- Noumea in two days. We will have a shore crane this time
- I make sweet tea for the first time since leaving the South
- I discover the red binder with tourist maps. Gee, that might have been useful to know about.
- The second engineer's stories
- "Sarah"
- The Romanian seaman, buying toys for his children
- The Romanian seaman's unplanned family reunion in Brazil
- Bounty rum - good stuff
- This entry has some explicit language in it. If you wish to read it, but without the swearing, you have some options, depending on your browser:
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- This entry also has some "sailors' stories," which some may find inappropriate. I have included them in the interest of providing an accurate depiction of life at sea.
It is cloudy this morning when I wake up. It will be cloudy all day. I take my morning coffee outside - B Deck, starboard side, watching the sea. When I reenter the mess to return my empty cup, Eric is sitting at the table, buttering his toast.
I sit out on the deck a little while, reading, then come in to play another level of Warcraft 3, before heading up to the administrative office to check my email. The printer next to me spits out a few pages, and soon after the Captain enters. He frowns at one of the pages, crumples it up, throws it into the paper waste bin, and prints it again. "Noumea," he says. "28 June, we make berth, maybe 7 o'clock in the morning. I'm going ashore this time." "Is the crane working?" I ask. I have seen no one working on it this morning. "We will have a shore crane for number two. One and three will be ship's cranes." I ask if they are able to move the crane. "It's the brake." "Oh?" I ask. "Is that why they had all those cables wrapped up around it yesterday?" "Yes," he tells me, thrusting his finger downward. "Otherwise, it falls to the deck." "It's always something with that damn thing," I remark. He walks out of the office, papers in hand. "Yeah. Tell me about it."
In the salon, I take a sudden craving for sweet tea, and decide to brew a pot. Foolishly, I use the coffee maker instead of the hot water dispenser. The coffee maker has not been used in at least the last three weeks, and probably much longer. More than once, it stops dripping and I have to give it a few good whacks to unstick whatever is jammed inside. I dump the sugar in and stir it with a teaspoon until it's dissolved, then take the caraffe and the empty water bottle into the restroom to pour it, over the sink in case of spillage, before returning the caraffe to the coffee maker. I close the bottle up and stick it in my fridge to chill.
Lunch is roast lamb with mushrooms and roasted potatoes. I skip the lamb, opting for the soup instead. The beef supply must be running low - the cook has cut up some chicken and thrown it into the beef and vegetable soup. I spend most of my lunch pulling chicken bones out of my mouth. I'm very tired and can barely keep my eyes open. I excuse myself and return to my cabin for an afternoon nap.
I sleep until around 1600. I try to sit on the deck and read, but find it's impossible. The starboard side is in direct sunlight, shielded from the wind, and very hot. The port side is cloudy, windy, and cold, and we're headed for rain. I return to the salon and discover a large red binder filled with tourist information on each port along the ship's route. I pull out the maps and pamphlets for Noumea. Looks like a pretty nice place.
At dinner, the men are giving the second engineer a hard time about someone named Sarah, and he is obliged to explain his situation to us: after his last contract, he signed up for an online dating website. Soon after, he was contacted through the service by another user whose profile name was "Sarah." When he went to check out the profile page, he discovered to his disappointment that "Sarah" was really a man! It turns out, he (the second engineer) had set up his own profile incorrectly, and said he was looking for men instead of women. Too bad for "Sarah".
After dinner, I present my two bottles to the captain in his office. He turns on some music videos and calls the other Romanians and the Bulgarian in for drinks. They all mix their rum with Pepsi Max. I drink a couple beers, insisting that the liquor is for the crew, then fetch the other bottle of rum from the freezer in my cabin.
Bounty rum is very good. Eric soon joins us and brings a 375mL bottle of the dark rum (also from Bounty - I brought the clear stuff), but says he doesn't like it. The chief engineer tells me, "I have a saying. When I am in Jamaica, I drink rum. When I am in Scotland, I drink scotch. When I am in the US, I drink Jack Daniel's." "I have a saying, too," I reply. "If the bottle's on the table, I'll drink it."
I learn from the chief engineer some more information about the number two crane. When they disassembled the winch, they discovered that the brake discs had gotten so hot in Tahiti that they had fused together (his word was "welded"), and destroyed one of the bearings. The ship doesn't have spares for those parts, either. "Oh, shit!" I exclaim. "'Shit' is right," he answers.
The second engineer tells us a story about a Romanian seaman who went to Los Angeles. "He wanted to buy something for his children, to take back with him, so he went to a big toy store - very large. His son liked fireman's trucks, so he went to where they had the fireman's trucks, and he asked the girl behind the counter for one. He didn't speak a lot of english, so he had some difficulty getting the one he wanted. 'No, no. Not that one, to the left,' et cetera. Finally, he was getting frustrated, so he said (in Romanian), 'Ah, this stupid lady does not know how to follow instructions.' The girl turns to him and says, 'Maybe you do not know how to give instructions.' It turns out, she had grown up in Bucharest; she was also Romanian, and living in Los Angeles.
"Another ship I was on, we were in Brazil and staying a few days, so some of the men went to a night club. One of them met a woman there and decided to take her back to his hotel room. When they get to his floor, the door to the elevator opens up, and who does he run into? His son, also with a woman! They did not know it, but both of their ships were in Brazil at the same time." "I bet that was pretty awkward," I comment. "Yeah, can you imagine? 'Hello, son.' 'Hello, father. Who is your friend?'"
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