F or adventure, adrenaline and the bliss of discovering new landscapes, as well as some dough, I spent the fall semester of 2007 as a deckhand aboard a the below pictured luxury yacht.

 

On its way from Ft. Lauderdale to the Maldives, Maverick II stopped more than a dozen ports (some in the same country), and I did my best to photograph and write about each one. I'm still posting photos from along the way, so keep checking in for new material.

Story Links:

Introduction: Fair Winds and Following Seas

Bahamas

Bermuda

Azores: Horta

Horta's Famous Seawall

Gibraltar

Sardinia

Malta, Hartford and Caravaggio

Drinking at the Malta Labour Party Bar, Part 1 • Part 2

Malta Road Signs • Biodiesel

Egypt The Suez Canal Baksheesh Pt. 1 • Baksheesh Pt. 2

The Flaming Teapot Pyramids Cairo Al Quayser

Oman From Oman to the Maldives

Maldives Finding Fun in Male

Day of the Deckie: Life on a MegaYacht

 

The 1,800 mile coastline of Somalia, where pirates currently lurk, is not where I saw international brigands.

 

When I spin my sea yarns - like heading south in the Red Sea towards Somalia - people ask me if I ever saw any pirates. We weren't attacked like that boat in the Med recently, or Le Ponant in the Gulf of Aden this spring. Or like this attack in the Gulf of Aden this week, where Somali pirates captured a ship full of military hardware.

 

But we did see one pirate ship. Yet it wasn't on the African coast. We didn't need any of the armaments we had prepared for unfriendly visitors in the Red Sea. We smuggled across the Atlantic a pair of shotguns and a rifle from a south Florida Bass Pro Shops.

 

We carried a rocket-powered line launcher - normally a man overboard tool, but if some man boarded our ship, it would work as a repellent. We had plans for anyone who dared mess with us in the Arabian Sea.

 

On watch, we'd imagine what we'd do if the pirates boarded: engineer, mate and captain grab the guns. Deckie fouls the attackers' props with lines. Bowsun navigates, watching speed and direction and performing evasive manuevers.

 

We ran without running lights under the bright moonlight in the Gulf of Aden, hoping to avoid the fate that befalls other ships, like Le Ponant.

 

On the radio, passing tankers or frieghters caught us on the radar, and once in a while, a strong foreign accent in English would mutter across Channel 16 - "What you do, it is not safe. Why no lights? Turn on your lights."

 

Uh, pirates, dude, you wanted to say. We're a white ship. Bad guys might mistake us for a ghost ship or something. We maintained radio silence.

 

And then there were those 10 p.m. all-hands-muster-in-the-bridge moments when something strange settled on the radar a mile away from Maverick II, and we thought, these are the fuckers who want to capute our booty. The blips turned out to be 27" sailboats or third-world fishing boats.

 

Who can deny nerves, scary and raw? Trust no ship passing in the night off the coast of Africa.

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Update 4/7/8: France has established contact with the pirates, the crew is safe, yet still on board, but more news soon.

 

UPDATED: French forces captured the pirates, April 14, 2008 .

 

H oly cow! Pirates on Friday seized a huge luxury yacht off the Somali coast. Le Ponant, a three masted schooner, can hold 64 passengers and is designed for cruising in some style.

 

According to the BBC, the French government has not had any contact with the captured vessel or its 30 crew members being held hostage. Le Ponant was apparently headed from the Seychelles to the Red Sea, most likely to a formerly French port in Djibouti.

 

The crazy part for me is that in Kuramathi in the Maldives, Maverick II, the yacht I was on, was anchored next to Le Ponant. I waved to crew members as they ferried guests to and from shopping on the island. I hope everything turns out well for them.

 

The BBC said that there have been 27 pirate attacks off the Somali coast in the last year. I'm thanking my lucky stars because Maverick II passed through Bab El Mandeb, the straights separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, where Le Ponant was hijacked.

 

We stayed to the eastern, Yemeni side of the straight, because of the regular piracy on the Somali coastline. It seems like le Ponant's course took them up the western side of the Gulf. And it was a bit scary for us when tiny fishing boats would pass close to us, because we weren't sure if they were pirates.

 

Apparently, Maverick II wasn't big enough prey, because the Beeb said that pirates recently tried to board a 600-passenger vessel.

 

While we had plans to fend off a pirate attack - shotguns, rocket-powered line launchers, flares - it seems clear we wouldn't have been able to defend ourselves, if the pirates could board le Ponant, which was huge compared to Maverick II.

 

This morning I did not want to get out of bed. I had a nightmare about police surveillance, them hacking and tracking my cell phone. Yikes.

 

Sitting in law school this morning, I looked at the faces of studying people, and said to myself, yeah, I want to be here and not the Maldives. But when it is this rainy, for this many days, shoot, it doesn't hurt to think of sunny places on the equator. Or in Jamaica.

 

Yes, places like this exist.

In fact, I read much of the Three Musketeers (of whom there are really four) sitting under a palm tree here.

And Nick the Engineer knows how to waterski.

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Midnight – Report to the bridge for four hours of watch duty. We've been on delivery for three days now. We should arrive at our destination by 10 a.m.

 

1 a.m. – Perform a visual engine room check, on the odd hours. On the even hours, we do a written engine room check.

 

Walk down two flights of stairs from the bridge to the engine room, swing open a massive 150-lb watertight door and inspect the engine's health. Look at the engine oil pressure gauges, the fuel level in the day tank, the fuel centrifuge that primes the engines, and the stabilizer, which prevents us from rolling left to right too much. Finally, make sure the blowers are feeding fresh air into the engine room, and take a second to check the generator is running.

If anything is amiss, contact the engineer immediately. Usually, it is fine because the engineer is on the ball.

 

2 a.m. –Watch partners change. Our captain has instituted staggered watches, so for the first two hours, we have one watch partner, and the second two hours, we have another. It makes it interesting conversation wise. Everyone has two four-hour watches daily while on delivery. Mine were 12 to 4, midnight and noon.

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The life of a deckhand, continued...

 

1p.m. – Lunch. Since breakfast was late, lunch is served an hour after its normal time. Today, the chef has treated us to toasted cheese sandwiches, with meat on some for the omnivores, and tomatoes for the vegetarians among us.

 

1:45 p.m. – Return to the washdown.

 

5 p.m. – Finish putting away the hoses, soap, buckets, chamois cloths, deck brushes and wash mitts. Two of the deckhands will have the night off, one of them stays on for watch. Normally, that only consists of emptying trash, turning on and off lights, stocking refrigerators with beverages and locking doors.
But since the owners are on board, guests are meeting the boat at 6 p.m. for dinner, despite the fact that we just pulled into town today and none of have had a day off in five days.

The unlucky man on watch not only deals with the above duties, but now assumes the role of bus boy and sous chef as well.
Change back into khaki shorts, belt and polo shirt. By this time, your feet are thoroughly pruned. If you want, put on a pair of shoes designated expressly for the boat, and they cannot be worn off the boat. Otherwise, the boat is a barefoot vessel. No shoes allowed on board.

Link to Day of the Deckie, Page 2

The life of a deckhand, continued...

 

10:30 p.m. – Congratulations, you have finished helping the chef clean the galley. And your day is just about done. The People are still sitting at the table, drinking bottles of wine.

 

10:45 p.m. – The People have finally gone to bed. Cover the table that they were sitting at, make sure the Marshall Islands ensign (flag) is taken in (it should have been done at sunset). Shut out the lights on the deck, and make sure that the doors are all locked.

 

11 p.m. – Crack yourself open a hard-earned beer and sit back and relax in the crew mess with your co-workers for a beer or more. But don't stay up too late. You have to be on deck at 8 a.m., because with guests aboard, the boat has to be shiny spotless before they wake up.

 

The boat runs in three different modes: Delivery, Charter (guests) and Yard Work. The transition days between Delivery and Charter are the hardest, often involving 18 or more hours, for the whole crew.

Link to Day of the Deckie, Page 3

 

*Dry means no alcohol. The Maldives is an Islamic country. No booze. Dry does not mean drought.

 

Just a few degrees north of the equator, it rains here often. And when it does rain in Male or the surrounding islands of the atoll, the air thickens with moisture and rain drops swim down from the sky like massive schools of tiny fish.

 

 

These fish are in the fish market in Male - 2,000 square feet of stink and fresh yellow fin for about $1 a pound. That means sashimi, tuna marinated in olive oil for pasta, tuna pan seared in a sesame seed rub, tuna and egg in a peruvian potato salad.

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The lights of Egypt glowed faintly on the southern Mediterranean horizon, but much closer shone the beacons of an offshore oil derrick, pumping black gold through the thick salt night.

 

So long as our ship, traversing the Red Sea, doesn't hit the offshore oil platforms that ubiquitously dot the horizon, mark the navigation charts and crowd the radar, they're of no concern, right?

 

Yet the Middle Eastern oil rigs do concern me, the same way a crack handshake in the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Farmington and Laurel does.

 

The sentiment doesn't arise after spotting an oil pump in Pennsylvania, or a field of them in Texas. The Med rigs reminded me of Eastern Syria - it's the Middle East - where those pump fill barrels, something like 50 percent of the world’s supply of them.

 

It feels like that scene in Dune, the Frank Herbert classic sci-fi thriller, where Paul the hero realizes that the massive desert sand worms are the source of the spice which allows his civilization to fold time and space, traveling light years in the blink of an eye.

 

The oil is the energy that helps us travel. The oil is life itself. We eat the oil (the gas that powers the tractors, the phosphate fertilizers which feed the crops, the gas for the trucks to deliver the food to market, etc).

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No posts for almost a month? Such is life on the high seas.

 

I am in Male, in the Maldives right now, sitting at a little internet cafe/juice bar with Lionel Richie playing, and a bunch of Japanese tourists chattering behind me.

 

The Maldives sits 4 degrees north of the equator, just to the west of the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a gorgeous atoll, and supposedly the diving around here is great. But the waters off Male, the main city, are dirty - dozens of dead fish and three-mile long diesel spills dirty.

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The Suez Canal should be called the Baksheesh Canal.

 

Almost every Egyptian we dealt with – from the crew on the pilot boat that led us into Port Said at the north end of the Canal to the customs' agents on the dock to the line handlers who we had to accommodate on our ship – wanted baksheesh.

 

Webster says "baksheesh" is a tip or gratuity in Egypt and India. I'd call it a bribe, usually in the form of Marlboro Reds, whisky, or cash (hard currency like Euros or dollars works best). But baksheesh can also be t-shirts, hats, or even something so mundane as Windex spray bottles.

The average cop in Egypt makes 500 Egyptian pounds a month. At 5.5 pounds to a dollar, that's less than $100 per month. That means the normal Egyptian makes far less.

 

The good ship Maverick II left Malta with at least 20 cartons of cigarettes. We had been forewarned. But after four days at sea between Malta and Egypt, we weren't prepared for how quickly the baksheesh calls would come.

 

I suppose we should expect that a $5.5 million luxury yacht has money written all over it, and in a poor country like Egypt, they see you coming miles away, literally.

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We needed a few days in Port Said to fix an engine part, fuel the boat, and wait our turn in the canal queue. Everyone had their hand out.

 

The bunker boat which filled our diesel tanks had a large crew, and they wanted cigarettes and cash. Since they had to wash their hands before they could come on board our ship to examine the jerry-rigged hose, I gave them a spray bottle of soap from the deck locker.

 

While I was on board the bunker boat examining the quantity of diesel (or gasoil as they call it), the crew served me tea in the galley. I almost didn't drink it because the rest of the boat was so filthy.

 

I was on board at prayer time, and in the port, we could hear the muezzin call. One of the boat crew members knelt down, facing east praying to mecca. Others smoked cigarettes and went about their business.

 

Some six hours later, after we finished fueling, and the government agent had tried to cheat us out of some 3,000 liters of diesel, the captain of the bunker boat wouldn't give me back my spray bottle.

 

"Souvenir," he said. This, of course, after we gave them several hundred Egyptian pounds, a half a dozen cartons of cigarettes, plus sodas, Tootsie Pops and Twizzlers. I had no choice.

 

Baksheesh is a way of life.

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Strike the European Union part of the following sentence, and try to imagine it gracing a sign announcing road construction in the United States:

 

"This project, part financed by the European Union, is helping to reduce economic and social disparities among citizens of the union."

 

What kind of a massive shift in transportation policies would it take for the Connecticut Department of Transportation to acknowledge not only that transportation is a source of economic injustice, but that we can use tax dollars to lessen the gap between rich and poor?

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Okay, granted for that the 25 feet before you walk up to this biodiesel pump in Gzira, Malta, the air smells as if every blackwater tank in the marina has been emptied and sitting in a corner of the harbor for three weeks, and that the water regurgitates enough plastic and crap in some places look like this:

 

But jeez, they are selling biodiesel at pumps. This particular pump is in a Shell station, which means that on some level, the world oil giant can probably do the same thing in America if it wants.

 

Instead, Shell is trying to foist upon Connecticut and New York an LNG filling station. I don't think it's fully Shell's fault, though. It falls upon the shoulders of the people of Connecticut and America that we don't force corporate giants to bend to our will. We bend far too easily to theirs.

 

Sure, there are McDonald's and KFC's here in Gzira and a Burger King in the historical walls of Valletta. But in no way have any of these fast food corporations gotten to build their signature buildings. No, they shut up and take a slot in some building that is 450 years old and live with it.

 

The fast food giants are forced to do their destructive business in a pedestrian environment with no drive thrus (but they do deliver with scooters), no parking. They still generate the litter, but the Europeans have been a little smarter in maintaining their small market local economies.

 

I'll get into that later. It's a day off today, and I don't want to spend it blogging. To Gozo it is.

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The surprises that arise on this boat never stop. For example, the original route has changed so many times, I never often know what we will be doing from one day to the next.

 

When we arrived in Gibraltar, we - being the crew - labored under the impression that our next stop was Malta. The boss announced a small change in plans. The boat would re-route to Sardinia to pick up a guest, much to all our chagrin.

 

This is kind of supposed to be a straight delivery. But, hey, if I bought a $10 million boat, I'd want to go anywhere on a whim and subject anybody on my payroll to my desires.

 

So, I understand it, and I partly appreciate it, because were it not for this spontaniety, I would not have gotten a chance to visit Italy - land of my ancestors.

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About a week and a half ago, U.S. Rep. Chris Shays proclaimed that maybe Broadwater - the private liquified natural gas regassification factory proposed for the middle of Long Island Sound wasn't such a bads idea.

 

Among the dozens of reason why privatizing a chunk of a priceless estuary, the danger of LNG itself is near the top of my list. We just need to look half a world away in Gibraltar to realize why we shouldn't have LNG in LIS.

 

The good ship Maverick II pulled into Europe and on our way through the bay of Gibraltar to moor, I counted no less than 35 ships of 100 meters or more anchored in the bay. The real monsters, though, are the LNG tankers, which push almost 400 meters.

 

The Spanish and English authorities have so much respect for the destructive power of an LNG tanker that they force the huge ships to anchor outside the bay, in the open Med, on the east coast of Gibraltar.

 

Now imagine the LNG tanker pictured above in Long Island Sound, and think of all the recreational boats that will surround it in the Race, on its way to 11 miles south of East Haven. Something that big will absolutely be visible from the Connecticut coastline.

 

Aesthetically, it will be terrible to have LNG tankers in Long Island Sound. The ocean's visual beauty once sacrificed for industry will not be easily reclaimed.

 

Link to gorgeous picture of a sunset and more photos from Gibraltar...

 

O n the list of "Things I Never Wanted To Do," I can now check off "Cross the Atlantic In A Sub-Tropical Storm."

 

Slogging through seven days in 10 to 15 foot seas is as little fun as it sounds. I don't get seasick, but imagine a dull headache, a lighter version of the dizzy kind you got as a kid when you rolled down a hill too fast.

 

The payoff, though, was spending three days in Horta, a small port city on the island of Faial in the Azores – the Portuguese archipelago of volcanic mountaintops sitting two-thirds of the way across Atlantic.

 

Faial is an island of some 12,000 people. At one point, more than twice that number populated it. But 50 years ago, in 1957, a volcano erupted, and made life on the island difficult.

 

Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts responded by welcoming Azoreans to Massachusetts. Kennedy work magic with the federal bureaucracy and managed to invite 12,000 or so folks to the Bay state.

 

A sea-faring people, the Azoreans moved to coastal cities like New Bedford, but they also moved inland to Springfield.

 

So it should have come as no surprise to me, but when I sat down at the seaside restaurant Quebra Mar for a dinner of the local delicacy Guelly Fish with a special sauce, the owner Ernaldo turned out to have visited his cousin in Hartford during Christmas a few years ago.

 

He remembered how beautiful and cold and white and snowy it was, very different from the temperate island climate of Faial.

 

In Horta, if you look west and can see Pico, the next island, it is going to rain. If you can't see Pico, it is already raining, said one local, a transplant from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He moved there 16 years ago, and hasn't looked back once.

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Words can't always describe the enormity of something entirely visual. So, here is a photo essay of the work of hundreds of sailors who visit the port of Horta on the island of Faial in the Portuguese Azores.

Looking south down the marina dock. This is just one wall, and there are multiple other veins of paintings like this.

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S top one, the Bahamas, provided more adventure than I signed up for. While on shore leave on a small island called Guana Cay, the First Mate Tim - enjoying his first night off in three weeks - was walking back to the tender and he fell down and broke his right ankle.

 

Of course, the Guana Cay is so small that it has no medical facilities to speak of, and not at 10:30 at night. We didn’t know how bad the break was, only Timmy – a 28 year old former college hockey player from Rochester, NY - telling us that he was no girly man, but boy it hurt.

 

In the dark moonless night, some local paramedic volunteers strapped him onto a stretcher, carried him to the nearby dive boat/nautical ambulance and ferried him the 30 minute ride across a choppy bay to the Government Clinic on Marsh Harbour.

 

The Captain and I followed soon after in the tender from the yacht Maverick II. When I walked into the Government Clinic, four black Bahamian men were sitting in folding chairs watching white Republican presidential candidates debate on Fox News.

 

We found Tim laying on an exam bed, heavily sedated. Medical equipment that was 20 years old and had seen it better days surrounded him. The physician on duty at midnight wrapped Tim’s leg in a splint, but had no x-ray machine to diagnose the problem other than it was a fractured leg.

 

The Clinic had no overnight beds, and it shut down at 1 a.m., the good Doctor suggested that we get Tim a hotel room, and put him onto a commercial flight in the morning to Nassau.

 

Doctors’ Hospital, a private hospital, would have the best care, The MD said. At the government hospital in Nassau, he said Tim might wait all day.

 

I kept asking the doctor if he could give Tim more drugs to ease the pain, but he ignored it. He gave us a pair of crutches at 1 a.m, and sent us away. So we took Tim to a hotel, and left him with another deckhand.

 

The Captain and I returned to the boat at around 3:45, navigating foreign waters in pitch blackness.

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Law school is really expensive, especially at a private university. Like $23,000 a year for part time night school pricey.

 

I graduated from Syracuse University in 1994 with more than $10,000 in debt, and it took me until 2002 to finish paying it back. When I wrote my student loan checks, I often wondered if I was paying for classes that I skipped, was stoned for, was hungover for, or fell asleep in, and if I was there, had I done the homework?

 

From that student debt encumberance, I learned that financial freedom is intellectual freedom. Since I don’t see myself raking in the big bucks at a firm like Dewey, Cheatam and How after I pass the bar, I am taking that lesson to heart.

 

Once I finish school, I want to be able to apply my newly acquired legal skills to battles that I want to fight, not ones that the senior partners assign me to.

 

Combine that entrepreneurial spirit with my bad case of wanderlust - one that has plagued me for years – and I need to do something to finance my education and travel. The solution is simple: I am taking a semester off to work as a crew member to deliver a boat to Thailand.

 

The yacht – owned by an obscenely wealthy white man from Britain – will start the journey to Southeast Asia from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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