Testing...A...B...C...or...D?

...I before E, except after C...

Remember the good old days when you just couldn’t wait to get out of school just so that you would never have to take a test ever again in your life?

Yeah, me too. 

I’m pretty sure that we all figured that once we were all out of school we would never have to study again. 

No more pencils.

No more books.

No more teacher’s dirty looks. 

You know how the song goes.

I thought that never another homework assignment would cross my doorstep.

Surprisingly(?), was I wrong.

Since starting my career out to sea, it has been... 

Classes for this. School for that. License for this. Certificate for that. Classes. Lectures. Demonstrations. Simulations. Practices. Reading assignments. Drawings. Regulatory mandates. Note taking. Yearly renewals. Bi-annually renewals. Five-year renewals. Endorsements galore.

Grade school had nothing on becoming a Citizen Sailor.

Just the other day I took, yet again, another test.

This time I finished taking the multiple exams that is required for upgrading my Merchant Mariners License to Master of 1600 Tons/Oceans. 

Back in the day when licenses looked cool.

Not a fan of the new license booklet.

It has been a long time since I had to take a license exam. 

Too long, in fact. 

I actually had to study. 

I couldn’t rely on the knowledge that I had forced into my brain way back in the college days. 

I had to hit the books and hit them hard. Or hit the computer mouse and arrow keys as it were. 

Times are a changing. Seems as though today’s kiddos aren’t the only ones studying with an iPad or a laptop.

Not surprisingly, the tests were pretty challenging. I had forgotten a lot about GM, righting moments, how to figure out the change in the Metacentric Height and the effects on a vessel's buoyancy. Not to mention a multitude of other things I knew all so well almost two decades ago.

But I passed.

And I’m excited about that. 

Apparently, you can teach old horse new tricks. Or at the very least make him remember stuff that he knew many, many tides ago. 

So Master of 1600 Ton/Oceans is in the books.

And it feels good.

As an added bonus, I didn’t have to argue with my kids that they had to go do their homework. 

Because Dad had to go do his too.

It's not all Doom and Gloom

On the rare occasion, crew change isn't a giant Charlie Foxtrot. Sometimes it can be fun. Sometimes.

Just before we got off the boat for Christmas, Mongo warned us that we were in for a treat. However, his warning did not fully prepare us for what was forthcoming. Come crew change day, this was how he appeared...

Jolly 'Ole Elf?

Obviously, no amount of warning could have prepared us for that.
But it got better.
Oh so much better.

Not only did he wear the outfit on the boat, but he also wore it to the airport. I'm not really sure what the Blueberries thought of it. They did make him remove his belt before going through the scanner. Besides, what can you say to a guy who is dressed like Santa's helper returning to the North Pole from Texas?
"What is your destination today, sir?" Just seems like you are asking for a sarcastic remark.

So, we are sitting at the airport waiting on our flight with this...

Sidebar: The snowflakes are blue LED lights that flash on and off

And every time that he moves the bells on his outfit start to Jingle.
He goes to the restroom. Jingle, Jingle, Jingle.
Gets something out of his bag. Jingle, Jingle.
Shifts in his seat. Jingle.
We all decided that should TSA suddenly take an interest in him, there was no way to hide from them.
"Where did he go?"
jingle, jingle, jingle
"Over there!!!"
We also decided that should the flight experience some turbulence, no one on the plane was going to get any sleep.
JINGLE, JINGLE, JINGLE!!!

Crew change was going well.
But it got better!

As we were waiting for our flight to board, another plane across the terminal was loading up their passengers. It was getting down to crunch time. The gate attendants announcing that the doors were about to close.

When out in the terminal there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my seat to see what was the matter.

Actually, I just looked up and turned my head towards the other gate.
So did Mongo. Jingle.
And so did the rest of the airport.

For running down the ramp to the gate, was a man(?), who I can only describe as being a hipster Gene Simmons look alike...

More for the hair than anything else

...sprinting for the closing doors screaming, "No! Wait! Don't leave without us!"

Wait...Us?
There is only one person. What is this 'us' you speak of?

"My girlfriend is at security! You have to wait! We've been planning this vacation forever!"

#1. You have been planning a vacation for 'forever', then perhaps, you show up the airport more than 2 minutes before the flight leaves.
#2. Get a grip. Sounding like a whiny 5-year old doesn't win you any friends when you are trying to convince the gate agent to delay a flight loaded with people who COULD get to the airport on time.

"You have 1 minute to get her here, or the flight leaves without you." Stated the clearly unimpressed gate agent.
 And off went the screaming 5-year old Gene Simmons running back up the ramp to try to coral his wayward girlfriend.
After about 20 seconds the gate agent went, "3...2...1...Gate's closed."
We all laughed and laughed.

3 minutes later, screetchy Gene Simmons came sprinting back to the gate. Girlfriend no where to be found.

"Sorry. Gate is closed."
Whereupon he proceeded to have a meltdown of unprecedented proportions. Screaming, wailing, and banging his head on the wall. Or banging that hat of hair on the wall. It was like a helmet. It was truly something to see. And no girlfriend in sight. Which is probably a good thing, since being a witness to that kind of behavior should have led her to being an "ex-girlfriend".

Suck it up, Buttercup!!!

A full five minutes later, said girlfriend, finally strolls down the hallway towards the gate.
Sorry, sister. That ship has sailed.
More whining and complaining ensued. I gave tons of respect to the agent for having to deal with these two dimwits and still managing to maintain her composure.

Right up to the point where she booked the two late travels onto our flight.

Which at that point, I was hoping they were booked to sit next to Mongo. And we had severe turbulence the entire trip. JINGLE, JINGLE, JINGLE!!!

See, crew change CAN be fun.
For some of us.

2014- Happy New Year!

Another year come and gone.
Another holiday spent on the boat.
Is New Year's Day a holiday?
I guess since we get holiday pay for it, technically it is.
My wife and I discussed it. The consensus being, meh.
Just another day when days don't mean a thing.

But here we are...2014!!!
Seems like 1990 was only 10 years ago.

It also means that it is time to do New Years Resolutions. Or if you happen to watch AT&T commercials, "Revolutions".

Or not.

I'm not really a fan of planning out what is going to happen during the course of the next year based on one day.
I know what I have to do in the New Year.
I know what I didn't do over the last year.
I know some things that I couldn't predict, or even want to happen, happened last year.
I know some things will happen this year that aren't in the grand scheme of things.
It's called LIFE.

What I do know, is that I've got a fantastic family.
I work with a great group of guys.
And I've got a blog where I can 'wax poetic' about life in general.

So bring on 2014!

Just don't expect me to get the year right on the checks I write for the next 4 months.

Corpus, You Never Disappoint Me

As frequent readers of this blog know, Corpus Christi, Texas is one of my favorite places to crew change. Although, I have recently declared Lake Charles, LA as our New #1, Corpus Christi has once again tried to claw it's way back to the top spot.

We all arrived for crew change at the Corpus Christi airport early. We had just spent Thanksgiving at home and wanted to make sure that we avoided the holiday crowds and got our reliefs off the boat and on the way home to their families on time.
The trouble started with them being anchored offshore. Normally, this isn't a problem (well, unless you count all the times where the weather conditions tried to kill us). For some reason, no one wanted to take us out to the boat in a launch. So even though we were hours early for crew change, we had to wait for the boat to come into the port and arrive at the dock.
So what do 7 guys do in order to kill a few hours with nothing to do? Naturally, you go to Walmart.
Also, naturally, this is a REALLY bad idea.

There is only so much to see and do in Walmart. Of course you also had to add in the Black Friday crowds as well. Nothing good could come out of this. And it didn't.
We looked at rice cookers. Checked the prices on all of the big screen TVs that were on sale. Bought some deodorant and shampoo. Wandered around the whole store checking out all of the 'Made in China' stuff they had. And made fun of all of the Walmartians and Walmutants that were out in search of bargains.
Eventually, we found our way over to the section that had Christmas clothing. This is where, by this point I'm sure, that the store security had every single camera in the store pointed at us. They had Santa hats. Some weird cow hat. T-shirts and sweatshirts. But what really caught my eye was this...

The Texas version of the Ugly Christmas Sweater.

I bought it.
Other members of the crew bought similar outfits. They also had this...

Silky smooth.

Which, in retrospect, it was a really good thing that no one bought. Because on a boat, a purchase like that can quickly degenerate into something like this...

It's a K-mart commercial. Look it up. It's funny. And disturbing.

Alas, you can only spend so much time perusing the goods available in Walmart. So we went to McDonald's. Conveniently located in the back of Walmart. And proceeded to order 21 double cheeseburgers. And 2 Holiday Pies. Which caused some funny looks. Which, I can only assume, was due to the quantity of Holiday Pies.

A quick call to the boat revealed that they were going to be delayed even more in their arrival at the berth. Unfortunately, we had exhausted our patience level in Walmart and decided a different locale would be a better place to wait a few more hours. It was decided that the lobby of  the local Holiday Inn would make an acceptable location.
You would think that a lobby of a Holiday Inn at 10 o'clock at night on the day after Thanksgiving would be a quiet place to kick your feet up, right? Wrong.
As we proceeded to grab a few spots on the couches at the hotel, a wedding broke out. That's right, a wedding. Right there in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. How romantic.

Best of luck to the new couple.

I told you Corpus was trying to edge it's way back into First Place.

After killing a few more hours at the hotel, we went back to Walmart to do our grub shopping for the hitch. We were going to take it nice and slow and kill some more time before we could get on the boat. That didn't work out so well either.
34 minutes to buy 2 weeks worth of food.
A NEW RECORD!
Damn it!

As we were checking out another quick call to the boat revealed that they were going to be even more delayed getting into the dock. More time to kill. But now with a van full of food. So off to the dock we went anyways.

When we got to the terminal, the rent-a-cop security told us that we couldn't enter the terminal until the boat arrived. So we pulled into the parking lot ( in reality, a grass field) to wait. Whereupon the driver, in one smooth fluid motion, managed to put the van in park and pull out his iPad immediately, in order to watch RED2 on, what can only be described as VOLUME LEVEL 9,684!!!!! I just wanted to close my eyes and take a nap.

Eventually, after more than 9 hours of trying to waste time, the boat arrived. The other crew sprinted by us in order to try to get to the airport in time to make their flights going home.

So much for getting to the boat early.

Well played, Corpus Christi. Well played.

Time to go Shopping

I lose my car keys at the house all of time. It’s a skill I have become quite good at. Losing things at home is no big deal. However, losing things on the boat IS a big deal. 

Patron Saint of Lost Things

 

A few hours ago The Boss and I were sitting in the wheelhouse awaiting the arrival of the other crew. The conversation was about nothing in particular. But one subject that came up was leaving things behind. I mentioned that I have left my wallet behind on the boat before. Not having a driver’s license, credit cards, or money can be problematic for 2 weeks. Just random conversation. No big deal.

When the launch boat came alongside and just as we were leaving the wheelhouse I noticed that The Boss had left his iPod next to the radio.

“Hey, don’t forget your iPod. That would suck not to have for 2 weeks.”

“Yes, it would. Thanks.”

And off we went. 

When we got to the dock I opened my bag to get my ID, wallet, and my money so I would have it with me. It was then I realized my cell phone wasn’t in my pocket. It also wasn’t in my bag. A quick check of the memory bank determined that I had left it on the window sill of the wheelhouse. Your know, the wheelhouse where I reminded The Boss not to forget his iPod. 

Moments later, my suspicions were confirmed as the Chief Engineer laughed at me and said, “Your cell phone is calling me. Want me to answer it?” Crap.

So I have no cell phone. 

It’s alright, I was planning on buying a new one this time home anyway. 

Now I just have to figure out how to call my wife from the airport so I can get a ride home.

That might be a problem.

The Good 'Ole Days

Technology sure has transformed the maritime industry. I could go on and on about advances in RADAR, AIS, GPS, SONAR, and a whole host of other maritime related acronyms. But what I’m really talking about is advances in communication devices, namely, cell phones. 

When I first started in the business there were no cell phones. If you wanted to talk to your loved ones, family members, friends, probation officer, or just a good divorce lawyer, the only way to communicate with them was a good old pay phone. Obviously, there are some logistical problems with using pay phones when you work on boats. Most glaringly, there are no pay phones on boats. Your only option was to wait until you get to a dock in order to use one. After a while, you knew the location of every single pay phone, at every single dock, in every single terminal, in every single port that you went to. Now just because you managed to figure out the location of all of the payphones on the eastern seaboard, you still had to deal with a bunch of other issues. 

The now extinct "payphone". For the younger crowd.

Namely, just because you finally were able to get to the dock and find a working pay phone, there was no guarantee that the person you wanted to talk to was going to be near their phone. Many a conversation was dashed to pieces by the phone ringing and ringing and ringing etc. only to fall on deaf ears. Back in the day some people didn’t even have answering machines. On occasion, even that didn’t matter. Case in point, even today, I call my parents and their answering machine has the ‘robo-voice’ greeting on it. I love technology. How my parents have not managed to embrace the technological advances in the world and yet still have me as a child is mind boggling. 

Another issue that I had concerning pay phones was that my wife was still in college when I first started working on boats. At the time, she didn’t have a private phone in her room. So I was forced to call another payphone that was in the hallway of her dorm in order to talk to her. After being at anchor for over a week, all you could hope for was that some kind soul would answer the phone and then attempt to find her so that we could talk. More often than not, it just rang and rang. Sometimes you would get someone. Sometimes they might even go look for her. Sometimes they just left the phone hanging off the hook. Sometimes you just listened to the conversations in the background of an off the hook phone just because it was all you had. Sometimes, on the very rare occasion, we actually got to talk to one another. In retrospect, I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t more than one mariner type relationship that had ended because of payphones.

“No, sorry. She isn’t here.”

“That’s too bad. Hey, what are you doing tonight?” Or something along those lines. 

For some reason, she stuck with me through the payphone days.

Then came the cell phone era. As with the beginning of most things, it started with one. 

One hitch, the Chief Engineer on a long past boat, came back with this new miracle of communication. It might as well have been a communicator from Star Trek as far as we were concerned.

"No Service"...Damn it, Spock!!!...

The cost per minute for using this new cell phone was absolutely ridiculous. The cell phone tower coverage sucked. It was ugly, unwieldy, and unreliable.
And we all had to have one!!!

The days of standing out in the snow and rain waiting for your turn on the only payphone within 50 miles was over!

It started with the Chief’s phone. A trip or two later the Captain had one. Then someone else bought one.

Eventually, when we sat down at the galley table for dinner, there was a pile of cell phones in the middle of the table. Should one of them ring, it was a mad scramble to determine who the proper owner of the phone was. No personalized ring tones back in the day.

Hello?... Hello?... Hello?...

Fast forward to today. Everyone has a cell phone. Most are smart phones. Most have more computing power then some of those early day RADARs, AIS units, and other assorted letter jumble electronics we have aboard.

Right up until it breaks.

Which is where we are today. 

My wife’s cell phone broke. Technical support (me) from a few hundred miles away wasn’t able to fix it. She is now cell phoneless. An absolutely horrible condition in today’s technological world. 

Calls to the house went unanswered. Messages left on the answering machine were ignored.

It was like being back in the old days of the payphone all over again. The horror!

A new cell phone is on order. In the interim, she had a friend give her an old phone that she had lying around. It might be able to send text messages. It might not. Either way, it is a phone. We can talk once again. Honestly, if she happened to look in one of our kids toy boxes she probably would have been able to find my original cell phone. It got retired on 9/11/01 after the terrorist attacks. I got frustrated, threw it on the galley table, and smashed the screen. Yet the thing still worked. Probably still does. Try that with one of today’s smart phones.

You never forget your first

With all of that being said, sometimes it’s nice not being in constant communication with the rest of the world. There aren’t any cell phone towers offshore. And some of the places we go, the phone and internet service is spotty, at best. It’s nice to be “off the grid” every now and then.

Then again, it is also nice to be able to talk to my wife and kids when I’m at work. 

Plus, it also means I get to look for a new phone when I get home. Why should she be the only one with a cool new cell phone?

We Have a NEW #1!!!

"Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

It used to be that my favorite place to crew change was off Corpus Christi, TX.

For reference please see HERE and HERE. 

Alas, times have changed. 

Please welcome Calcasieu Pass Anchorage off of Lake Charles, LA to the top of the list for fun places to die in a horrible maritime accident crew change.

It started of innocently enough. A quick text message:  “Ok everything is set for a launch off lake charles. Take your Dramamine its gonna be 4-5 feet. Tug will be underway so they can make a lee.”

Now there is a long running rule in the maritime world that whenever you get a forecast from our friends over at the National Weather Service you take the forecast numbers, add them together, and what you end up with will be the actual wind and wave conditions. In this case, add the 4-5 foot wave forecast to get 9 footers. Not surprisingly, that was just about right. This crew change made the Corpus crew changes look like a piece of cake.

Our choice of launch boats for this venture was a 36-foot catamaran style police/dive boat. Think party barge on steroids. 

Pontoon boat. a.k.a. Party Barge.

 

 

Considering the sea conditions it was about as smooth a ride as we were going to get. Except, of course, if you happened to factor in the 100-foot+ offshore supply boats that were tied up next to us. 

More appropriate?

If you add in the ton of grub that we bought, 7 of us going to the boat, 2 crew members for the launch boat, it could be said that space on board the launch was at a premium. Half of us were inside the cabin, the other half got to sit outside on the stern in the weather. Which, in retrospect, was kind of handy, had the Chief Engineer decided to lighten the load by getting rid of any food that he had eaten that day. I think we may have even made it out to the jetty entrance before the guys outside were soaking wet. 

Once outside the jetty the ride didn’t get any better. The guys outside didn’t get any less soaked. And the chatter about the Chief chumming for the fish seemed to diminish more and more the longer the ride went on. And when we got in the vicinity of the tug, the friendly banter ceased altogether.

It was immediately clear that this was not going to be an easy crew change. 

Even with the tug underway and trying its best to create a lee in the winds and waves for the launch boat to come alongside, we all knew that wasn’t going to happen. The tug’s rubber fendering was coming out of the water so high that if the launch came alongside it would have crushed the boat, and anyone that happened to be in the way, as it came crashing back down.  

Plan B was instituted.

The other crew then had to rig a pilot ladder over the side for us to try to scramble aboard the barge that way. Hats off to the pilots who have to do the transfer from a pilot boat to another vessel and vice versa every day. It is no easy task. Timing is everything. It might even be the ONLY thing. Because if your timing is off, and the boat surges at the wrong time, it is truly ‘GAME OVER’ for you. You are either getting crushed, going into “the drink”, or any other number of situation that can only end badly for you. It happens every year where pilots have been killed or severely injured in transfers to/from pilot boats. Our only hope was not to become one of those statistics. With 7 guys going on, and 7 guys coming off the statistics weren’t on our side.

I didn’t have a chance to observe the whole operation. My job was to get onboard the barge, scurry back to the tug, go to the wheelhouse to relieve my guy of steering the boat, and allow him to scurry back to the barge in order to get aboard the launch. All I know was that some arrivals and departures weren’t so graceful. 

Full disclosure: Mine was one of those not so graceful ones. The timing was right. The grip by one of my hands on the Jacobs Ladder was suspect. I swung to the right, holding onto the ladder with one hand and one foot, as the other foot and hand searched for something to grasp on to. I lost style points for that one. But, I managed to regain a solid grip and climb aboard the pitching barge without being mangled by the launch. Bonus points for that. 

One Foot? No!

One hand? Not how it is suppose to be done!

After that, for me at least, it was just trying to keep the boat pointed up into the seas as the other crew got aboard the launch. I heard more style points were lost during that procedure. Even more point were lost during the transfer of our grub and the other crew’s personnel effects.

When we got aboard the launch there was a GIANT cooler that we loaded all of our grub into. When we got to the boat and we realized that there was no way we were going to go alongside the tug we had to institute a new plan to get the cooler with said grub aboard the barge. The only way to do it was to use the barge’s crane to pick up the cooler and swing it onto the barge. Now, picture a small boat, alongside a larger boat, both pitching a rolling at different rates. Add to that a giant metal hook at the end of a cable at the end of a boom swinging at a completely different rate. Imagine trying to attach this giant metal hook to a cargo net containing a cooler with a ton of food without getting knocked out or killed with all of the aforementioned issues. It took more than one try. Once aboard, the food was replaced with the off-going crew’s luggage. Once again, a cargo net with a giant cooler, loaded with stuff, attached to a cable, at the end of a boom, was attempted to be surgically lowered onto a small pitching boat from the deck of a larger pitching boat. This too, took more than one attempt.

In a way, I’m happy I was in the wheelhouse and missed most of it.

I hate doing stupid things.

Even more, I hate watching other people doing stupid things.

In terms of stupid things, this crew change was way up on the “Stupid Shit-o-meter”!