Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep,
It’s own appointed limits keep;
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
The Navy Hymn, William Whitting, 1860.
Some went out on the sea in ships; they were merchants on the mighty waters.
They saw the works of the Lord, his wonderful deeds in the deep.
For he spoke and stirred up a tempest that lifted high the waves.
They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths; in their peril their courage melted away.
Psalm 107: 23–26
We hired a junior GIS technician a few years ago in my old job making atlases for deep draught tankers. He had little to no knowledge of maritime cartography at the time. When he tried to explain his new job to his girlfriend as making modified ‘maps of the sea’, she was reported to have replied ‘What’s to map!? ‘isn’t it all just blue?’
That flat blue bit on your map is the bitter and restless chaos within which the world is bound. A container for monsters, ghosts, and mysteries. It is the place you go to test yourself. Where you go to find your limitations.
Whenever you go, you know there is some small chance you may not come back. The reason you do it anyway is because each time you do make it back, you are a little stronger.
I’m writing this article on my flight to Amsterdam to join my ship or a four-week hitch. I’m feeling rather defeated and sad today. Last week my four-year-old son ‘graduated’ from nursery school. He told his teacher he wanted to be a sailor when he grows up, to drive big cars and big boats, like his daddy.
This morning my eldest daughter tripped over an open dishwasher door and landed badly on top of it. She was in tears, and very sore when I bade her farewell to school. I was clearly annoyed with her, even though the surface of my words was designed to reassure her. She was packed into the car, still crying, when she left for school. My hug didn’t help.
And when we realised the dishwasher was goosed, my wife was just about in tears as well. Missing husband, 3 kids, and another giant hassle to deal with, just as I’m heading out of the door.
When the two-year-old and the four-year-old realised I would be leaving for a full four weeks again, they clung to my ankles and cried and said ‘Daddy, please don’t go. No. I love you. Don’t go’.
That was the first time one of them has actually begged me like that.
That was the worst goodbye since the first time I went back to sea after my eldest daughter was born in South Carolina, in 2014.
It feels like a mini-death, sometimes.
You spend the few days before you go away desperately trying to think if there is anything else you can do for your wife and family before you become unavailable to them. Clean the car, check the tires, fill the freezer with food, buy heavy bulk items, move the furniture around that’s too heavy for your wife to carry, get the dishwasher repair guy out, etc.
It takes me an hour to pack my bags. Some things are still packed from the last trip. Once that is done, I remove or put away anything that is mine. My books go on a shelf, my papers in a drawer, my tools in my van. The materials I still need to finish my bathroom renovation go in the shed or locked in the bathroom. I clean all my toiletries away. Erasing my own presence in advance of my departure, in the way you might clean out your grandmother’s room at the care home after she passes on.
I’m not there anymore. Not even a damp toothbrush on the sink. Ghosting yourself.
There is a fluttery urgency in your heart and your conscious mind, running through the material ‘to-do list’.
Then, the only thing left on your to do list is ‘pay attention to your wife and children’. Until you leave. That an hour or so of hugs and goodbyes while waiting for the taxi to the airport.
We painted pictures at the dining table with the dirty tablecloth out for the kids who are decorating bits of packaging from the new vacuum cleaner. That was another last-minute purchase, hastily made after one of their socks killed the old one.
The slightly sick feeling of heartache and emptiness is like mourning combined with a guilt-ridden shameful hangover.
The encounter is with their innocent eyes. They care not about your ‘reasons’. Only about your absence.
It feels like a gaping chest wound. Like divorce.
We get through it. As the days go by, the wound heals. Although the heart hardens temporarily. As action is required, your journey progresses, and the feelings give way to focus on the next task. Although every WhatsApp message pierces through that for a moment, you enjoy the painful reminders of home as they pierce through your liminal separation, and bring you back into context for a second.
We’re supposed to pretend that loneliness isn’t real, even though it is the defining characteristic of the way people live now. At least compared to the days before electronics and air travel. Mobility and the network effect is supposed to bring free city air to every pocket, every back room, and every village across the land. The weirdest elements of our personalities are supposed to be liberated by this digital connection to ‘the world’. So many people find their avatar more engaging than their real life.
I don’t know.
Be special. Be unique. Travel. Pursue your dreams.
What if your dream is just to be where you are needed the most?
‘It’s too late sweet girl. I have to go, or someone else’s daddy can’t come home’.
Nothing exists without some sacrifice.
I scroll continuously when I’m travelling. Instagram, twitter, emails, maritime news feeds and podcasts. What, exactly, is this freedom and liberty that we crave so badly? All I feel from my phone is Bernaysian malaise.
A lot of people are capitalizing on the Titan incident, online.
I felt zero emotion or interest in the deaths on board the Titan submarine when I heard the news. Submarines are floating coffins. Go to the submarine museum in Gosport and read about the history of the development of submarines. Leaf through the mighty ‘Book of the Dead’ at that museum, and you’ll notice one glaringly obvious thing. Whenever someone dies on a submarine, that usually means that everyone dies.
I’ve only just recently enjoyed the Allianz safety review for 2022, which announced another year of continued safety improvements at sea, with only 38 total losses. Although there was a Lloyds report that stated a spike in fatalities in that year, from an average of 35 per year to 215 in 2022 (96 on Merchant Ships). An unparalleled success in maritime safety. The death statistics are always way less than reality. It is a subset, but the ‘doubling to tripling’ of deaths at sea this year against recent averages was attributed to Covid 19.
Remember that not-very-serious disease from 2019 that we all had multiple times, jibber-jabbed or not? The one that killed zero people under, what, about 50 years old? That ‘killed’ people already ten years over the life expectancy in the UK, if they had an average of six serious co-morbidities?
Yeah, they’re blaming that for the tripling of deaths among a predominantly healthy maritime workforce that is required to take a medical every year or two to keep their license.
Anyway.
Virtue signalling around the Titan incident has been dreadful. All kinds of horrible limousine-liberals and champagne-national-socialists took to Twitter, saying how immoral it is to be sad about billionaires dying, while poor brown people are dying on rafts trying to reach Western Europe.
What makes that kind of posturing so sickening is that these people don’t care about the refugees on the rafts, or the billionaires. They only care about their own self-image.
None of them want billionaires to exist. Although all of their grand designs for socialist spending depend on taxing the same billionaires to 400% of their net worth.
I’m sorry that this is the case, but the open-borders, ultra-welfare political posturing of the so-called left is the carrot which is enticing those poor people to their deaths. And the Public-Private-Stakeholder-Neo-Fascist future they promote, is just corporate cronyism and regulatory capture. That is what the so-called left actually represents. Their regulatory capture and fiat funded model of totalitarian governance is also what drives the massive wealth inequality that creates many of the billionaires these people seem to hate so much.
Believe it or not, lefties, it is possible to be sad for both poor people and rich people who are dying.
Death, after all, is the great equalizer.
Of course, I have opinions about Titan. Keeping people alive – particularly passengers who’ve put their faith in you – is my primary role at sea. But I’ll wait for the official marine investigation report, and the lawsuits, before jumping to conclusions.
It will be particularly interesting to see the various insurers try to deal with the waivers and find a jurisdiction where blame can still be apportioned.
That being said, I can still have great sympathy for someone trapped in pitch black darkness, inside a tiny steel compartment at sea, facing their death.
That poor Dawood boy was young. His hopes and dreams were cut short. He never knew the comfort of having children, or a life left behind that will go on without him.
Darkness. Quietness. Loud cracks and groans. Fear. Heat. Cold. Panic. Crushing. Contortion. Bargaining. Threats. Emotion.
Terror.
Pain.
Silence.
Death is coming for us all. But it is always better not to die in fear and pain.
The same thing is also true for the poor migrant children whose parents paid for them to make insanely hazardous crossings on ill-equipped craft.
They say drowning is peaceful, like falling asleep.
That’s bullshit.
Children should not be drowning in terror because of our politicians’ unwillingness to do their jobs, or the public’s inability to understand incentives.
I put the phone down. It makes everything worse.
I forgot to pack toothpaste. £3 was the cheapest toothpaste at the airport. Still cheaper than my local Co-Op.
My flight was delayed. I fell asleep while she was taxiing. The agent met me at Schipol, and we drove for about an hour to the hotel in Rotterdam. It was too hot.
We spoke about the Dutch and English royal families, how the Dutch King is a little too close to Zelensky, and how the farmers were planning to protest again on Thursday. My taxi driver thinks Britain was wise to leave the EU when it did, even if it hurt in the short term.
We spoke of how it feels to be away from children. He works 60 hours a week, and so does his wife. His daughter is 13 and is mostly raised by his parents. It hurts him deeply. What hurts him more is how exhausted he is during the few moments he does spend with his daughter each week.
Inflation in action.
He did tell me how happy he was that last year he was able to take his father and his father’s best friend – who’d never been on a plane before – on holiday to Israel. Both men had terminal cancer and lied to the doctors to get away for the trip. Both died shortly after the trip, happy to spend their final weeks together with family in a state of wonder and adventure and kind companionship.
We arrived at the hotel. I’ve been here before. Basic, but clean.
Shower.
Schnitzel, currywurst and stroganoff for ‘German night’, came with a free beer, which was Belgian for some reason.
Video call home for ten minutes. The band-aid was off. Everyone had stopped crying. The countdown until my return begins.
5 am, 1-hour taxi ride to the water police/customs and then the ship. I got absolutely covered in dog hair from the cab, but at least the police station had a really good coffee machine.
The ship’s logbook is riddled with errors and omissions. Departure paperwork is incomplete. The medical stores are a shambles, and the inventory has not been renumbered to the new format issued by the coastguard last time I was here. The officers are exhausted and are being asked to sail before work is finished. Items have been welded to the deck in the wrong place, blocking access to the stern doors. We have two clients applying different standards. It looks like the dog from the taxi cab also took a nap in my cabin, and that will take 2 hours to clean. As soon as we plugged in the clients gear, it blacked out the ship. The stability computer is out of date and we are overloaded.
Good.
My time to shine.
The job is mobilisation for a de-trenching and grapnel-run job. We’re going to be dropping a giant hook, 100 m over the stern, and digging it down 1.8 m into the seabed. We then drag it behind us and ‘fish’ for old telecoms wires. When we snag one, we hoist it up on our winch, stopper it off, and cut it with a giant cable-cutting hydraulic/pneumatic vice thing.
The forces acting on the ship are significant. If things go wrong, people could get cut in half. I will be paying close attention to safety on deck this trip.
All of the big bosses and safety managers seem very supportive and safety conscious. They have an outdated ‘No Injuries, No Accidents’ safety policy, which is proven to inhibit the kind of open feedback and reporting that is really required to create a genuine safety culture. But they do seem to actually care.
However, one client reveals his ignorance of safety culture management by immediately following the talk about safety culture by asking us to sail immediately (we weren’t ready, and personnel completely out of hours with fatigue), and to stay out, even in bad weather, for as long as possible.
Never underestimate the depth and breadth of your own ignorance, or anyone else’s. Take the time to explain, and people who care will eventually make the right decision. If they don’t, it proves they don’t care.
Incentives, eh?
Departure Rotterdam. Probably the busiest port in Europe. And Dutch people drive their ships like Panamanians drive yellow taxi cabs. Like crazy maniacs who live without fear!
It was good fun though, and the VTS overwatch was excellent.
30 hours later arrive at the job site and set up.
The weather is worse than forecast, and we have some contractors on board who haven’t sailed on small ships before. Very seasick.
I was shocked to discover that the seasickness medication now issued to vessels is no longer the good old Stugeron or Kwells type that simply dehydrates you so you can’t vomit. Instead, it is an anti-psychotic medication, with a menacing-sounding name.
‘For sickness prevention, take 5 to 10 mg, every two hours, maximum 30 mg. For curing sickness, take 20 mg, then 10 mg after two hours. To treat Schizophrenia take…’
One presumes that schizophrenics must be terribly lop-sided. I’d rather just be sick, personally.
The surveyors calibrated their sensors, survey pole and Ultra Short Baseline. We did two practice hauls before the weather got out of limits, and the deck was awash.
We stopped the job, waiting on weather (W.O.W.).
No internet signal here at all.
No scrolling. No stupidity. Downloaded podcasts, books and my bible app keep me from feeling too wretched in the hour between my twelve-hour shift and bed.
Twelve-hour steam back into Eemshaven. After about eight hours I got a 5G signal again, and a flood of messages and photos of the kids came in.
The ship handling was cool. I took a pilot for the first time (mandatory on the Ems for ships with greater than 13.5 m beam), and I’m glad I did. The cross current at the entrance shifted us 50 m sideways in seconds. Some giant turbine blades stuck out from a heavy lift vessel, so I had to do some fun driving in 30-knot winds to squeeze into my berth.
The LNG import/export trade is booming here thanks to Uncle Putin, and Germany’s energy U-turn. Talk of the farmers’ protest on Thursday smacked of disappointment that only 1000 or so turned up, and the military was not required on this occasion.
They are running out of steam, it seems.
All decent people want the same things for themselves and for their children. They want to live a life free from arbitrary and unjust events, imposed by people they don’t know, and who do not care for them. They want to live in their ancestral homelands and work to improve their lot. They do not want their progress to be undone unnecessarily, and their children to face unnecessary pain and suffering.
We want to die in peace and quiet, knowing that we have given our children enough wisdom and fortitude to face their own trials, when they inevitably come.
Nobody goes to their death thinking, ‘I hope the Labour party twitterati gets some good PR out of this’. Nobody wants to die alone on a submarine, or on a raft in the middle of nowhere.
As riots break out across Belgium and France tonight, Scottish people are pre-emptively called racist on trains so migrants can beat them up with impunity, British Army medical officers are persecuted for stating that biological sex is a real thing, and churches and historic buildings are burned to the ground, and Dutch farmers and their capital and resolve are slowly crushed under the weight of the EU/WEF Net Zero cartels, it is clear that our elected leaders do not want the same things as normal people.
They want power and control. They care not for consent, voluntarism, consistency or justice.
They have betrayed us all.
One of the podcasts I listened to on the way over starred Francis Hunt the Market Sniper.
His solution to the ills of our time was for people to make a ‘hold your nose purchase’ and invest in the tools of state-sponsored corruption, like XRP by Ripple, Raytheon, BAE, etc. All so you can profit enough to live a little bit longer under slavery than others. Then run away to third-world countries, abandon your home and family to their ‘fate’, and survive by being rich enough to bribe local warlords. Slightly delaying your inevitable death, financially supporting the tools of your own demise, and sacrificing your conscience and integrity in the process.
That’s called giving in.
I’m afraid, that won’t work my friends.
What is coming will require us to speak the truth, upset people, and stand our ground. Not quitting is all you’ll have. Voluntary self-sacrifice has a power that no system of coercion can ever hope to emulate.
Dark times ahead?
Good.
Time to prove yourself.