Memories of a sailor.

Please note. I am writing from memory and may make an error or two here and there. For example, I am not current in whatever the current rules and regulations governing the fisheries are as I have been away from fishing for over 35 years. I am also not a maritime attorney.

 

I begin.

A country's Merchant Marine is it's collection of vessels used for trade and commerce. As a general rule of thumb if it's on the water to make money it's part of a country's Merchant Marine.

For a practical use here the term 'merchant mariner' is those mariners that are required to have either a license or document in order to be able to sail.

The people that man these various vessels are called 'merchant mariners'. The term 'merchant seamen' is also often used. Commonly we are generally called 'sailors'. It shuld be carefully noted merchant seaman are not a part of the US military.

A lot of what the public hears and knows about the United States Merchant Marine is left over from WW2. I have an old WW2 poster for the WW2 Merchant Marine. It instructs men to join the US Merchant Marine. Men who did sail in the Merchant Marine were given draft deferments. The last thing the government wanted was for qualified mariners to enlist in the service.

During WW2 the Shipping Administration built a lot of ships to carry the fight overseas. Many people have heard of the Liberty ships and the Victory ships that were built in record numbers. In addition to that, various and sundry civilian owned vessels were contracted into service to move military people and goods.

Needless to say, the Axis took exception to this and sunk as many of these vessels as they could. If you look at all US Merchant Mariners they suffered a higher casualty rate than any of the military services.

Recently the government decided that serving WW2 Merchant Mariners were to be given certain veteran's status and many of the things that go with it.

As recently as about 10 or 15 years ago I listened to a WW2 vet still angry about a cousin that sailed. He called him a draft dodger. When I told him about the casualty rate and pointed out that the last thing the government wanted was to have merchant mariners join the service he turned beet red and admitted he owed his cousin an apology.

After WW2 wound down the WW2 ships plied the merchant fleet all over the world. Some of the wartime vessels lasted well into the 70s. I never sailed on one but a shipmate named Vic did. Vic was a highly respected deckhand on a tug I was associated with. Tug skippers loved him. He knew practically everything about the business and had an incredible mind. Thing is he had a perception problem of some sort and could neither read nor write.

While his illiteracy certainly kept him from advancing on paper and left him making a career as an entry level Ordinary Seaman (OS) he was well respected and was often consulted by tug skippers. He was one of the last of the true Old School mariners and I mourn their passing.

There's the other side of the intellectual coin, too. 

There are several state level merchant marine academies on a state level and there's King's Point Merchant Marine Academy on a federal level. They graduate people with either a Third Mate or a Third Engineer license and send them out into the civilian world to sail. (King's Pointers also get an ensign's commission, USNR)

For decades they generally manned ships. As the US Flag Merchant Marine dwindled to a small handful of ships many of these people headed into the tug and barge business. Their competence in the business ranges from top of the line to downright dismal. It's up to the individual.

In the For What it's Worth Department, as a general rule, academy graduates seldom go straight into the wheelhouse. They start by serving as basic deckhands for a while and then enter a mate training program where they get hands on instruction under the guidance of experienced captains. It should be interesting to note that their peers in the mate training program may very well be a high school graduate that has shown promise and demonstrated the skills required to do the job.

Non academy grads that work their way up into licensed officer positions are called 'hawsepipers' and are just as well respected as their academy schooled peers. 

In my time I have seen academy grads step in and replace a captain that wasn't up to the job. On the other hand I've seen King's Pointers busted to mate and replaced by someone that may or may not have even finished high school. It's a business that is competency based.

Of course things are changing now and the educational requirements are getting a little stricter. I heard quite some time ago that the Coast Guard doesn't administer the tests orally anymore.

I entered the oil transportation business shortly after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William sound in March of 1989. The spill stunned the industry and led to many changes. In January of 1990 I entered the business.

My personal career of working on the water started before I became a teenager when I'd go out with a lobsterman and help him pull pots. 

Later from time to time I would hang out at the (now defunct) Coast Guard small boat station and would often run 'Sunset patrol' in a 40 footer. More often than not, after they sailed clear of the dock I steered the boat. Later on some solid 'Joe Citizen' asked why a civvie kid was steering a Coast Guard boat.

Quick fix. I was handed a pair of dungarees, a cap and a shirt with the stripes of an apprentice seaman stamped on the sleeve. Nobody questioned me ever again. 

As a sidebar, I managed to once show up to the station at preciesly the wrong time. I wandered in once during a major inspection from District Headquarters and found myself being questioned by a lieutenant commander. Much to the Chief of Station's relief I answered his questions well and when he let me go I promptly vanished into the woodwork.

I made a beeline for the paint locker, hid out in it until I saw a hole to sneak through and made a break for it. Later I was told the officer that had questioned me was very impressed with me. Go figure. The station passed with flying colors.

Back on station.

All during high school I sporadically lobstered and worked on the water. If I recall correctly, I was a high school senior and someone's cruiser broke down near Provincetown. It was repaired and when the owner got a call it was up and running I was asked to both return the rental car to Provincetown and bring the boat back to its home marina in Scituate. I was to be accompanied by his son, a few years my junior.

The trip turned out to be a nightmare. Sailing it from the slip was rather scary as it required skills I didn't know I had until after we were safely clear and underway. Once we were out of port both engines overheated and for a while we were dead in the water.

After some frigging around I found I could run one at half-throttle while the other one cooled down. We were out of sight of land for several hours but my dead reckoning navigation wasn't all that bad. 

When land hove into view I slowly picked out my landmarks and was pleasantly surprised to find my navigation was pretty damned close. We entered the river, sialed her to the marina, tied her up and called the owner.

I finished high school working at odd times lobstering and other related things.

At the time among the adventurous group I was a part of, there were two things that were discussed. The French Foreign Legion was discussed rhetorically. The one that was discussed more seriously wand 'Getting our Z cards and working on a freighter'.

Z-card is Old School for what is called a 'Merchant Mariner's Document'. Today anyone can get one simply by applying and if they have no terrible criminal history and can pass a physical they are simply issued to the applicant. A full set of documents runs a little under $400 and is good for five years.

Back in the day it wasn't so easy. The Coast Guard would issue a Zcard to anyone with experience. The Catch-22 was one could not get experience without one. However, there was a way to get experience without one. 

Ship's captains could hire American citizens overseas to replace sick or injured crewmen or in some cases hire someone as a supplimental crewman. At the time the place to go to do this was Manila. A lot of then US flagged ships came and went and ship jobs could be had there if one had the patience to wait and hang out.

Now there actually was one more way that would save a candidate a lot of time, trouble and expense. If a bona fide shipping company would give a person a letter stating they would hire someone upon reciept of a Z-card then they would immediately issue the candidate one. There was only one problem with this.

The market was flooded with sailors and the companies were simply not hiring inexperienced people. The old days of the WW2 era 'break bulk' ships was dying and dying fast. They were being replaced by container ships that could be unloader and reloaded in a lot less time.

Ship's crews were getting smaller because of automation and the Vietnam war was just beginning to wind down. Automation reduced the number of longshoremen, also. The strong backs of the longshoremen were being rapidly replaced with highly skilled crane operators.

Then for me life got in the way. I still dabbled in the fisheries a little bit but my job was a shoreside job that paid the bills and then there was a marriage and an enlistment in the army. I left the army a few years later with an honorable discharge and a divorce decree. 

From there it was a trip to Alaska where I built houses and commercial fished. Although I was back on the water again, I wanted back under different circumstances. 

Deep Sea shipping had dwindled and had been pretty much reduced to the American shipping fleet to little more than Jones Act work.

For what it's worth the Jones Act is a cabotage law. Most seafaring countries have cabotage laws to protect the home merchant fleet and keep it healthy and keep trained mariners ready in case of time of war. The Jones Act says that shipping between US ports must be carried out my US flagged vessels. An example of how this works is that a foreign ship may offload and reload goods in a US port but must offload/ load goods in another country before it can return to a  US port. 

A simplification of this might be a Dutch flagged ship full of cheese planning on delivering it to Boston and New York could drop off some of the cargo in New York but before it could go to Boston it would have to leave the country (Let's say to Canada) and make a delivery/reload there before proceeding to New York.  American flagged vessels can make deliveries to and from US ports at their desire.

In truth the Jones Act has saved what little US flagged shipping there is left. Our 'Deep Sea' merchant marine is pretty insignificant these days. Much of what has replaced Jones Act shipping is tugs and barges.

  I gave the earlier dreams little thought anymore and considered it to pretty much be a lost dream. My dreams of sailing the Seven Seas had slipped away. So much for going overseas but then again, with offloading and reloading automated, who wants to see the world through a porthole?

Somewhere along the line I had accumulated a sailboat I purchased in Everett, Washington and 'put on the hard' in Port Townsend. A few months later I returned and a friend and I sailed it to Kodiak but that's another long soggy saga. 

We leave our hero dead in the water, in his mid 30s adrift and working either building houses or commercial fishing in Kodiak, Alaska and living on a sailboat in Dog Bay.

Tune in next week, same time, same channel for Part two of our show. And now a word from our sponser...