Dose of Reality

Usually when I tell someone that I work on a tugboat the standard reaction is, “Wow. I’ve never met anyone that does that. That is so cool.” I then attempt to answer all of the questions they have concerning the maritime industry.

“What do you do at night?”

 “Where do you stay?”

 “What do you do for food?”

 “How long do you work?” Etc. Etc.

Two years ago, our new neighbors moved in across the street. After pleasant introductions, the conversation gravitated towards what everyone did for work. Once again, I prepared myself for the onslaught of the usual questions. 

Imagine my surprise when my new neighbor mentioned that he works for two weeks and then has two weeks off.

Wait.

What?

Someone works the same type of schedule that I do?

Inconceivable!

As it turned out, Kevin was a pilot. He flew anti-cocaine drug interdiction missions in South America. For once, I was the one with all of the questions.

For the next two years, Kevin and I worked the exact same schedule. He was home the same days I was and gone for the same ones as well. He missed the same holidays I did. He was around for the same birthday parties as I. We were both around during the day so we could go to the shooting range together. We could ride our quads late in the evening and not worry about having to be at work early the next day. A quick walk across the street to lend a tool or borrow a lawn edger was all it took. It was refreshing to have a friend that understood what it was like to be away from home and your family six months out of the year.

It was also nice to be able to say to your friend, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Nothing.”

“You?”

“Nothing.”

And then laugh at all of those people who were stuck in their 9 to 5 jobs.

This last time that I was off from work we moved into our new house. Granted, we only moved 0.68 miles. Essentially, we moved from one side of the main road, across the street, to the other side of the main road. But it meant that Kevin wasn’t going to be my neighbor anymore. It meant I wasn’t going to be able to look out my front door and see Kevin doing something stupid on his ladder as he was trying to hang up his Christmas lights. It meant that when we need more chairs for our “Thanksgiving Three-Peat” I couldn’t just walk across the street to get more. It meant that babysitting services (for both houses) weren’t just a walk across the front lawn. 

Just before I came back to work, Kevin and his family came over to our new house to take the 5-cent tour. As they were leaving, Kevin and I shook hands and he said, “Hey, see you in two weeks.”

“Nope. Three weeks,” was my reply, “We are doing our holiday switch around this time.”

“Well that sucks. That means our schedules are going to flip. With you guys moving and now the schedules changing I’ll never see you guys again.”

“I severely doubt that.”

A few days ago my wife called me and left a message on my cell phone.

Two things were wrong with that. First, my wife never calls my cell phone when I’m off watch. Secondly, she never leaves me a message. Especially one that says, “Hey, give me a call when you can.”

The next day I called my wife back.

The exact details of the call I don’t recall.

But the one line I do remember, “Kevin isn’t coming home.”

Kevin was at work flying a mission. During the flight, his plane suffered some kind of mechanical problem and went down.

Kevin’s co-pilot suffered severe injuries in the crash.

Kevin was killed.

Once again, I’m at work and there is nothing I can do. I can’t be there to comfort his family. I can’t be there to help. I won’t be home to attend his funeral. My only solace is that if there were anyone who would understand that I’m stuck at work and the reasons why I can’t be there, it would be Kevin. And even that doesn’t help.

Kevin leaves behind his wife, two step sons, and his own toddler son. Just last week, my wife told me that Kevin and his wife are expecting another child. 

He was 39.

I miss my friend.

More than words can ever say.

Shipyard

We are going to do a little bit of time traveling here. The next few posts actually happened last hitch. But with moving/work/life, etc. getting in the way I just haven't had time to put pen to paper. Or 000111010100111's to a digital memory system, as it may be.

Shipyard sucks. There. I said it.

Shipyards look so clean and organized in the pictures

Generally, life aboard a tugboat isn't too taxing. In fact, anytime you meet someone new and tell them you work on a tugboat a usual response is, "Oh, that must be EXCITING!" No. No, it's not. Which is just the way we like it. Sure, it is usually 23 hours and 55 minutes of complete and total boredom. Only interrupted by 5 minutes of sheer terror. But we like boring. Boring is good. Boring means things are going well. Boring means you haven't screwed up. Screw ups are expensive. 'Boring' trumps 'exciting' any day of the week on a tugboat.

But shipyard isn't boring. Shipyard is expensive. Shipyard is a lot of hard work in a minimal amount of time. Time is money in this business. And the longer you are in shipyard the more money the company spends and the less money the company makes. It's like "Fast and the Furious". Without Vin Diesel. Or cars. Or women with clothes that are 2 sizes too small. In essence, shipyard is: Get in. Fix it. Get out.

Maybe clothes 3 times too small?
Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Tugboats are work boats. You don't make money tied to the dock. The busier you are the better things are. The hitch seems to go by faster. The company is making money. Everyone is happy. However, tugboats are floating pieces of machinery. Machinery that needs to be maintained. Constantly. There is ALWAYS something to do on a tugboat. If you aren't doing regular maintenance, you are doing preventative maintenance. Let things go too long between the two, and you are doing replacement maintenance. The maritime environment is brutal. Even worse so in the southern climates and the Gulf of Mexico. Even with keeping up with the maintenance schedule and doing everything 'by the numbers, things still break. Things wear out. Not to mention that some things just can't be fixed or overhauled while the boat is out working. Which is why we are in the shipyard. It's time to fix all the stuff that is broken, is about to break, needs to be overhauled, worked on, tweaked, inspected, repaired, replaced, or just looked at.

Plus, you have less than 2 weeks to do a over a months worth or work.

Which is why I'm trying to get caught up with the blog.
Shipyard isn't exactly a blog friendly environment.

Role Reversal

I'm ready to go back to work.

Wait? What?!

Ready to go back to work?

That's right, folks. I'm ready to go back to work. Technically, I'm ready for a break.

We bought a house. We moved a whole 0.68 miles. But it's not the distance that matters.
It's the stuff. Lots of stuff. TONS of stuff. More stuff than I even realized.

Thankfully, we (and by we, I mean my wife) has made a lot of GREAT friends. Friends that disregarded any weekend plans they had made and helped us move everything we owned in only 2 days. We couldn't have done it without them.

Physically, I'm just beat.

But I'm also mentally drained.

It turns out that picking up everything you own, shoving it in a truck, driving down the street, and then shoving all of your belongings into your new garage is the easy part.

It just never ends

Then the fun really begins.

Then you get to call every type of "Customer Service" that you can think of.
Phone, cable, power, water, Tivo, gas, banking etc. etc. etc.


The best part of moving into a brand new house, is that it is a brand new house. It doesn't exist. It's not in ANY database for ANY company.
No amount of arguing with any "Customer Service" person will convince them that your new house DOES, in fact, exist. Even when you tell them the you are calling them from your own living room. If it's not on the computer screen in front of them, you might as well be calling them from Neptune.

Just trying to get anyone on the other end of the phone that has any idea of what you are talking about is a monumental task. Sometimes it takes multiple calls to the exact same phone number just to speak to the right person. My wife and I like to refer to it as "Customer Service Roulette".

It's mentally taxing trying to explain time and time again that you just want to give these people your hard earned money. All I want to do is watch Robin Meade on the news in the morning.
You would think that they would want your money.
Apparently not.

I have a new found hatred for Time Warner Cable. Congratulations! You really deserve it.

I'm physically beat and mentally drained.
I'm ready to go back to work.

Although we are working a three week hitch to switch around for the holidays.

 On second thought, maybe painting the kids rooms isn't so bad after all.

Not Happy

Yup. That pretty much sums up how I have been feeling lately.
Good thing there are no cacti on tugboats.

A hitch ago I was making fun of two of my shipmates who were left behind on crew change. For once, I wasn't the one left behind watching as the rest of my crew departed for home.
But, karma is a bitch.
The very next hitch, once again, I was the one stuck aboard on crew change day.

I knew it was coming.

Mere moments after my new relief was informed he was going to be assigned to the boat, we had this conversation.
"So I guess I'm going to be your relief. Hey, can you work over for me? My friend is getting married and I want to go to it."
"No. I'm suppose to be closing on my new house and I have to move that week because the lease on my current house expires the day we get off."

So there it is. Not even one hitch on the boat and he wants time off. For a wedding. On a THURSDAY? Who gets married on a Thursday?
But I ALSO had plans.
I had things I needed to get done.
The difference being, my plans were for my TIME OFF.
We all have things that we want to go to. It's the nature of the beast when you work for 6 months out of the year. We have covered this before. You're going to miss things.

I missed the birth of my son for FUCKS SAKE!

It sucks that your buddy planned his wedding for the time you are suppose to be at work. It sucks that I just happen to be scheduled to move that week and I can't cover for you. But sometimes life isn't all rainbows and unicorns.

I still knew it was coming.

I knew no one was going to be able to cover for him. I knew there wasn't anyone in the company willing or able to cover for him. I knew that the were two possibilities.
1. He sucked it up and told his friend, "Sorry. I wish I could attend your wedding. But I have to work."
2. He went to the wedding anyways and I get screwed. Because if no one shows up to be your relief you don't go home.

The office tried to be diplomatic about the situation.
They asked if I could stay.
I said, "No." For the afformentioned reasons.
They asked again.
"No."
They asked again really nicely.

I knew I was screwed. I knew there was no way out of this. They didn't have a relief. There was no way they were going to get a relief. I was staying one way or the other.

I wish I had a cactus.

So my relief is going to a Thursday wedding. I'm staying behind. My wife is pissed. And so am I.

Bye, Bye

Part of the spirit and the culture of the U.S. military is the creed that you don’t leave anyone behind.

On tugboats, not so much.

Don’t get me wrong. Should the unthinkable emergency happen, everyone on my crew is highly trained and motivated to do everything they can to try to save one another. 

But, when it comes to crew change, we will leave your ass behind in the blink of an eye.

As of late, I am the one being left behind.  Waving goodbye from the stern of the boat as my crew mates  happily depart on their two week reprieve away from the boat. 

See 'ya later, suckers!

However, on this crew change, I was the one thinking “sucks to be them” as the launch boat pulled away leaving not one, but two of our crew behind.

Mongo/Superman/Witness Protection got to stay behind because his relief had decided that tugboating wasn’t the job for him. His relief had only made it one hitch before he quit. Not really a big loss. I didn’t even learn the guy’s name. So our deckhand gets to stay and work with the opposite crew. He then gets to stay and work our hitch with us before he goes home. Six weeks on a tugboat isn’t much fun. We still laughed at him.

JM also got left behind. His relief was stuck in Cleveland (what the hell is the deal with getting stuck in Cleveland?). At least he doesn’t have to work 6 weeks straight. It still sucks nonetheless. Especially, after he paid for his flight home. We laughed at him too.

We are hoping for better luck next time.

Our fearless leader will be back after leaving us with TPWSNBN while he was at home fighting off some nasty infection. Which we suspect he caught while visiting some shady New Jersey highway rest stop.

Mongo will be on the downhill slop of a six week hitch.  

And I might actually have a steady relief.  The third different one in a year.

Fingers crossed.

It smells like...Victory

That face is staring at me

“An army marches on its stomach”--- Napoleon Bonaparte

So does a tugboat.

A chief engineer I once worked with, not quite as eloquent as Napoleon, once said, “This ain’t no F@#king camping trip.” 

Grub, and grub shopping, are an integral part of a happy crew.

We usually try to go shopping just before we crew change to get on the boat. However, our fearless leader decided he was going to get an eye infection on his time off, so he couldn’t come back to work. Which leads to a whole host of issues. 

Just get the essentials

First and foremost, it means we get to work with TPWSNBN.

Yay! <sarcasm>

But it also means that all of the money we have to spend on grub is at his house with him and not with us.

Not to be caught without a fresh supply of milk and eggs on the boat we did a quick and inexpensive grub shop in record time. Needless to say, we didn’t get everything we wanted/needed the first time around. So we went grub shopping a few days into the hitch to refill our coffers and refresh our supply.

With seven different guys on the boat (eight this time), we all have our own little specialty items that we like to get for grub.

I happen to like 1% milk.

The 2^nd mate likes Feta cheese.

The engineer wanted Jell-o because he just got his wisdom teeth pulled out.

And we all have decided that Walmart makes a pretty good pre-made pizza.

Good to go for another week

Because we don’t want to forget anything,we have a grub list on the computer that we print out every time we go shopping. To this, we can add (sudden craving for Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough?) or subtract anything that we have too much of (think Ricotta cheese).

Since TPWSNBN was working over for our fallen leader he had a need to resupply his body wash. So on the list it went. 

Now, when dealing with anything that involves men, the Devil is in the details. You just can’t write down “body wash” no more than you can just write down “screws”.

Is it Phillips head screws? 

#8 or #6? 

Self-tapping?

Wood or sheet metal?

What length?

“Body wash” just isn’t going to cut the mustard? We need details, damn it!

So the deckhand, being the good deckhand he is, called the boat from the grub store to make sure he was going to get the correct body wash.

I now present you with a transcript of the voicemail message that he left:

Hey Cap, it’s (name redacted to protect the mentally insane)

… aaahhh… 

What type of, I guess, flavor of Olay body wash do you want?

Very manly

Luscious Orchid?  

Silky Berry?

Soothing Cucumber? 

Nectarine?   

Avocado oil?

 … aaahhh…

Ultra Moisture with Shea Butter?

…aaahhh…

I don’t know. There’s a lot.

 Uhmmm…

Sunflower oil?

Uhmmm…

Give me a call.  Bye.

Subtle advertising for a different gender?

Clearly, there was a break down in communication.

First of all, It’s a tugboat! We get dirty. We get sweaty. We smell like diesel oil.

My wife refers to the particular aroma as, “You smell like boat.”

Which I take as a compliment.

Secondly, we use soap!

We don’t use body wash.

And we definitely don’t use Olay body wash that smells like a meadow of flowers after a fresh spring rainfall.

It makes the boat smell like a French whore house. And not in a good way.

On the plus side, it’s “hump day”. Halfway through the hitch. The boat is, once again, back to a seven man crew. It can only get better from here. I hope.

Size Matters

The tiny ship was tossed

Tugboats are small.

Well, not really. They just seem that way compared to some of the ships that tugboats are always pictured next to.

In reality, tugboats are quite large. 

For example, the boat I currently work on is essentially a 7-bedroom, 2-bathroom, condo with a full sized kitchen, laundry room, full basement, and a balcony (wheelhouse) with stunning ocean views from 50 feet in the air. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Most of the time it is (minus the days you are out in stormy weather getting your brains beat out of your head).

We're gonna need a bigger boat

But if you want to make that expansive floating townhouse seem small, just add one extra guy to the crew.

So, my relief is going to a different boat.
Again.

In the year and a half since I transferred from the other crew, onto this crew, this is going to be my third different relief. It would seem that no one wants to work with TPWSNBN. Who knew?

Because my new relief is also new to the company, he has to get three different Captains to verify that he is capable of running his own watch. Since he can’t run his own watch before being verified that he can run his own watch, he gets to ride along with us. This makes him the magical 8^th guy on the boat that makes the boat seem that much smaller.

As mentioned before, it’s a 7-bedroom boat. Add one more guy to a seven man crew and you become short one bedroom. Luckily (?), we have bunk beds in two of the rooms. So if you ever want to revert back to your childhood and are craving a chance to sleep in bunk beds again, maybe a job on a tug is for you. Unfortunately, this also means that someone from the regular crew gets displaced from their own room. This is so that the new guy can get up and lay down whenever he has to so that he can show the Captain that he knows what he is doing. In theory. My kids LOVE their bunk bed. My crew, not so much. 

Seriously? A slide?

Now there are 3 things you do on a tugboat.

Eat, sleep, and stand a watch.

We have determined that the sleeping situation is less than optimal. What about eating?

Yeah, that too is screwed up.

The galley is only so big. Essentially, it is big enough for you to get in, eat, and get out. Guys going on-watch want to be able to eat and then get to work. Guys coming off-watch, want to be able to eat and then go to bed.  All it takes is that one extra guy to mess up the balance of people coming and going to create a traffic jam around meal time. It’s like that one car on a two lane road that is going just fast enough so you can’t pass him, but just slow enough to back up everyone behind him. It’s like that. But with food.

This leaves watch standing.

We all have our own job descriptions. The tankermen do their tankerman thing. The wheelhouse guys do the steering the boat thing. And the engineer makes sure the TV works.

Throw that one extra guy into the mix, who doesn’t really have a job description, but is trying to do the job so he can have a job description, but is really just getting in the way and disrupting the normal work load, and you have the trifecta of a BIG boat seeming just way too small.

Seems about right

Hopefully, next hitch it will all be back to normal. Everyone will have their own room. The galley will be back to its normal flow of traffic. And the wheelhouse won’t be as cramped with people tripping over each other. 

Then we can get back to the real issues concerning crew change and the day to day operations of our floating condo.

Early indications lead me to believe that there will be no lack of content for the blog.