A Break Because I Was Broken

If you noticed the lack of blog posts recently, #1. Thanks for reading #2. You’re right.

It wasn’t by choice. It was by orders of my doctor. Okay, my doctor didn’t specifically say, “You can’t write blog posts.” But since I was bedridden for 6 weeks and just the act of moving was a painful experience, I decided that banging on a keyboard wasn’t in my best interest.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but in case I haven’t, I’m a moron.

I have a particular set of skills. Skills that get me into trouble. Skills that generally lead me to the hospital waiting room. Or surgery. Or both. At a minimum, skills that get my insurance company in a tizzy and me shelling out a co-pay.

My specialty is sprained ankles. Four times that diagnosis has been made for me (Officially. I won’t count the numerous times that crutches weren’t required.) Thankfully, I like to keep it even. Twice on each leg. I’m an equal opportunity injurer (Is that a word?).

However, my back seems to think that it needs to catch up with my ankles on the “take me to the hospital” scale. Which is what led to me being incapacitated for the better part of two months.

Way back (get it?) in the day, in 2001, I hurt my back. Badly. I believe I did it trying to move Jet-ski’s around. But it was one of those times that you pull a muscle in your back, it hurts, it’s sore, but eventually it goes away. This time it didn’t go away. It got worse. Much worse. Probably going back to work after the injury didn’t help. By the time I got home from my hitch on the boat, I was in excruciating pain.

In an effort to relieve the pain, I went to a Chiropractor. Some of my friends swear by them.

I swear at them. Witch doctors!

I’m not saying that all Chiropractors are bad. I just had a REALLY bad experience with my first one. After the fact, I learned that it would have never made a difference what the Chiropractor did; he was never going to be able to fix me. I found that out after going to a second Chiropractor. One MUCH better than the first. One that actually made me not hate them as a group as much. However, I still call them Witch Doctors. The second one at least took some x-rays, ran some tests, and poked and prodded me before trying any sort of adjustment. It was also when I learned that my medical history was somewhat incomplete.

“When did you break you ribs?” Chiropractor #2 asked.

“Uuhhmm. Never.”  I replied, somewhat confused.

“Ahahaha. Yeah. No. You broke your ribs.”

I’m a danger to myself even when I don’t know it. I think I remember when I did that on a boat. I just didn’t know it at the time. Hurt like hell to breathe for a couple days. Apparently, that is what broken ribs feel like.

Only a matter of time.

Broken ribs notwithstanding, turns out I crushed the disc between L4 and L5 in my lower back. I knew something was really wrong when the doctor kept asking me to stand up straight as she tried to take an x-ray. My reply was, “I am standing up straight.”

Whereas, I got another, “Yeah. No.”

 “Well this is the best you’re gonna get. Take the picture so I can sit down before I pass out.”

I spent Christmas that year lying on the floor at a friend’s house as they, and my wife, ate Christmas dinner in the other room. The highlight of my day being when I threw up in their driveway just as we pulled in.

A few weeks later, I had surgery to remove the cartilage that was pressing on the nerve and causing the excruciating pain down my left leg.

Fast forward 13 years and I did it again.

Same problem. Same pain. Same issues. However, no throwing up in the driveway this time.

I skipped the Chiropractor this time and went straight to the back expert. When you’re an old pro at this sort of thing you can skip the middle man.

It was like déjà vu all over again.

“Stand up straight when we take the x-ray.”

“I am. Trust me, this is all you’re gonna get. Can I sit down now?”

Just standing at the counter to get signed in at the doctor’s office was torture. Initially, I said the pain this time wasn’t as bad as the first time. I was wrong. Way wrong.

Can you spot the problem?

X-rays, MRIs, minor outpatient surgery to try pain relieving shots, and a multitude of doctors’ appointments later, I was back (did it again) in surgery.

Two and half weeks after surgery, I was back (I can’t help it) at work. Which is a REALLY short amount of recovery time. Too short. But that is another blog post. Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

So my back is back.

I’m back to work.

The recovery is going slow but smooth. I still have trouble knowing where my limits are.  But my newly repaired back is more than willing to let me know when I cross those limits. 

Fingers crossed I can make it another 13 years before I do something stupid again. At least as far as my back is concerned.

Although I wouldn’t put any money down on it.

This is where I profess my undying love for my wife and all the support she has given me over the years. At one point during this back injury adventure she was forced to sleep on a bench upstairs (I say bench, but it is really a twin sized 12-inch memory foam mattress reading bench that I built to fit under the upstairs window). Every time I found a comfortable spot where the pain was somewhat tolerable, one of us would move, and the ‘happy spot of little pain’ would be gone. Since I was in no shape to go upstairs (I did it once. Stayed there for 2 days) she volunteered to abandon our comfy bed for the (equally comfy) bench seat/bed. After surgery, she dragged a mattress downstairs and put it in the corner to sleep back in our room. The first night it took me 45 minutes to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Turns out, even though I love our memory foam mattress because it cradles and conforms to your body, after back surgery, sleeping on a memory foam mattress is like sleeping in quicksand. Because it cradles and conforms to your body, when your back muscles have been ripped apart and twisting and moving are impossibility, you yearn for a bed made out of a sheet of plywood. She figured at least she could be closer so that when nature calls, at least she could be within earshot so that she could be my leaning post as I shuffled around. 

My family puts up with enough just based on my work schedule alone. They really were my rock during this whole ordeal.

Dangerous Job

A few years ago, back when the TV show ‘Deadliest Catch’ was the go-to reference for everything nautical, my wife and one of her friends were discussing how dangerous the maritime industry seemed to be. Of course, all information about the maritime world was obtained from watching Alaskan fishermen battle with Mother Nature in their quest to line their pockets in the shortest amount of time humanly possible. 

Dangerous and cold

Dangerous? No doubt. 

In way of comparison, tugboating seemed, and for the most part is, pretty tame.

Granted, mistakes still happen. We are, in fact, all human. Humans make mistakes. And machinery and Mother Nature could care less one way or another.

As it were, during the particular time that my wife was insisting that tugboating is relatively safe compared to Alaskan crab fishing, three incidents happened in less than two weeks that glaringly reinforced to me that my profession is, in fact, a dangerous job.

To start with, one of the companies that I had previously worked for had a tug sink off of Cape Hatteras. This particular tug had a classmate of mine serving as the Chief Engineer, who fortunately happened to be on his time off. Three men died.

Later in the week, a tug that I had served aboard as a deckhand not too long before, was maneuvering with a barge. The tow wire connecting the two swung across the stern of the tug striking the deckhand and throwing him over the side into the water. As far as I know, they never found the body.

The third incident, in less than ten days, happened even closer to home. The company I worked for at the time had two tugs. We were working in New York harbor and our sister tug was moving barges up in the Hudson River. They were shifting a couple of barges off of a dock when one of the crew members slipped on the deck and fell into a gap between the two barges. He had a portable radio with him and called back to the tug to relay what had happened. Seconds later, the barges came together with him being trapped between them.

In less than two weeks, 5 good men were lost in incidents on boats and for companies that I was all too familiar with. It was going to be a tough sell trying to explain to outsiders that my job was not a dangerous one.

Personally, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve sprained my ankle (twice) at work. Gotten a sliver of metal in my eye while installing new radar. Sidebar:  I do not recommend driving yourself to the hospital with a metal shaving in your eye. It causes your eyes to water and makes you want to close your eyes as well. Two conditions that make driving down the highway at 65 miles per hour a very sketchy endeavor. I’ve also been on boats that have had minor fires aboard. Although, in retrospect, there is no such thing as a MINOR fire aboard a boat. I’ve had to put on SCBA in order to go down into the engine room to shut down a generator that had filled the entire boat with smoke. Had to extinguish a stack fire after a shipyard worker left some wood cribbing next to the hot exhaust pipes. Little stuff. Stuff that (hopefully) your years of training and experience help to mitigate before the situation becomes unmanageable. Little stuff after which, life just continues on the way it was before.

The other day, we were gathered on the upper deck of the boat, mustered at our lifeboat station conducting a Man Overboard / Abandon Ship drill. All of us were looking very motley as we donned our Survival Suits (‘Gumby Suits’ as they are known throughout the industry) and inspected the accompanying safety gear. 

Easy to see why they are called "Gumby Suits"

Unknown to us, 1200 miles away, off the coast of Long Island, New York, the exact emergency, the one that we were at that very moment training for, had just taken place.

 

The Tug Sea Bear was heading back to New York harbor from a dredging job that it had been working on out in Long Island. Something happened. I don’t know the exact details and perhaps never will. However, for some reason, the boat started taking on water. Undoubtedly, the Captain ordered his crew to don their survival suits. As the situation worsened, it surely became clear that the tug couldn’t be saved. At which point the ‘Abandon Ship’ order was given.

In the warm weather and the calm waters of the Mississippi River near New Orleans, our ongoing drill was nonchalant and relaxed. In New York, the water wasn’t calm. And it wasn’t warm.

At some point, the four man crew of the Sea Bear was forced into the stormy, 30-something degree water of the Atlantic Ocean. Three of the four men were wearing their life saving Survival Suits. A thick layer of orange neoprene designed to insulate your body against the bone chilling cold water. Without one, your chances of surviving being in the cold North Atlantic waters are almost zero. The Captain wasn’t wearing one.

Why wasn’t he wearing one? I have no idea. It wasn’t like he was new to the industry. He was a seasoned mariner. I happen to know this first hand.

The Captain was Don Maloney.

I was his Mate at that two boat company in New York.

I still have his phone number saved in my cell phone to this day. We had kept in touch after that small two tugboat company went by the wayside. I would have sailed with him any day of the week. He was a great Captain, a fine man, and to this day I can still hear his greeting to me…

“Hey, Scotty-boy.”

I’ve been contemplating for two days on how to end this blog post with something refined and eloquent. How to say, “Fair winds and following seas…” in my own special way without it seeming like the standard canned response to someone’s loss.

Two days I’ve thought about how to say that I’ll miss Captain Don Maloney.

The only thing I’ve been able to come up with is…

FUCK!!!

Win - Win

Because I'm the greatest husband. EVER. I decided to give my wife my brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone.

Which really does make it sound like I really am the greatest husband. EVER.

In reality, what happened was my brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone wasn't supposed to be delivered to our house until AFTER I had to go back to the boat.
Typical.
So my loving wife gave me her phone to use temporarily until I got back home. Figuring that she could use my brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone temporarily until I got back home whereas we could make the switch back to me having a brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone and she could have her relatively new, not even a year old, cell phone back.

Guess who gets the bigger more powerful one? Not me.

But, because I'm the greatest husband. EVER. I decided that instead of switching things around, deleting apps, syncing up emails, phone numbers, pictures, etc. time and time again, I would just GIVE her the brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone and I would keep the relatively new, not even a year old, cell phone instead.

Greatest husband. EVER. Right?

Or, I may have an issue with playing around with electronics and never being satisfied with anything stock.

I do love me some Jeremy Clarkson

Or we can go old school

I kept the relatively new, not even a year old, phone in the knowledge that I could change things around, update the ROM, download tons of apps, get root access to the operating system, etc. etc. Fun stuff like that.

I wasn't going to be able to do that with the brand new, never used, straight out of the box, never opened, cell phone because we decided to do a 2 year lease on it. No messing with the fun stuff inside if you have to give it back.

So I look like the greatest husband. EVER. And I still get to play with electronics and attempt to turn my phone into an expensive paper weight by messing with it.

A real possibility

Win-Win.

Plus, chances are very good that I might just leave the phone on the boat anyway. It's not like it hasn't happened before.

Time Off

I really shouldn't call it "time off". "Not on the boat" might be a better description. When I'm at home there really isn't "time off". Catching up on paying the bills, catching up on the yard work, catching up on all of the family things that have happened while I was at work, etc. Of course, there is also the foray into some slap-stick carpentry work as well.
You would think all of those things would take up just about all of my free time. And you would be right. But I have one remaining activity that I like to dabble in when I'm on my "time off". I like to play Semi-Pro Firefighter as well.

Ladder 1. "Big Sexy" as she is affectionately called.

This last time home was no exception. I got to build stuff.

My latest project.

Tried to get my tax returns somewhat organized. Watched my beloved New England Patriots win the Super Bowl. Probably scarring my children for life with my over exuberant celebration at the end of the game.

Yeah, I was excited.

Managed to wrestle out the tall ladder to get the last remaining Christmas lights off the peak of the house, etc. But the highlight of my "time off" had to come on an early, crisp Saturday morning.

Someone had decided that their house wasn't tenable anymore. The exact reasoning is unbeknown to me. All I do know is that they donated their house to my fire department in order to use it for training. Normally, anything fun, exciting, noteworthy, etc. that happens at home happens when I'm at work. Birth of my son, my daughter getting her appendix out, birthdays, anniversaries, that sort of thing. This usually rings true for fun and exciting fire department related things as well. In the last 2 years we have had at least 4 different opportunities to do live burns in donated structures. I have been home for exactly one of them.

Engine 2. Black over red, the best combination out there.

Make that two. The planets aligned, the stars shone brightly, and I was actually around for a training burn.
The following videos are of us honing our craft and refining our skills.
Did I mention that firefighting is a ridiculous amount of fun?

Did I also mention that I do it for free?
My wife says that 'technically' it's not a job because I don't get paid.

At least I get paid to work on boats. So I got that going for me. Which is nice.

It's a BIG Ocean

The Earth’s surface is approximately 71% water. Of that, 97% of that water surface is made up of the oceans. While at I’m at work I only need just a minuscule percentage of that in order to operate the boat safely. As we have shown before, bad things happen when two vessels try to occupy the exact same parcel of water at the exact same moment in time. It gets expense. Something that all true professional mariners strive to avoid at all times. This is exactly why I get so annoyed when someone wants to try to invade my particular tiny piece of water that I already occupy.

I have a t-shirt that I made at home that says, “I hate sailboats”. That’s all it says. No fancy graphics. No high tech fonts. Just a simple statement of fact. I hate sailboats. Wearing a shirt like that also happens to invoke random strangers at the airport to query the meaning of my shirt. It’s a conversation starter. When I explain to them that I work on tugboats, an almost sudden realization of the meaning hits them and all becomes instantly clear. It is as if there is a worldwide understanding that people on sailboats are indeed a scourge to waterways.

The offending shirt. Simple. Classy. Okay, simple.

 Anyone who has ever sailed the Ocean Blue, the Deep Muddy, the Inland Rivers, back bays, Sounds, rivers, harbors, etc. has at one point in time come across the ever-despised WAFI. In case you weren't aware, a WAFI, is a Wind Assisted Fucking Idiot. Not to be confused with a MAFI, a Motor Assisted Fucking Idiot. A WAFI, in its more accepted term, is a sailboat. And I hate them.

For some reason, sailboaters are under the impression that the Rules of the Road just don’t apply to them. Or they are just idiots. I happen to lean more towards the side that they happen to be ‘Stupid to the Highest Degree (squared)’. On more than one occasion, I have had sailboats try to cut between the tugboat and the barge that I was towing. Never mind that there happens to be either a giant rope hawser, or a large steel wire trailing behind the tug connecting us the barge. It is, in fact, the exact way that we TOW a barge.  No amount of sound signals, radio calls, or brightly shining spot lights directed at the WAFI should dissuade them to alter their course away from impend danger and/or death. The same can be said for sailboats crossing your bow, impeding you in a confined channel, or any other numerous situations where you just shake your head and silently ask yourself, “Can someone really be this stupid?” The answer is ‘YES’. Yes, they can. And if you were to survey 100 tugboaters and ask them if they had ever experienced a similar situation, 105 of them would answer in the affirmative. It’s going to happen. It’s a fact of life out here on the water. WAFI’s have earned their reputation as a plague upon the nations waterways (as have most MAFI’s).

"I swear I didn't see the GIANT orange ship"

 Full disclosure: I don’t hate sailboats. A sailboat with beautiful lines that hearkens back to a time gone past is a pleasing sight. The quiet of being propelled by Mother Nature with the only sound being the hull gliding through the water and the wind in your face is something to embrace.

I just hate the people that run them. Poorly.

If you work up in the waters of the northeastern United States, spring time signals the start of WAFI season. We also refer to the sudden emergence of this group of waterborne locusts as the beginning of the ‘Weekend Warriors’. A conglomeration of 9 to 5ers whose expertise of the water doesn’t extend much past the fact that water is wet.

Being that we are currently assigned to the Gulf of Mexico, I was hoping that the year round pleasant boating weather would increase the odds that the water bound populace would be more skilled in the areas of following the Rules of the Road and just general seamanship. And for the most part, not having to cram a whole year’s worth of pleasure boating into 3 months and then forgetting about the water for the other 9, has indeed seemed to have an effect.

Alas, our focus has merely shifted from the relatively well behaved southern Weekend Warriors, to a different group of glaring floating pestilence. Shrimp boats. The WAFI’s of the Gulf of Mexico.

I was of the impression that the shrimp boats, staffed with seasoned mariners such as ourselves, would have more of a grasp of proper water-going etiquette, a mutual respect for those who make a living by plying the seas. I was wrong. Very wrong.

Might as well throw them into the MAFI category. But worse.  At least the assorted _AFI’s would sometimes realize that a tiny fiberglass boat versus a hulking steel barge would lead to a very quick demise. But the shrimp boats could care less. I guess their theory is that their boat would fare better than a sailboat. I would venture that they might do a bit more than scratch our paint, but I’m fairly sure that the end result would be the same. But you can’t even tell that to them because they are either- 1.) Not monitoring their radio to hear our calls that they are heading for danger, or 2.) Their command of the spoken English language is not up to par as to understand that they are acting rather foolishly (cleaned up here for NSFW language).

Shrimp boat Captain? (What is it with this blog and Tom Hanks?)

 Either way, the number of WTF! moments are starting to pile up. Nothing that requires paperwork (or worse), but just enough to get your heart pumping a little faster, your blood pressure to rise, and your focus to narrow. It’s the Gulf’s version of WAFI season. And with the coming of the springtime fog season, which just adds another variable to the equation, it makes we wonder if 3 months of Weekend Warriors isn’t such a bad deal at all.

I just want a tiny, little, itty-bitty, piece of water borne real estate in order to affect my craft. Is it so unreasonable to want to have everyone else do the same?

I guess that I now need a t-shirt that says, “I hate shrimp boats”. And I know that plenty of professional mariners here in the Gulf happen to agree with me.

At a minimum it will spark more random discussions in the airport.

Product Placement

Have you noticed on TV lately that the placement of certain products in the background of a scene have just become blatant endorsements? I'm just waiting for the dialogue to begin to reflect this as well.

"Come on, Jennifer. If we don't get into our 2014 Hyundai Elantra with a six speed variable transmission soon. We'll never make it to Pepsi-co Field on time to stop the terrorists. Even with our stylish Hyundai Elantra getting 38 miles per gallon highway and going from 0 to 60 in 6.8 seconds, not even it's 5 star crash safety rating could save us then."

Yeah, it's starting to get that bad.

But what does Jennifer and stopping terrorists have to do with tugboats?

Nothing.

But I'm about to do a shameless product endorsement and I had to lead with something.

We have been in shipyard for the last couple of weeks.
Hence the complete lack of new, funny, and hip stories on this here blog. Aside from the normal "shave and a haircut" for the boat, Mongo and I were tasked with forming our own construction company in order to rebuild the galley. "Two Morons Construction Company" was founded and most of our time was invested on destroying and then rebuilding the galley to our exacting tolerances. Banging on a computer keyboard at night to relay our tales of joy just was not in the cards.

But now I'm on my time off. The Christmas lights have been strung around the house, the mud room cabinets that I promised to build the wife have been built, and mandatory tugboat training has been accomplished. So between getting online Christmas shopping done and playing semi-pro firefighter this week, I finally had time to put zeros and ones out into cyberspace.

Oh yeah, product placement. Right.

During shipyard you get dirty. Depending on what project you are doing (i.e. toilet blowing up in your face) you can get REALLY dirty. After getting dirty, you need to get clean. Which sometimes is an issue when the water pipes to the boat are laying in pieces on the deck of the engine room.
For years the old standby for getting you hands clean has been to use "GoJo", the "Natural Orange Pumice Hand Cleaner".

Smells like oranges. Doesn't taste like them.

That was, of course, until this shipyard period.
After one such day of getting way too dirty, there was a new bottle of hand cleaner in the engine room sink. I had already washed my hands with the old standby GoJo, but was less than pleased with the results. I figured that I would try out some of this new stuff and see if my results were any closer to being actually clean.

Enter... CODE RED. I had neither seen nor heard of it before. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained. It smelled of cherries. I passed on the taste testing part. It had a smidgen of pumice similar to the old go-to GoJo. But immediately upon rubbing it into my previously GoJo cleaned hands, it whisked away any of the remaining dirty, grime, wood glue, sandblasting grit, paint, and whatever else was plastered on my hands. I was thoroughly pleased. This stuff was good. For the rest of the time we were on the boat anytime my hands got too dirty to tell that they were still hands, I went with the Code Red. It never failed to get my hands clean from whatever happened to be ground into them. GoJo had to go. It's Code Red for me from now on.

Now that I'm home, where the Honey-Do list never seems to get smaller, and my hands get just as dirty as in the shipyard, I realized that I MUST get some Code Red. Trouble is, I can't find any. Even my online searches have come up empty on when to find a local retailer. I found where to buy a Main Battle Tank online! You would think I could find hand cleaner!
Alas, the search continues. So if anyone happens to know where I can find it, send me a link. Or a sample. Or a bottle. Or a 55-gallon drum of it. The same holds true for anyone who works for the company that makes Code Red. This is good advertising.

"Jennifer, my hands are so clean from using Code Red hand cleanser I know that we can fool the finger print scanner and stop the terrorists."

You know, product placement.