific resource in their Moth Photographers Group site).

One morning a week or so ago, I was excited to post some photos of a new-to-me moth that I had proudly identified as a rare-ish Louisiana endemic.

Louisiana eyed silk moth, Automeris louisiana

A couple of hours later, the fellow who first described the insect back in 1981 was commenting on the photo. How cool is that?

Out here in the oil patch, it's mostly (though not exclusively) white men working on boats. And our view of the natural world, while sometimes stunning (especially at dawn and dusk), is necessarily circumscribed.

With that in mind, I can view the moths only as a gift, renewed every night under the aft deck worklights.

Shenanigans (Part Three): Stupid, Lazy and Greedy

In part two of my mini-series about oil patch vessel shenanigans, I did a little griping of my own.

Sorry ‘bout that. It was mostly to hide my ambivalence about the next post. This one.

Not everything I’m about to write happened while I was on the boat, or even in the presence of people I consider friends; however,  I have some good friends who have done some questionable things.

They are still my friends.

I may not always have been a poster boy for how to things the right way myself, so far as that goes … but in the interests of protecting my Fifth Amendment rights, I’m also not admitting to a damn thing.

I don’t know if the sorts of things I’m going to mention in this post are widespread, or if they are more common on the smaller boats or just at certain companies. They range from stupid and dangerous to lazy and greedy to … well, let’s just leave the potential civil and criminal penalties out of this, shall we?

There was the time, for instance, when I awoke at 2300 for my midnight-to-noon watch and found the other three guys on the boat falling down drunk.

In fact, it may have been one of them falling that woke me up.

Now, I’m pretty sure that shipyard periods and, say, hurricanes, may be treated somewhat differently. But when you’re 100 miles offshore, on safety standby for a dozen manned platforms, it’s quite possible (even if not probable on any given day) that at some point the entire crew may be needed at a moment’s notice. It has happened.

Other maritime nations, and other industries, may treat on-board alcohol use differently. Cruise ships have crew bars, and some foreign navies historically have run as much on rum or vodka as on fuel oil or atomic reaction.

The U.S. Navy banned the consumption of alcohol aboard its vessels with General Order No. 99 in 1914. The U.K.’s Royal Navy did not follow suit until 1971, and then only in part.

In the U.S. it is a violation of federal law to operate a commercial vessel with a blood alcohol content level of .04 percent or higher, and the Coast Guard has an official policy of discouraging the use of alcohol and “dangerous drugs” among vessel crew members. 

Boat companies and their customers, at least in the Gulf of Mexico, positively prohibit it. Licensed officers lose their jobs, lose their livelihoods and go to jail every year for forgetting this.

Even “strict” captains often are indifferent to what their crew members do at home, though surely they will remind their crews about the possibility of random drug tests and drug tests following incidents (even those that clearly are the other guy’s fault).

And many of us, I can tell you with a degree of certainty, are looking forward to retirement and  ... let's call it the "personal freedom" that will come with it.

A deckhand who worked for me on one boat thought he was pretty slick, smoking synthetic “marijuana.” He thought, with absolutely no justification, that he was “cool” when he was high – that there was no obvious difference in his performance or appearance.

Granted, his performance was nothing to write home about even when he was sober. But when he was high, he was heavy-lidded, bloody-eyed and approached each task with all the ingenuity and efficiency of one of the walking dead. 

I actually had to pull out from beneath a crane twice one morning, run down to the deck and help him rig, before finally sending him below to wake up his relief.

It’s nothing like the “good old days,” or so I am told. Back then, a lot of boats wouldn’t leave the dock without a case of beer on ice and a quarter bag in the wheelhouse. Or so I am told. Must have been fun, those days.

I was mightily impressed with the first crewboat I worked on. Our bilges were clean enough to eat off of. Absorbent pads were cut to fit and placed under every drip. Everything from oil filters to greasy rags to what we dumped out of the Fry Daddy went into DOT-approved waste drums in a containment well on the dock.

We put less oil in the water in a month than a single tour boat I had previously worked on did in a day. I thought, for a few brief months, that was the standard in the offshore industry.

Sadly, it is not so.

I remember walking around the boat early one morning and, after admiring the colors in the sky, noticed the rainbow sheen that started in the vicinity of our hull and continued downwind for about a quarter mile. It could have come from the platform to which we were moored, but I’m thinking that Genius, the synthetic pot guy, had decided to get a jump on the day by pumping the bilges.

I digress, but I have to mention another one of his great ideas. This particular company had a policy of prohibiting fishing from its vessels. It’s a policy the crews enthusiastically ignored, and staying offshore a week at a time we frequently had fish to share when we got home.*

Anyway, the catching was easy when we were hanging off one of the platforms. But once our standby buoy was replaced in the middle of the field, we had some trouble finding some of our favorite reef fish.

The sea bed in the Gulf of Mexico is basically one big mudflat, and reef fish thrive best where there is structure. Oil and gas production platforms provide great structure. So does all the metal – gratings and ladders and tubing and pipe – that came down in junk iron baskets.

One day we sent up a new washing machine to a platform and received the old, worn-out unit to be taken to the dock, and thence to the landfill. A couple of us figured that a washing machine was good for three or four snapper, minimum, and decided it should go over the side at the standby buoy.

Knucklehead remembered about half that discussion. Later the next day, at the buoy, I looked all over the boat for that damned washing machine. Finally I asked Genius.

“Oh, I threw it over,” he said. “For fish structure.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Where?”

“At _____ (the platform number). Last night.”

“Genius, that platform *is* fish structure. We don’t need any more over there.”

Speaking of structure, many vessels I've worked on have shiny stainless or aluminum compression posts in the wheelhouse or accommodations deck. If you're a guy with certain experiences in your background and a little imagination, it's not too difficult to see these as the sorts of poles that are sometimes found in certain entertainment venues.

Problem is, overheads are usually pretty low, so to actually put these poles to use one would need to employ a rather diminutive dancer.

Yep, I'm talking about midget strippers.

We got pretty close a couple of times to having this all worked out. It never came to fruition, but the dream remains alive deep in the hearts of a couple of guys I know.

But back to MARPOL and the Clean Water Act and that sort of thing.

I heard about a guy at one company who instructed his engineer to wait ‘til nightfall to dispose of used oil filters. Over the side while underway. Every 250 hours, like clockwork.

I've heard that some folks pump (often oily) bilges offshore as a matter of course. Even if there is an oily water separator on board. I've also been given to understand that it's not unusual to pump the holding tank at the dock as a matter of course. Even if a boat is headed out the required 3 miles beyond COLREGS in a few hours.

All of this pales, though, next to a phenomenon known as “making fuel.” This involves something other than chemistry, or even alchemy.

I’m not talking about rounding errors or padding the numbers a few hundred gallons here or there to make sure it comes out right in the end.

A couple of boats I’ve worked on have belly tanks that run fore-and-aft, and depending on how the boat is trimmed fuel soundings can be off by as much as 500 gallons per tank. Guesstimates are employed, fuel adjustments are periodically logged. It works out.

No, I’m talking about making fuel for profit. Only a few people I’ve known have allegedly done this, and sadly, now I can't even remember exactly who they were.

The way it works in the Gulf of Mexico, the customer (i.e., the company that charters the vessel) purchases the fuel the vessel uses for the period of the charter.

Say a boat goes “on charter” with 5,000 gallons of fuel. At the end of the charter period, the vessel, if it has less than 5,000 gallons on board, will take on enough fuel to make up the difference at the customer’s expense. If it has more than 5,000 gallons, the boat will pump it to another of the customer’s boats or the value of the excess fuel will be taken out of the vessel’s day rate.

In the interim, fuel is accounted for on a daily or weekly basis.

It’s not all that difficult to fudge the numbers just a little (say, logging 1,400 gallons on a 6-hour run instead of the 900 you actually burned – 233 gph vs. 150 gph – both are in the usual range for vessels I’ve worked on).

A week of daily runs like that and you’ve accumulated an “extra” 3,500 gallons of fuel worth north of $12,000 at the pump.

The trick is to dispose of the “extra” fuel and bring the actual fuel on board back to what the logs show. And that, too, is not all that difficult.

I heard a story about one captain who actually filled a slack rig water tank with stolen diesel to hide it from the customer’s auditors before he had the opportunity to pump it off to another boat or a truck.

Reportedly, the going rate for a gallon of pink diesel is $1, whether the buyer is some guy who runs boats or a yard worker at some dock.

The first week on one of my previous employer’s boats in Venice, one of the dock’s riggers passed a question to me through our engineer: “He wants to know,” the engineer said, “if you’ll sell him some diesel.”

“We can probably do that,” I replied. “Does he need it for the crane or something? We’ll just have to get him to sign a ticket.”

“Um, no … I think he wants to bring a truck over, sort of do it under the table. He wants 300 gallons.”

“Um, no,” I parroted. “Actually, hell no. And tell him not to ask again.”

Later that night I held a meeting with the entire crew. This happened. I said no. I will always say no. I don’t know how you’ve done things on this boat before, but we won’t be doing that while I’m here. First, it’s wrong. Second, it’s bad business. Third, we now have 14 cameras on this boat, and they are constantly recording. Any questions?

I’m pretty sure, though I have no proof, that one guy I was briefly acquainted with “made” in the neighborhood of 10,000 gallons for his company one month. That was his boast, anyhow. That’s between $30,000 and $40,000 at the pump. That is, I’m guessing, a felony.

It’s also no way to do business. It’s not fair to the vessel crew you have co-opted in your crime, it’s certainly not fair to the customer who is paying for the fuel. 

And I would have thought that it is self-evident that artificially increasing your fuel consumption makes your vessel less competitive.

It’s also all of five or six days of charter fees. Why trade that long-term, legal income for a short-term gain that carries the risk of personal and financial disaster?

Greed is the only answer I can come up with. The same sort of greed that would lead a company to transfer close to a grand per month in healthcare costs to its employees and blame it on Obamacare.

*Some might call this “raping the resource.” I prefer to think of it as “resource assessment,” or “single-line sampling.” And I can vouch for the fact that snapper populations are healthy where there is structure 100 miles offshore.

Shenanigans (Part Two): Ain't No Drama Like Boat Drama

And I thought high school was bad. Let me tell you, it has nothing on a boat full of grown-ass men suffering together in collective isolation while fighting each other, the office, problems at home, the elements, mechanical breakdowns, clueless dispatchers and an uncertain supply system.

The whining, the bellyaching, the moaning … the recriminations and machinations and scheming. It’s a freakin’ soap opera.

Not on every boat, and not at every company.  But, generally, if a sailor isn’t griping, you’d best check for a pulse. Or maybe conduct a drug test (see Shenanigans: PartThree).

This week I got a call from one of the engineers I worked with briefly. He was just checking in, and venting a bit, and to sum  it all up he said: “This place is batshit crazy! I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

My most miserable hitches were a pain in the ass mostly because of the people I was sailing with. Weather, customer, job, vessel maintenance – all of that is addressed in a pretty straightforward manner.

A former colleague who usually was surrounded by enough drama to qualify for a Golden Globe nomination called me on his way home from his last hitch. He had found out he was “let go” when he called the office and asked for his sea time letter, only to discover it was already in the mail. (He was okay with that, as he had just doubled his day rate elsewhere.)

“You know,” he said, “________ went to the office and said that you and I are racist.”

I was surprised, then upon reflection not all that shocked as I recalled: after four consecutive days of waking this particular young man for his watch; after four consecutive days of mostly calm, patient, focused, one-on-one counseling; after four consecutive days spending nearly my entire watch demonstrating that mopping is best conducted with two hands on the mop handle, not one, and that mops typically must be rinsed and re-wetted more than once per day; after all this, I finally wrote a formal disciplinary report and created a performance improvement plan.

It was then that the young man told me that I was singling him out, that I was treating him differently than everyone else.

“Oh. No. You. Don’t,” I remember thinking, almost willing him to play that card. I guess he did, finally, just not to my face.

But it was true. I was singling him out. Because I am, deep down (and the evidence of my own last hitch notwithstanding), goldbrickerist. He was the only one not pulling his weight. Others were having to get up early and stay up late to take care of the tasks he didn’t finish – or even start.

Still, it was days of drama, and in the end office staff who were afraid they would be sued if they treated this individual like everyone else in the company sort of left me dangling in the breeze.

Then there is the shuffling of licensed personnel because the lead captain feels threatened by another captain’s competency, or because boat handling skills aren’t up-to-snuff, or personalities don’t mesh, or someone is calling the office too often, or the customer doesn’t like the way a captain talks to the crane operator, or simply because there is a shitty boat and a shitty job somewhere else and one poor sucker hasn’t gotten the memo yet and blithely says: “Sure, I’ll help you out over there.”

On one boat, crew members complain because they have to carry their toiletries to and from the head (never more than 10 steps away on a crewboat, by the way). On the next boat, someone gets bent out of shape because there are too many bottles of body wash inhabiting the shower.

And the egos. Sheesh. I have personally met the World’s Best Boat Handler. All 27 of them. I have come to believe that one of the biggest problems with the much-abused U.S. domestic tonnage admeasuring system is that it never accurately accounts for the amount of volume a boat requires to safely contain those egos.

I’ve worked with a few guys who were hot shit on the sticks, no doubt. But for the most part the widespread notion that “I am better at this than anyone else out here” is a fine example of something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which manifests itself in all sorts of other ways as well. 

The thing is, the murky swirl of rumor and innuendo and double-dealing that is part and parcel of life aboard some boats generally remains unilluminated because, well, there are some sneaky bastards out there.

But more than that, there is a prevailing notion that information is power. And we all know that one must never, under any but the most dire circumstances, share power.

This is, more than anything, a top-down problem and an organizational culture challenge at the management level.

Consider: on the last day of last year, the news that our company was merging not just sales and marketing efforts as previously announced but also vessel operations, HSE and HR (i.e., everything) with another, similarly-sized company was buried in a memo informing all crew members that “due to Obamacare” insurance costs would be increasingly transferred from the employer to the employees.

The specifics translated into a $963 per month additional out-of-pocket expense for me, and probably for a lot of guys with families.

And I’m betting it had very little to do with the ACA (last year we were assured our coverage was ACA-compliant and grandfathered and wouldn’t change) and a whole lot to do with the company trimming expenses.

That memo, by the way, was sent only to the boats, not to the one-third of vessel employees then at home. Kind of like the e-mail the day after Christmas that announced that, “due to a computer glitch,” payroll would be delayed by five days.

As my first crewboat mentor told me more than once: “When you mess with my pay, you’re messing with my feelings.”

As I almost got around to mentioning earlier, boat life is not “Lord of the Flies” all the time, not every company is completely awful at communication, and even from boat to boat within a given company’s fleet, the culture can be markedly different.

On one boat on which I worked, for instance, there were literally dozens of hardcore pornographic magazines strewn around the vessel; I had to move them to plot a course on the chart, or eat a bowl of cereal. On the next boat, there was not a skin mag to be seen, but lots of well-read actual books, the kind with words.

On one boat the list of deckhand daily and weekly duties ended with a threat: "If you can't do it, we'll find someone who can! "On the next boat, it ended with a note of encouragement: "You're an important part of the team, and we appreciate all you do!"

In the end, people make the difference, for good or bad.

A Modest Proposal

This fog-shrouded aluminum asylum has got me thinking: what if someone built a crew(boat) company?

Newcomers to the industry, if they are paying attention, at some point will marvel at the quirky cast of characters surrounding them.

You realize pretty quickly that it takes a special kind of person to spend two-thirds of the year on a boat. And when I say “special,” I mean “strange,” or at least estranged.

Quirks range from the amusing to the annoying to the downright … what the hell did he just do?!

You spend more time with these people than you do with your spouse or significant other. You spend more time with them than you spend with your besty, your kids, or your parents. And for 28 days at a time they are always right there.  You can’t get away.

Think about it a little more, and you realize that you are pretty special yourself, or you wouldn’t be here.

There is, at this moment, a lively discussion on gCaptain in response to a prospective mariner’s question about how to start or maintain a relationship or a family. The comments run the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking.

My response would be that it depends on what kind of relationship you have or want with your significant other, and what you are willing to sacrifice – not just for your family, but of your family as well.

My wife, for instance, is an independent professional who doesn’t feel the need to be welded to my side all the time. Like the Gipper, we have a policy of trust but verify.

She’s busy, I’m absent, and we try to make the most of the time we have when I’m home.

Still, we miss a lot, and miss each other a lot. I didn’t marry her, after all, to be away from her eight months of every year.

My 3-year-old takes a photo of me off the wall every night and carries it around until he goes to bed. My 1-year-old, last time I was home, called me “Mama” for an entire week.

I asked him: “Where’s Daddy?” He turned and pointed to a picture.

True story.

Clearly this is insupportable in the long run.

The old lady and I keep telling each other: think of it as a deployment; we’ll suck it up until I upgrade and get a bigger boat and a better schedule.

In the meantime, there is this boat, and every boat I’ve worked on to date, which brings me back to my modest proposal.

If you browse most boat companies’ web sites, you’ll find pages of information about the vessels in their fleet and very little about the mariners who operate those vessels.

In the 100-ton world, at least, crew members – even captains – are largely seen as interchangeable.

I’ve  actually heard these words from one company’s operations manager: “Deckhands are a dime a dozen. It’s a McDonald’s job. We can get a new deckhand any time.”

I have yet to see a formal career ladder, continuing education or meaningful retention plans anywhere I’ve worked.

And so the mill churns, people come and go, things get lost in the shuffle and other things fall between the cracks and that inanimate boat the company is so proud of never operates at maximum efficiency.

If I owned a boat company, I wouldn’t be writing this. But if I did, knowing what I know now, I would consider doing these things:

1. Make building crews a priority over building or buying boats; take the time to put together six or eight people with complimentary (not necessarily identical) abilities, sympathetic outlooks and ambitions, etc.

Do this one crew at a time and never, under any circumstances, disperse that crew. If another boat needs a key crew member, move the entire crew. 

I can imagine this would be extremely difficult and time-consuming. I also know it is possible. A friend who is a captain on another of this company’s boats – a boat no one would ever ask for – was telling me just the other day how great his entire crew is. “That is,” he said, “about 90 percent of the battle out here.

2. Even time: yes, I know …. broken record, right? It is insane to believe that anyone can maintain a normal or healthy family life on a 240-day schedule. It’s a good schedule for work-release. 

It’s a fine schedule for youngsters who a.) don’t have families of their own, b.)  want to stack some green, and c.) couch surf with friends or crash at mom and dad’s in their scant time off. Pay everyone just a little more so there is only an incremental  loss of income.(Consider: even at current, mid-range 100-ton rates, a captain could make $50,000-$60,000 per year on a 180-day schedule; pretty damned good for someone with an eighth-grade education. Pretty damned good for anyone in this post-unionized, post-manufacturing American economy.) 

Do a complete crew change every two weeks with an adequate (mandatory) handover meeting. This would mitigate any additional crew change costs. The only additional costs to the company would be benefits for two additional persons per boat. Man days on the vessel remain the same.

An additional benefit is that there would likely be a larger pool of people to work over if necessary, more time for customer-required or employee-desired education, and a fresher, sharper, less stressed-out and quirky work force.

3. Provide continuing education and a formal career ladder for entry-level employees. Maybe even partner with a reputable company operating larger vessels. The truth is, some people will – for reasons ranging from native ability or ambition to temperament to health to cost – never get off the 100-ton boats and move “up.” That’s okay.

But many people see the 100-ton boats as a stepping stone to an AB or QMED rating or a 500-ton master’s or mate’s license. Recognize that, help them out and get the best out of them while they are here.

On a practical level, a couple of days in the shop each year going over common CumminsK-19 or  K-38 or Cat 3512 issues, troubleshooting and onboard repair would probably save tens of thousands of dollars in third-party mechanics’ labor. 

Many of a crew boat company’s best and brightest will move on. Provide some incentives to stretch the service of those employees, and become the employer of choice for people getting started or folks who simply want to operate fast, aluminum hulls.

“Boat Company Boss for a Day” is a fun thought exercise … kind of like “What would I spend my millions on if I won the lottery?”

I’m about as likely to get to play the former as I am to spend the latter.

Out here we joke among ourselves that our office staff should be required to ride a week with us each year. Then, we grumble, they would understand.

The flip side, of course, is that most of us have little idea the sort of hell 20 boats are giving our crew coordinator or operations manager.

Illuminating my ignorance would only kill the dream, though. It’s nice to dream.

A Pod of Whales

Our regular run out to the field takes us nearly two hours, the first 45 minutes of which is through the Port of Venice, up and across the Mississippi River and through one of the river's many passes.

Black dots show sperm whale distribution.

When we turn out to the southeast, we show only about 10 feet of water under the keel. That number grows only gradually, until we reach what must be a pretty steep slope in the underlying shelf. The depth goes from about 30 feet to 125 feet in the space of a couple of miles.

The Mississippi Delta is a fascinating place for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that -- for reasons I haven't taken the time to discover -- sperm whales sometimes show up there.

Other whales are resident in the Gulf of Mexico as well, including pilot whales, pygmy sperm whales, right whales (a mother and her calf took a little side trip up the Corpus Christi Ship Channel a while ago) and even orcas.

My most common cetacean encounters though are with dolphins -- Atlantic bottlenose dolphins and Atlantic spotted dolphins.

So imagine my excitement early one morning a few weeks ago when a captain on another boat mentioned the pod of whales up ahead of us.

The other boat, a supply vessel, was also making its way out toward our field. In the pre-dawn murk, I called ahead and asked the captain if I could overtake him on "the two," that is, come around his port side.

"No problem, cap," he replied. "Y'all have a good morning."

Then, almost as an afterthought: "Y'all going around that pod of whales up there?"

Pod of whales? What?!

My first thought was: "Why are there whales in such shallow water?"

My second thought was: "How does he know there is a pod of whales up head of us in the dark? Does someone track them and then broadcast their location?"

My third thought was: "Does he have some sort of whale-detecting equipment on his boat? That's weird ..."

I called him back: "Say again?"

"I was just wondering if y'all are going to go around the north end of that pod of whales up ahead," he said. "I usually just go all the way around because they're so close together."

Oh. I see: pod of .... wells.

He was talking about the dense cluster of satellites on our course.

Later the same day, I tell the other captain on our boat the story.

He looked at me strangely: "But I saw a whale today," he said. "It had barnacles all over its back and a big ol' tail, which came all the way out of the water before he went down."

He then proceeded to tell me about other whale sightings.

Should I be so fortunate to see a whale, or even a pod of whales, I'm pretty sure I won't be going around them. I will, though, wake everyone on the boat so they can see them too.

Drilling for Dummies

Being trash strictly of the boat variety rather than the oilfied type, I'm constantly trying to assign the correct names to the equipment we carry out to the drilling rigs, and often find myself asking rig hands and company men "what's that?" and "what does that thing do?"

My buddy over at New England Waterman recently posted this link, sort of a "Drilling for Dummies" primer. Cool. I think I'll go and read it now.

Well, Hello There ...

Here we are: 2013. The election has come and gone, a plunge over the fiscal cliff was narrowly averted and all that worry about the Mayan calendar has come to naught. Former hometown hero Lance Armstrong is reportedly set to announce that yes, in fact he is a lying bastard.

The U.S. is enjoying a 20-year peak in oil production and is on-track to claim the title of top oil producing nation in the world in the next decade. Newbuilds are hitting the water one after another, and rigs and boats are making their way back to the Gulf.

Me? I've been hanging out with the family for the past five weeks. During that time we moved across town, celebrated the holidays and explored the new neighborhood.

This Christmas marked the first time since ... well, probably in at least a decade, that I got to spend Christmas with the entire family -- both my brother and my sister (and their awesome significant others), the kids and my folks.

I was grateful for that opportunity.

We're a mile from our neighborhood brewpub (in which we promptly invested) and from a light rail station. There has been lots of kid time, which has been a real joy after spending nearly three months straight away from home.

I even got to head downtown to one of my old haunts for the "Wednesday Night Church Service," and was reminded, again, how fortunate I am to make my home in a place where $8 buys me a couple of hours of truly world-class music.

With another  200 days at sea under my belt, I now have the requisite time in the right categories to sit for the 500-ton Mate Oceans exam, and I'm just a few months shy of time enough for the 500-ton Master. 

I think I'll sit both and be done with license exams through 1600-ton Master and 2nd Mate All Gross Tons.

First, though, I have a long list of endorsements and assessments to complete. Short of spending about four months and $20,000 in a structured program, it's catch-as-catch-can at a handful of schools scattered around the continent's rim.

I start Monday with the Radar Observer Unlimited course at Fletcher Technical Community College in Houma, La. I have used radars routinely since the days when I was running tour boats; maybe this course will help me use them more effectively.

The climb up through the hawsepipe is a long one and is not particularly straightforward after the implementation of STCW 95. But how cool is it that there is even such an option in this country?! Many maritime nations have only one route to the wheelhouse, and that's through an academy of some sort.

The only way this works for me, by the way, is because my lovely bride also works.

She's sort of a superwoman -- holding down a high-pressure, senior-level position for a large healthcare network, taking care of our two youngest children (both still in diapers) and managing to remember to feed the dog and cat.

That doesn't give me the freedom to not work, but it does give us enough float that I can take a little time off and go to school, and I don't have to accept the first job that's offered.

The game plan of the day is to spend half of the week after next interviewing for jobs; I think I'll be looking at companies with larger boats -- mini-supply and supply boats.

Crewboats are cool, but with the growing importance of deepwater E&P, there may be much better opportunities on the larger, slower, steel hulls.

I'll keep you posted.

What Lies Beneath

I've written about some of the cool critters we see out in the Gulf, but had to come home to have the time and bandwidth to actually upload video.

So here it is, with thanks to JJ Grey (with whom I briefly sat on the board of a marine conservation non-profit) for the music.

The camera is a Panasonic Lumix duct-taped to the end of a hook pole. No live view as I was filming, so please excuse the herky-jerky quality of the video.

Small World

A shout-out to my compadre from Florida who sherlocked his way through this blog and correctly deduced not only what company I work for, but what boat I’m on and what field we’re working. Of course, he’s a captain on a sister ship for the same company.

Anyhow, thanks for reading.

More proof that it’s a small world … I’ve been puzzling over why this damned norther just keeps blowing and blowing after the front passed through. Navtex delivered the answer this afternoon:

High pressure well NW of the area is combining with the large wind field of Hurcn Sandy to produce fresh to strong NW to N winds behind the front. These winds will persist thru early Mon over W portions of the Gulf … and linger to the E. Winds will diminish basin wide Tue and Wed as high pres builds SE across the Gulf ….

And here I thought that the late-season hurricane that barely brushed the Gulf was a mid-Atlantic and Northeast problem, one that wouldn’t affect us at all. I looked at the projected track last week and dismissed it from my mind.

“Fresh” and “strong” are adjectives with specific meanings in marine meteorology; they correspond to Force 5 and Force 6 on the Beaufort Wind Scale, or 17-21 knots and 22-27 knots, respectively.

So, thanks Sandy, for the extended cold front. And my very best wishes to the mariners who must deal with the comparably much worse conditions up the east coast and in the Atlantic.