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.

Seventeen Seagulls

The production boat in our field suffered the third mechanical breakdown in as many weeks Thanksgiving morning.

What that meant for us is that when we headed out on our normal daily run about 0500 Thursday, we didn't hit the dock again until late Saturday.

A good rule of thumb is that mechanical failures, family emergencies, sudden illnesses, falls from ladders and so on that occur on or immediately before holidays are suspect.

I'm not saying the other boat's crew (all of whom are local) went home for the holiday. But I wouldn't be surprised.

So, anyway, we took up the slack. Which was okay, because we had been sitting at the dock for five days, while that other boat rolled around in 10-14 foot seas.

And it's not like we were being fair-weather sailors; every morning the company man at our platform took a look at his weather forecast, took a look over the railing, then called us and told us to sit tight.

By the time we did get to the field, seas had subsided to an easy 2-3 ft. and our nights on the buoy were downright soporific.

Two nights in a row we had a flock of seagulls foraging beneath our deck lights: exactly 17 of them, both nights.

They were quiet, almost ghostly, and soared in and out of the darkness, flopping inexpertly into the water to pick-up their prey. I marked them down as first-winter birds, with blockier heads and less voice than Laughing gulls.

I suspect Bonaparte's gulls, which should be easy enough to identify if I think to look for a couple of distinctive field marks next time.

In other news, our boat has a new first captain, and it's not me. And that's just fine: the guy who was chosen has loads of experience with this company and has been doing this long enough to make his worst mistakes and learn from them.

More than anything I'm happy that we'll now have continuity across watches and someone to make final decisions.

Ever dreamed of working on a democratic boat where decision-making is by consensus? There is a reason that not even the Soviet Union operated a ship as a worker's cooperative.

It. Does. Not. Work.

There are usually about half a dozen ways to do anything out here, and two or three of them probably even work pretty well. Sometimes it just comes down to personal preference or habit, and that's okay.

There's some more shaking-out to do, and we'll see how that goes. I'm sure I don't understand everything -- the resume, the experience, the demonstrated knowledge, the communication skills, the management chops, the boat-handling ability, the maturity, the dues paid, the politics -- that factors into these decisions.

But the fact that the office folks got it right with our lead captain gives me hope, and quiets the turmoil of my thoughts enough that I can go back to counting seagulls.

Books

When I was brand spanking new to this career, it was not unusual for me to show up to the boat with a milk crate full of books.

I would like to say I read voraciously, but in fact it's more like "indiscriminately." I read good books and I read crap books. Fiction and non-fiction. Escapist entertainments and prize-winning literature. Sometimes I read professional references.

One night a couple of weeks ago I overheard an exchange over the radio between a captain on one of the boats that also works for our customer and a captain on another boat. It was all about books.

That radio exchange resulted in the gifting of a large box of reportedly high-quality hardbacks to the boat that frequently ties-up next to us. I've been invited over to find something I'd like to read.

At some point over the last couple of years, I discovered the Kindle. It's magic. Bookstores are few and far between in South Louisiana, but with a 4G wi-fi connection, I can download the latest releases in seconds.

I still go to sea with dozens of books, but now most of them are on my e-reader and, sadly, not readily shareable.

Looking at my Kindle now, here are a few I can recommend:

Storm Front by John Sandford. This is the latest in Sandford's Virgil Flowers series, and like all of the author's Minnesota-set thrillers, a fun read.

Deceived, by Randy Wayne White. A spin-off from the Doc Ford series that features fishing guide and PI Hannah Smith. The writing is less consistently terrific than in the Doc Ford novels, but it's still good.

Never Go Back, by Lee Child. Jack Reacher is one of the great characters of recent adventure fiction. I refuse to see the horribly miscast movie.

I discovered Justin Cronin, a creative writing teacher at Houston's Rice University, through his science fiction stories. He has also written some literary fiction of note, including: Mary and O'Neil and The Summer Guest. I especially enjoyed the latter.

I think I'm all caught up on Martin Cruz Smith's (Gorky Park) Arkady Renko novels now. I recently read Wolves Eat Dogs, Red Square and Three Stations. Renko is another great fictional character.

Drive up and down Hwy 90 in South Louisiana long enough, and you'll see the name "Robichaux" pretty frequently. James Lee Burke's series featuring the Iberia Parish sheriff's detective by the same name blurs the line between genre entertainment and high-brow literature.

Burke's bio led me to the work of his cousin, the famed short story writer Andre Dubus. I just finished his Selected Stories and will be looking for more.

I find I have quite a few Jim Harrison books on my Kindle. I guess that's because, over the past 12 months or so, Harrison has become hands-down my favorite living writer, maybe my favorite writer period. Maybe you know him from Legends of the Fall.

Harrison is sort of Bukowski-Hemingway-Zane Grey all rolled-up together. Perhaps a bit more honorable than any of them, come to think of it. Start anywhere (the collections of novellas -- something like The River Swimmer would give you a good taste) but at some point also pick up his memoir, Off to the Side.

I recently finished the trade paperback version of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The pace of this epistolary novel had been described as "elegaic," and I would say that's about right. 

It's almost a ... meditation or prayer, I guess. It took me a while to "get into" the story, but before long I found myself looking forward to the end of my watch so I could get back to it.

For recommendations on professional (or at least related) reading, I often refer back to a thread on the gCaptain forum called "Books in Your Library."

I can heartily recommend Max Hardberger's Freighter Captain and Seized. The latter has received more press, but the former is a better read, I think. It also happens to be available only as an e-book.

The Voyage of the Rose City by the late John Moynihan is a great read, and well-worth picking up. In the same vein, I am re-reading the John McPhee classic, Looking for a Ship.

My Kindle also holds a copy of Navigation Rules, The Arts of the Sailor, The Sailor's Word Book (free!), Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems, Thinking, Fast and Slow and Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast.

In hardback, I've been carrying around (and sometimes even referring to) Nigel Calder's Marine Diesel Engines: Maintenance, Troubleshooting and Repair. Mechanics of any kind not being my strong suite, I take whatever help I can find, wherever I can find it. Calder's book is geared more toward yachties, and powerplants somewhat smaller than the massive Cats that drive my boat. 

Still, a diesel engine is a diesel engine and this straightforward book is helpful.

In hopes of getting a jump on celestial navigation, and upon the recommendation of someone on gCaptain, I recently purchased the paperback version of A Star to Steer Her By by Edward Bergin.

For the edification (and education) of the entire crew, I recently ordered the Sibley Guide to Birds and Hoese and Moore's Fishes of the Gulf of Mexico.They live near the chart table for quick reference.

My father sent me a copy of At All Costs: How a Crippled Ship and Two American Merchant Mariners Turned the Tide of World War II. I enjoyed it very much. So much, I paid it forward to a friend who works as a captain for another company. He was able to stern-up next to us in Fourchon long enough to take possession.

I'm a fan of Nelson DeMille's writing and looked forward all summer to The Quest, an expansion and rewriting of an early novel and the only thing I haven't yet read. It was an all-around disappointment and I can't help wondering if perhaps his best work is now behind him.

I enjoy the mindless adventure of Clive Cussler's books, and I'm not the only fan on the boat. I'll be taking a stack of Cussler and Hiasson and whatever else I can find that I think others might enjoy back with me in about 10 days.

In a milk crate, of course.

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.

Terror at Tiger Pass!

Somewhere off the coast of Africa this week, an Edison Chouest Offshore supply vessel was attacked by pirates and the American captain and chief engineer were kidnapped.

Elsewhere in the Pacific a couple of weeks ago, some poor ship somewhere was caught in the grip of a typhoon.

I sail on a small ship in a small sea. I suppose I am doomed to diminutive adventures.

I am reminded of the old veteran who was asked which war he served in.

“The Big One,” he replied.

“Oh, wow, I didn’t think you were quite old enough to be in World War II,” the other guy said.

“I wasn’t. I was in Korea, and it felt mighty damned big to me,” retorted the old soldier.

That exchange probably made more sense 20 or 30 years ago when I first heard it – back when Korean War veterans were merely middle-aged. But I digress, before I even get started.

Here’s what happened.

We leave the dock in Venice at 4 a.m. In a driving rain. A left takes us up Tiger Pass, and another left turn to take us north in the Jump to the Mississippi River.

About three-quarters of the way up the Jump, making a little better than 7 knots, I feel the engines suddenly drop out of gear. I pull them back to clutch, and then re-engage the throttles.

According to my gauges, they’re still idling, but there is no response to the controls.

I check my throttle selector -- a tiny toggle switch that moves inputs between the forward and aft helm stations. It’s where it is supposed to be.

Suddenly, my engine monitoring system shows “NO DATA” for two of the engines. The other two flicker in and out.

By this time I have lost all forward momentum and the river’s current is beginning to drag me back. I turn on the Not Under Command lights (red over red), make a security call on VHF 13, and run downstairs to wake everyone up.

Our progress, backwards, to the intersection of the Jump and Tiger Pass

The engineer and the off-watch captain tackle the problem, which we assume to be electrical. The deckhand helps keep lookout, and I man the radios.

There is quite a bit of traffic – supply vessels, crewboats, tugs and barges, shrimp boats --  through the Jump, which portions some amount of the Mississippi River into Tiger Pass and Grand Pass.

The current is not being kind to us, and begins to drag the bow of the boat – the most vulnerable section of the hull – towards a nasty group of pilings on the north bank of the Jump. It occurs to me, belatedly, that I do have control of one engine on the boat, one that is not hooked-up to the malfunctioning monitoring system.

I turn-on the bow thruster and use it to steer the boat. We pirouette gracefully off of the steep bank of a slip, and I flip the boat nearly 180 degrees, hoping to be able to catch an abandoned dock where the Jump meets Tiger Pass.

No one is more surprised than me that I’m able to swing the starboard stern to within a few feet of the dock. 

The deckhand catches a piling and makes us fast, and I use the bow thruster to ease us up against the dock, where we secure the boat.

We are no longer a hazard to navigation.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew is troubleshooting at a rapid pace. We find a couple of wires melted together in a control box. We isolate and reattach them. We regain throttles for about a minute, before the whole system crashes.

Another crewboat that works our field – and whose captain holds a master of towing vessels – comes alongside to take us back to our dock. Back in the middle of the Jump, we are in the midst of letting go the other boat so he can come around to our starboard side when once again our throttles come to life.

“Let’s see if we can hold ‘em long enough to get back to the dock,” I tell the other captain. “But if you could shadow us back, that would be great.”

And … we make it. Two hours after our departure. We thought we had the problem beat, too, until we tried to leave the dock an hour later and the same thing happened all over again.

Turned out the problem was in the interface between one of the big Caterpillar engines and the aftermarket control system.

Or one of the problems was.

Regardless, it was fixed, and we’re none the worse for the experience.

It was a bit of an adrenaline dump that left me feeling wrung-out the rest of the morning.

And that’s my sea story for this hitch.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a reluctant Victorian-era poet who converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. His father was, among other things, a marine insurer, and one of Hopkins' best-known poems is The Wreck of the Deutschland.

I have been a fan of Father Hopkins' verse since my college days, for his use of sprung rhythm and alliteration as well as his keen eye for the natural world.

I suspect, though I have not confirmed, that industrial Britain in the second half of the 19th century was in some ways not so different than the Gulf of Mexico oil patch in the first half of the 21st century.

Many mornings on the boat, Hopkins' words come to mind:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. "God's Grandeur," Poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918

Blah, blah, blah

I woke-up yesterday afternoon in time to finish a backload and bring the boat back in.

The shrimping must be really good on the east side of the delta between Main Pass and Baptiste Collette. There sure were a lot of shrimp boats out there.

We took on a little more than 10 tons of fuel and 20 tons of potable water. Changed the oil and filters on the port generator. Just a moment ago I finished tightening-down the stuffing boxes on all four shafts, trying to find that elusive 3-second drip.

At about five minutes after midnight, the engineer offered to head downstairs to wake-up the deckhand. When I finally saw him, at about 00:30, I said: "Look, being late for your watch is a write-up offense. I don't want to write you up. So don't be late."

He looked confused, so I reiterated what I had said the first night we worked together.

"Your watch is midnight 'til noon. I expect to see you 10 or 15 minutes before your watch starts so I can let you know what we have going on, help you prioritize if we have an interruption, or whatever."

He looked more confused, then asked: "But what if I'm not awake 10 minutes before my watch?"

I have a feeling the second half of this hitch is going to be a long couple of weeks.

Hexadekaphobia

Thursday the 16th. Crew change day. Grocery day. The mechanics are coming on-board to wrap-up the repair on our steering pump day.

Thursday the 16th. The day our customer fires an entire service company and keeps us in the field until every single piece of their equipment, and all their people, are on our boat.

Our platform is ... well, I don't know if it's unique in all the Gulf, but it's certainly different than any I've ever worked before. There are two cranes, which is not unusual. They are pretty short cranes, which also is not unusual.

At both cranes, the crane operator cannot actually see the deck of the boat he is offloading or backloading, which is very unusual. I mean, not at all. Sometimes they'll post a flagger at the rail to relay crane signals. Other times I or the deckhand give the crane operator verbal signals over the radio.

At one point during the backload, the platform sent down a wireline unit that weighed maybe 15,000 pounds. It had three, really long taglines attached to it. For a deckhand with just one free hand who was simultaneously giving signals over the radio to the crane operator and giving me hand signals about where he wanted the boat.

A consequence of this very short crane with no visual communication between the operator and the deck is that he just hangs the load over the water, and I then position the boat under the lift where I want it set down.

Somehow it all worked out.

Well, mostly. For reasons of stability, I prefer to have heavy loads forward on the deck. So I have a hope of seeing the stern of the boat from the aft helm station, I likewise prefer to have tall loads up close to the house.

But I can direct the loading of the boat that way only if I know what's coming. The crane operator, for some reason, has it in his head that I should have heavy lifts on the stern and all the light stuff up front. We went back and forth on this over the radio, and by the time the heavy stuff started coming down, the front of the deck was already filled-up.

Two days in a row we've been back at the dock by 9:30 in the morning. Now, on crew change day, we don't leave the field until midnight.

Because we're heavy, and despite the fact that I've pumped off about 3,000 gallons of water, we'll now only make about 17 knots. In places, only about 15 knots, depending on the water depth.

At the dock, we have a cargo box of supplies and groceries, a couple of crew members signing-on and two very tired mechanics. On board, we have seven unhappy passengers and there is no clear path from the front of the boat to the back of the boat.

I'm no dummy, and I call our dispatcher about two hours out and explain the situation very clearly. I don't demand that he put us under the crane as soon as we get in, but I figure it should be clear that under the crane is where we need to be.

Not only was there a boat already under the crane, our standby spot was two-deep in crewboats.

Turned out there was a hole about 32-feet wide between their sterns and a 65-foot crewboat that spends the night on our dock. It was suggested that I stern-up there to let our passengers off and our mechanics on.

When I got to this boat, I was told that there is not room to top around in this slip (we back down out of Tiger Pass). And in many places -- due to barges, other boats, etc. -- there is not.

But by going to the very back of the slip and topping around in the "T," I was able to slide back to that hole and sort of twist into it using the bow thruster and the inboards.

It felt like a pretty nifty piece of boat handling to me, though I may have been the only one impressed.

Anyhow, all of this led to a delayed crew change, which meant the on-signers hadn't been able to get any rest, which meant that I needed to stay up later (not to mention we were changing the watch schedule), which meant that I had been up, and mostly operating the boat, for 21 hours by the time I was relieved.

Yesterday, of course, we were back at the dock by noon and we're not expected to have another run until Friday.

Apparently that sort of nonsense only happens on crew change day. On the sixteenth.

It's enough to make a fellow develop a phobia.

Prejudice and Pride

I've been on the new boat a couple of weeks now, and I'm happy to say it seems to be going well.

I really enjoy the guys I'm working with this part of the hitch, and that helps. A lot.

During Week One, I spent almost all my time -- all the time I wasn't actually operating the boat -- reading through the company's new Safety Management System manual, chasing-down and catching-up paperwork the manual says we should be doing, teaching the other captain (let's call him "Curt") how to use the computerized log system, and so on.

Curt's a terrific shipmate, and makes up for his lack of paperwork prowess with a fearless engagement of the engine room.

At some point in the past week, during a protracted watch turnover, we were discussing our previous careers, and I mentioned some of the office jobs I'd held.

"Well, that explains why you're so good at the paperwork and the computer," he said.

"I guess," I replied, "It's easy for me and something I can contribute, but I'd rather be known as someone who can run a boat."

"Oh, you do fine," Curt said. "I don't see any problems on that end."

Then Curt let slip that the only thing he'd heard about me before I came over here was that I was a "wheelhouse" captain. 

That may not sound so bad, but in this business it's a whole lot worse than damning with faint praise. It's something along the lines of a verbal sneer. It can be career-limiting. It also happens, in this instance, not to be true.

No matter; I'm pretty sure I know where that came from and why, and it doesn't have anything to do with my willingness to get down and dirty with the crew.

But.

It does make one think, and during my Week Two here I've been extra conscious about helping-out on deck and in the engine room, and we've gotten some good work done on the boat.

The other night our dispatcher sent us straight over to one fuel dock to load water, then to another fuel dock to pick up some drums he needed for another boat at our dock.

I had never been to the second dock, and had to call them several times to figure-out exactly where I was going and where they wanted me once we got there. Another of our company's boats was lying along the outside of the dock, partially blocking the slip I had been told to stern-up in.

The captain on our other boat called me on the radio: "Hey Cap, I can slide back for you if you need me to."

"Nah," I reply. "I think I can get in there." He could see where I was going better than me and moved out of the way anyhow.

Now this particular slip is oddly shaped, kind of like this:

That boat-shaped thing in the middle of my bad drawing? That was another crew boat. The Jump? It has some percentage of the Mississippi River's outflow moving through it at a brisk pace.

Anyhow, I wriggled in and was relieved not to have crunched anything.

As we were leaving, though, the current caught my bow and started pushing me down on the other crewboat in the slip. I threw her into a full-throttle pivot, figuring I'd deal with my bow and the third crewboat, bow-in on the far side of the slip, if I managed to clear the one now behind me.

We did, by about two feet, which is too close for my comfort. And we made it out into the Jump okay.

I called-up the captain on our other boat, who may or may not have been watching the whole procedure.

"Hey, this is Curt on the _______," I said. "That slip's a little tricky, isn't it?"

We chatted a few minutes, and I signed-off.

Fortunately, this time my pride was the only thing that was damaged (and only privately, at that). I don't think I'm the World's Greatest Captain, but I'm a pretty fair boat handler, and stuff like that is NOT supposed to happen to me.

But sometimes, thankfully rarely these days, it does. And I suspect I'm not alone in this, that a lot of us out here have "Oh, shit!" moments we just don't tell anyone about.

At least not using our real names.

Part of that is ego, of course, but part of it also may arise from the fact that even though this is a booming industry with lots of jobs at the moment there also are about 100 tons of 100-ton captains out there. A "zero-defect" mentality prevails in some quarters, and fear of being replaced prevents an honest discussion and analysis of accidents and near-misses.

I read in the new SMS that a company steering committee will hold quarterly meetings to discuss accidents and near-misses and provide lessons learned to the fleet. I hope that happens.

But I'm afraid that, at least this one time, "Curt" will not be contributing.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, Off to Sea I Go

Back at it on a different boat almost identical to the old boat working a new-to-me field out of Venice, La.

My only prior experience of Venice was a tuna fishing trip many years ago that featured lots of beer and very few tuna.

Working here now is just like that, minus the beer.

The boat is in good shape and the crew is about five kinds of awesome. Nothing really to say about any of that.

So let's talk about the weather.

The first weekend of the hitch brings a tropical weather system followed by a strong cold front. For a while it looked like Tropical Storm Karen might mature into a Category One hurricane before landfall.

For a while, it looked like Karen was going to track right over my boat.

Turns out Karen is both disorganized and unambitious. She's slowed-down, wobbled a bit more northward, and is sort of just falling apart. Karen may still be a minimal tropical storm when she arrives, or perhaps just an unnamed tropical depression.

Meanwhile, not much is moving in Venice. Almost everyone who works at the dock our customer uses has bailed.

The company man who rode in with us two days ago told me they wouldn't need us before Monday. We'll see.

For a busy boat, any downtime is a welcomed opportunity to do a little maintenance. Last night we worked four hours into my off-watch repacking the rudder shafts and resolving a bilge pump issue.

Today it's parts and equipment inventory and the supply requisition. Fun times.

Let There Be Light, But Not Too Much Light

I've heard it said that we really earn our money at the stern controls.

Crewboats -- and most offshore service vessels -- have two helm stations: the forward helm station you'd expect to find on any boat, and an aft helm station with a sweeping view of the cargo deck and the stern.

That's where the close-quarters maneuvering takes place; offload and backload at rigs and platforms, personnel transfers, docking and undocking.

On a boat without DP, like this one, it can be stressful. Live-boating a two-hour water transfer to a production platform in 4-6-foot seas in the middle of the night; transferring deck cargo to a supply boat while fighting a 4-kt. current, 20 knots of wind and the other boat's wheel wash ... it can get pretty exciting.

It's also fun and interesting, and at the end of it all I sometimes feel a little drained.

That's one of the reasons that when we finish at the rig, I'm happy to punch in the numbers for Belle Pass and let the deckhand take the wheel while I catch-up the logs, grab a cup of coffee and take a smoke break on the "Texas" deck just behind the wheelhouse.

The other night as we settled on to our homeward course, I noticed a bright glow on the water. I looked over the railing and saw that the (mostly) blue deck lights ringing the house were on.

"Hey," I said as I ducked my head in to the wheelhouse, "turn those deck lights off, will you?"

"I have them on so these shrimp boats can see us better," said the deckhand.

This is a peeve I feed and groom on a daily basis: the navigation rules specify what lights a vessel must display. The flip side is that the same rules stipulate what lights a vessel may display.

Rule 20: (b) The Rules concerning lights shall be complied with from sunset to sunrise, and during such times no other lights shall be exhibited, except such lights which cannot be mistaken for the lights specified in these Rules or do not impair their visibility or distinctive character, or interfere with the keeping of a proper look-out.

Lights tell us a lot: they can tell us how large the other vessel is, which way it's going and what it's up to. This in turn tells me whether my vessel is privileged or burdened and whether there is a risk of collision, and dictates whether I need to talk to my counterpart on the other boat or make a course adjustment.

Rule 30 does allow that vessels of less than 100 meters may display working and deck lights while at anchor. This rule is frequently observed by workboats and crewboats moored to platforms in the Gulf.

It is confusing, then, to come rolling by what one assumes is a boat hanging on a satellite to discover, instead, the vessel is underway and the captain forgot to turn off his floodlights. Hopefully AIS or radar gave me a heads-up about that, but it doesn't always or there is so much information on the screen I haven't yet sorted it out.

But back to those shrimp boats. I hate 'em. I mean, I don't really ... I love shrimp, and that industry is an important part of the heritage and culture of my hometown. But I hate having to deal with them on the water: they rarely answer the radio, they always seem to be right on my course, and those damned work lights are blinding.

So blinding, in fact, that it's often difficult to tell at any distance which way the shrimp boat is moving or if it is underway at all. See Rule 20, above.

Aside from the glaring worklights, we know shrimpboats by the green-over-white all-around lights they display.According to Rule 26, those are the only lights they should display while engaged in trawling, but what are you gonna do?

They are probably relying on a fact that immediately came to mind when my deckhand told me he had the lights on so the shrimpers could see us better: they don't need to see us better, because according to Rule 18, vessels engaged in fishing are privileged over all other classes of vessels, except those not under command or restricted in their ability to maneuver.

Holding my boat at the rig or platform may be the more technically challenging part of this job, but I'm betting that if I ever have the misfortune to be involved in an accident, it's going to be on that boring, "easy,"point A to point B stretch.

Sturm und Drang

Well, today, anyhow. Lightning. Sheeting rain. More than 11 hours underway.

We headed out this morning with a larger-than-usual deck load and 15 passengers.

At the rig, the wind was out of the west-southwest, the current still pulling toward the east-southeast. Into the platform.

The rig called one of their supply boats over and thus began a complicated (but mostly time-consuming) cargo shuffle. Stuff from our deck to the rig floor. Stuff from our deck to the other boat's deck. Stuff from their deck to our deck. Stuff from the rig to our deck.

The supply vessel has dynamic positioning. We don't. But in the back-and-forth banter between the crane operator, the other boat and us I caught a fleeting, off-hand compliment from the crane operator: "Well, at least this guy can hold the boat in there. That makes a huge difference, believe me!"

I was being compared to the captain of the boat we replaced on this job. Then came a critical recollection of another captain who couldn't: "Had to chase him all over the Gulf with this crane ...."

Unfortunately, that guy was formerly on one of our other boats. He's "no longer with us," as they say.

Still, positive reinforcement is rare out here and I'll take what I can get.

Between cargo transfers, our engineer got some time on the sticks; he's off to school at the end of this hitch and hopes to come back as a training captain.

After nine years on deck and in the engine room, it's about time, and I look forward to working with him in the wheelhouse.

Almost three weeks down and just a little more than one to go. I don't really start counting the days until the weekend before crew change -- it's easier if I just don't think about it until I can count the wake-ups on one hand.

And not just because I'm bad at math.

Rolling, rolling, rolling ....

Coming into day seven of long, back-to-back runs. We’ve done a bit of everything: we have been to drilling rigs, lift boats and production platforms; pumped water and fuel, transferred cargo and personnel, even got a few hours of standby time in 200-feet of water.

During our offshore standby time the lead captain caught a tuna on the first drop, and that was lunch.

The weather has been all over the place, too, with a late-season cold front stalled over the area. Two nights in a row we had 40-knot winds, 5-to-7-foot seas, lightning and torrential rain. We even had hail, which makes quite a racket on an aluminum-hulled boat.

I’m also coming into day 27 of a 28-day hitch. I figured-out a while back that it’s not helpful to count the days ‘til the end, which now is nigh. Phew!

I could complain about my first hitch on this boat, but I’d have to make something up. The crew is still coming together, but the new first captain seems like a real good guy.

Back when we were still sitting at the dock a couple of days at a stretch, back in the good old days, we got some painting done on deck and have been tackling small repair and maintenance projects as we can. But mostly things are in good shape, and what’s not will be fixed when we go to shipyard in a month or so.

In the last week of running, I have been reminded of some of the unique privileges of this work. A new moon and a cloudless sky several nights have showcased the spangled vault above with the great, hazy wash of the Milky Way arcing overhead.

Our bow wave this past week has been a molten cascade of blue. It is the electric blue of lightning, the neon blue of sin, the plasma blue of a Star Trek warp drive.

On no more evidence than the color, I blame moderate densities of Noctiluca scintillans. The water is still cool enough for those bioluminescing dinoflagellates to be hanging around.

Anyhow, mesmerizing to watch, difficult to photograph.

In Which We Clear the Air, Encounter Reduced Visibility and Consider the (W)Retchedness of Passengers

I have a good friend who has just started a new job with a big consulting firm. He has been the number two guy at a smaller consulting company for years now, where he managed projects for one of the energy majors as well as a number of smaller organizations. It was pretty low-stress.

I asked him this week how the new gig is going.

"It's kicking my ass," he said. "The last two days I've worked 7:30 to midnight."

He told me earlier it's a steep learning curve, and moving faster than he's been used to in the past couple of years. It will undoubtedly, he said, get easier.

Not a lot unlike coming to a new company and a new boat in a new field working for a new customer.

The first nine days at my new job were pretty tough. The last five, much better.

A big part of that was a heart-to-heart with the first captain (post-g-d-coffeepot). Turns out he made some assumptions about what I was and wasn't willing to do on the boat and I made some assumptions about the way he wanted things done. We agreed to start over.

There's a lot to appreciate about this guy: he's an excellent boat handler and seems to be a very competent and knowledgeable mariner; he works and gets dirty with the crew; he has high standards and expects everyone else on the boat to meet them.

I'm sure I can learn some valuable things from him.

It probably helps our relationship that over the first hitch I didn't hit anything, didn't hurt anyone, and the job got done correctly and on-time. I stood my last five watches solo and without interference.

Over the weekend lower temps and higher dewpoints led do the development of patchy fog across our field. Fortunately, I didn't encounter any on my watch coming or going from the dock, but we were enveloped in the cold, damp, opaque mess one morning upon arrival to one of our drilling rigs.

At one point I had maybe a boat length of visibility. The answer: slow down, pay close attention to the radar, and use the radio a little more.

Monday, headed out on an evening run with six lifts and four passengers, I turned the helm over to my deckhand once we cleared the channel and ducked down to the galley for a cup of coffee.

On my way down, I noticed one of our passengers stand up unsteadily, sweat beading on his face. By the time I came back up the stairs he was loudly puking in the topside head.

I prefer passengers vomit outside, but this poor guy was non-stop and wouldn't have made it out the door to the back deck.

Through a process of elimination (he couldn't actually speak, just nod or shake his head between upchucks), I determined that he was going to a production platform and what his name was.

Unfortunately for him, drilling pays our bills and production is always the last stop. As the sounds of violent vomiting continued, I made some calls on the radio and altered course. We got him off first.

The deckhand and I did have some evil fun predicting which waves would set-off a new round: "Oh man, this one's going to get him ...." immediately followed by loud retching and the sound of the toilet flushing.

I've sometimes heard young guys boast they "never get seasick," as if it's some sort of test of manhood. And while I've never been more than a bit queasy myself, I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with an individual's own physiology (the inner ear and all that) and not much to do with experience, courage or fortitude.

In fact, I know a couple of men who are career mariners and boat owners who have, all their lives, become ill in a light chop. They deal with it pharmaceutically and carry on.

The new boat is busy, busy. We run as much as 20 hours some days, and in the two weeks I was aboard we never ran less than 10 hours in a day.

That's a change from my last job working production for Apache, where we rarely ran more than 10 hours a day and often less, except of course for the long trip out to the field and grocery deliveries at the beginning of the week.

Apache production typically works only during daylight hours, too, while drilling is around-the-clock and some rig crew changes occur at midnight.

Busy is good; it makes the hitch pass quickly.

The Goddamned Coffeepot

The wind has finally laid down some, a real favor to this boat -- a "big 135" with a measly 2,800 horses and no thruster. Not that I've ever used a thruster on a crewboat, but still ...

This morning, at our fourth stop of the run, the first captain came storming up the wheelhouse stairs, shoved me out of the way and said: "I'm going to school you ..." I was, he said, making the deckhands uptight.

The indictment read as follows: throttle jockeying, rushing from rig to rig, dumping gears.

Hey, it's his boat and he has the right to insist it is run the way he wants it run. But I'm no throttle jockey. And I sure as hell wasn't throwing the sticks down on the dash with an audible "clack" as he demonstrated; I don't even hold the throttles in a way that would make that possible.

I may not be doing everything exactly the way he wants on this boat yet, but I sure wasn't doing everything wrong, which was his strong implication.

A little later, he rushed up the steps again.

"This is the second morning in a row the coffeepot hasn't been set up. On this boat, you have to set the coffee pot up for the next watch."

"Okay, I got that," I said.

"Well, why wasn't it done? This is the second time. It was set up for you!"

"Probably because I'm still drinking coffee, and it's not even 1100. You come on watch at noon, right? Also, I've been driving the boat for the last five hours."

"It's got to be set up when I wake up," he clarifies. "If I get up before [the engineer], if that coffee is more than 20 minutes old, I dump it out and make a fresh pot for him. We don't drink old coffee."

"Okay, [his name -- rhymes with "Dick"], so what time do you usually get up?"

"It depends, but usually by 8 or 8:30."

"Okay," I say. "I guess I'll stop drinking coffee by 0700, just to be safe, and make sure the pot is set up for you."

"Look," he says, voice rising, "That's just the way it is on this boat, the way it's been for the past 13 years. If you can't get with the program I'll throw the goddamned coffeepot overboard!"

Alrighty then.

Oddly, that's the longest exchange I've had with this guy. The other day, in an effort to make small talk, maybe find a connection, I asked: "So, what kind of bike do you have?"

I got a one-word reply: "Harley." Then he walked away.

I could have guessed that much, given that he was wearing a Harley t-shirt.

Does it matter? <shrug> I dunno. In the end I'm here for a paycheck, and for the sea time. I'm always hoping to learn something new and improve my skills. It would be really nice if my weeks on the boat also were pleasant, interesting, or even (from time to time) fun.

After the goddamned coffeepot conversation, I was ready to go.

"Man," I said to a friend, "this just isn't going to work."

I decided instead to sleep on it, and now I just don't know. We'll see how I feel come Tuesday, I guess.

Adapt and Overcome

Second day offshore of the final week of a hard five and the weather is beautiful. Early this morning we get the call to backload a crane part and head to an unmanned platform 20 miles distant – in another field altogether, as a matter of fact – and in water nearly 700 feet deep.

It’s directly on the other side of a busy shipping lane for vessels headed to the mouth of the Mississippi, and I got to make passing arrangements with a 600-foot tanker on the way out.

This particular unmanned platform is our customer’s most productive in the area and we carry equipment out there on average once a month.

The issue with the crane is a bad swing motor; we’re carrying the replacement, and meet half a dozen production operators who have flown out to the platform.

The first challenge is getting the boat positioned directly under the fast line so the lift can be picked-up while the crane is in its rest. There’s a pretty good current running into the jacket, but light wind and calm seas make that part of the operation pretty straightforward.

Until the operators discover the crane won’t start.

On Channel 10: “Hey Cap, y’all wouldn’t happen to have a 12-volt jumper box on the boat?”

“Yessir, we sure do. Do you have somewhere to plug it in?”

“No, we sure don’t. I guess we’d need a mighty long extension cord.”

I eyeball the distance from the deck to the crane pedestal. Less than a boat length, but not much. Maybe 100-120 feet. I consider how many extension cords we have on the boat.

“Well, I think  maybe we can make that.”

We cobble together four or five extension cords and send them up on a low-tech handline we tie to the handle of the jumper box.

A few minutes pass as I hold the boat directly below the crane, and simultaneously I hear a diesel engine roar to life and a ragged cheer go up from the cluster of men on the platform.

Success.

We offload the swing motor and set a course for our next stop, more than two hours away.

I am reminded of advice I once gave boaters in a hook-and-bullet magazine I then wrote for:

Carry jumper cables on your boat. Many otherwise fine fishing days have been ruined by a dead battery, and for some reason most boaters don’t carry jumper cables on board, even though they probably have them in their trucks.

This marks the first time I’ve every jump-started a crane from a boat, but apparently it’s not unheard of.

Telling our other captain about the morning’s fun when he comes on watch, he recalls the time he used an air compressor on deck to start a platform’s crane, 100 feet of air hose draped from the pedestal to the boat’s deck.

More than one hundred miles and many hours from shore-side support, we frequently have to find work-arounds for challenges that beg more perfect solutions.

Some challenges, of course, can’t be adequately met out here, and for that we have our scheduled shipyard time – scheduled, in this case, to coincide with our biannual USCG hull inspection.

Our office still hasn’t given us a date, but it pretty much has to be in the next two weeks since our COI expires Nov. 18. Our work list is already three pages long.