December 2009     San Francisco

Arriving back in San Francisco last summer, I took a break from the medical work.  I found a company involved in local shipping, maritime logistics and tugboat operations, and started over at the bottom.  As usual, the bottom involved long hours, odd scheduling and repetitive menial tasks.  But the pay was very good and I figured that this work would lead to bigger and better things.  At the very least, it uncovered another American subculture:  the antisocially-employed maritime man.

The setting and location were great:  a dozen different working boats and a great big warehouse full of tools and heavy machinery, in downtown San Francisco. The place smelled of diesel fuel and machine oil, seaweed and welding fumes.  There was a wonderful lack of throw-pillows and fashion magazines.

My first night, I muddled my way into the engineering section of the warehouse to start the sandblaster.  I came across a sallow old man in blue coveralls who unfortunately looked much like Bill Wyman, the elderly drummer of the Rolling Stones.  I think he may have been deposited on our dock by the tides decades ago.  Too late, I noticed the one sticker on his battered old hard hat.  Small print, all caps, front and center: “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME.”  The two-foot long crescent wrench in his hand further encouraged me to keep walking and ask someone else. I never did see that mortician speak or smile, but I hoped to squeeze a story out of him someday.

The next night I worked with Frankie “The Rat Whisperer.”  It is not so much the neck and knuckle tattoos that separated him from the others, no, that was commonplace.  It was his marksmanship. Frankie brought a pellet rifle to the workplace to stalk the vermin that share our wharf.  That night, he picked off thirty-eight rats, and pinned them to a pegboard in the shop.   Frankie opted to not shoot any of the resident raccoons, possibly out of respect for their own complete disregard for our presence.  At night, massive schools of sardines swarmed under the dock lights, bigger fish and swimming birds snacked on them, and sea lions  erupted now and then to capture the striped bass.

It did not take long for this lifestyle to wear me out.  It was not so much the 0430 showtime at the dock, it was more the physical risk and the social drought that working on a tugboat involved. The captain that I worked for might use fifty words in a 12-hour shift, most of which were “Hey!” and “Fuck!”

There was not much conversation generally, and I did not tell any of them where I had been or what industry I came from.  Usually I just said “I’ve been away for awhile.”  Eventually it occurred to me that around the docks, that meant I had just got out of prison.  No wonder there were few follow-up questions.

The work was dangerous – dark and slippery decks, rolling on the waves of the foggy Bay.   There were a lot of trip hazards and pinch points, hot exhaust manifolds, greasy decks, tow-lines under high tension, and sometimes high winds and rain.  I noticed one guy with a crippled arm, another on his second disability for a lower back strain, one deckhand who was coming back after two broken ankles after falling off an upper deck, and some missing fingers here and there.  I got blunt advice on this topic:  “Don’t put your fingers where you wouldn’t put your dick.”  Thanks, dude.

Some of the guys were interesting, and the sights while out on the water were amazing.  More than once we pulled up alongside a moving ship in the middle of the night, to extract a well-armed Coast Guard tactical team from a rope ladder hanging down the hull.  Those were always random searches of oil tankers arriving from Muslim countries, now how about that?  Other guys were not as interesting, just counting the hours on the clock each day.  One captain named Dave, he probably won that prize.  We had taken an American crewman back to a ship anchored nearby, and on the way back, I mentioned that the crewman actually lived in Thailand now.  Dave looked perplexed and said “Thailand? Who the fuck would want to live there?  Ain’t that place like Mexico?!?  Shit…”

The work was scenic but uninteresting, and my time here would be limited.  I came mighty close to sinking a whole tugboat one night while crossing the Bay (they handle a lot differently than other boats, I quickly learned.)  Another night I actually did fall off a slippery barge while climbing up onto it.  Fortunately, I fell squarely down onto the deck of the tugboat below, not into the cold water or across a moving winch.

The last straw was after a four-hour transit up the Bay, crawling along at eight knots, loaded with pallets of gear and food for a ship at anchor.  I got a firm talking-to afterwards for reading the newspaper during that crossing, instead of….instead of what?  Tightening all the screws I could find?  The next day, I actually did tighten all the screws, collected a paycheck full of overtime and got the hell out of there.  It was good while it lasted, but I sure do not miss it.

Photos:  http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=chrisgilsenan&target=ALBUM&id=5479149607086291233&authkey=Gv1sRgCJbthaCL08_XqwE&feat=email

March 2001  San Francisco Bay

I was doing a marine engineering job out on the SF Bay, working on a phase of the Richmond Bridge seismic retrofit. Every day, I and my boat-driver Mel the Porno Rican would fetch our 20′ aluminum survey boat from the Oakland ship channel and transit the Bay at a furious rate of speed, freezing our stones off the whole way. One day was colder than the rest.

We were about halfway into the four-mile trip, deep inside a heavy fog bank mid-bay, and making about 20 knots over the 53-degree water, when we each noticed something was amiss. Maybe Melly-Mel at the helmy-helm felt the pitch of the deck getting steeper. Maybe I noticed the roar of the twin outboard engines deepening, becoming more muffled. The SS Silver Bullet was in trouble!

I stuck my head into the cabin to see what the what what was, and noted not his usual asinine smirk, but a positively stricken look on Mel’s face. Dios mio. Perhaps it was the alarming amounts of water sloshing around in the normally dry bilge. Or it could have been the bright-green patch of water gushing up through a Hole.In.The.Hull. F. We looked at each other. Back at the breach. Back at each other. F again.

It was only about the size of a quarter, so not too bad. Yeah, sort of like strapping into the space shuttle and realizing too late that your window won’t roll up all the way. We were going down, for real. Knowing that cold water will drain body heat 25x faster than cold air, and that in this water I could lose one degree of core temperature for every 3-5 minutes in the drink, I calculated that we would be dead for days before anyone saw our pathetic seagull-splattered heads bobbing in the bay.

So….do we stop and try to stuff the hole? With what? We got no stinking scupper plugs! Or gun it and hope to reach the Richmond marina before the engines go under? Or bail out into the life raft? Um, no. In violation of every OSHA and USCG code I can invent, our life raft sized vessel had no life raft. I had been with the company for about 3 weeks, and naturally had never inventoried or drilled for this eventuality. After all, nobody buys tornado insurance until their trailer flies away, right? And all I could think was: We better shut down because the boss-man will be really pissed if we sink this tin can with the engines wide open – they would be scrap metal. You simple ass! You are soaking wet and have mere minutes until you die a horrible cramping, sinking death with a half-wit bastard clutched to your head telling you he loves you! Think, you retard, think!

Sitting in the oily bilgewater and plugging the hole while crashing through the waves at full speed felt much like being in a washing machine, so we pulled over and tried again for about ten seconds. I tried to stuff it with anything at hand: a rag…a sandwich…a rubber rat (really.) Somehow these heroic attempts failed, water continued to gush in, and things were getting really not funny really fast. Gun it, Mel – Richmond marina.

I climbed up to the point of the bow, trying to offset some of the weight back aft and keep the outboards from drowning while I tried to make a phone call or two. No reception, of course – too far from land. As if anyone would ever find us or even hear our pathetic dying screams in this gray murk. I looked back through the fog at Mel and actually had to tell him to get on the radio (“Que?”) and mayday the Coast Guard now. I tried again to phone them, and then my boss. (Why??) No dice. We were getting closer to the marina, but we were also getting slower, lower and heavier, and water was slopping over the gunwales onto the deck. Doom was closing in. DOOM. Mel either couldn’t work the radio or just as likely, it was broken. I grabbed the two life preservers, the flaregun, an airhorn, my pet monkey, the EPIRB(yeah, right), and prepared to fling my warm pink body overboard and unto the mercy of King Neptune. But first, for some idiot reason, I stowed all the computer gear and my lunch up high inside the cabin. What a doorknob.

And now, the anti-climax: we made it full-throttle at 3 knots to the marina and made a daring, screeching crash-beaching onto the concrete launch ramp just as the Reaper started his deadly swing. We dumped the computer gear on the ramp as our never-proud vessel sank into the shallows, and the marina dudes swung down lickety-split in a high rolling crane to pluck our wounded steed from its watery grave.

As it turned out, a through-hull gauge had broken free during the transit. Typical of my employer’s third-world navy.

The Skipper

January 2001      Florida

The marine engineering company I worked for had sent a crane barge down to the gulf coast of Florida last spring to dredge an old shipping channel. While down there, an incident occurred where we ended up in the salvage/recovery business.

Down in this area, there is a big bar/restaurant/family entertainment joint called Lloyd’s, which oddly enough is owned by a guy named Lloyd, who had spawned a 23 yr old good ol’ boy named Lloyd Jr. Well one day young Lloyd Jr took ol’ Lloyd Sr’s 50′ beautiful custom sportfishing boat out for a spin. He had stocked it well with a few good friends, a passel of lovelies, and much frosty cold beverage. What else do you need, really? Mmmmmmmaybe a little attention to detail?

They went out cruising for the afternoon, fishing, hooting and hollering, and there were plenty of shenanigans going on down belowdecks, too. Poor Lloyd was mostly at the wheel, though, and had not had much opportunity to go and sample the wares of the frisky female who had been pestering him for attention all day. Poor Lloyd. Eventually, need overcame reason and the boy succumbed to the vixen’s charms. As the story goes, he switched the boat to autopilot, programmed a course and speed, and ducked below for some quick relief. However. During the previous winter, the harbor authorities had constructed a rock jetty 1/4 mile long and 15′ above sea level on both sides of the harbor channel entrance, but nobody had bothered to inform the onboard autopilot. So even though the boat had dutifully slowed to 10 knots to make the approach, nobody the rocks coming. Not Lloyd Jr, not Lloyd Sr, not Lloyd of Llondon (the insurer.)
Crunch.
Everybody and everything went flying, people got messed up, and the boat was a total loss. They didn’t sink it, though – it was high and dry on the rock pile.
When my people were called in to help, they delicately snatched up this $1,000,000 piece of wreckage using a 4-ton toothed clamshell bucket. The deckhands said they could look up at the bottom of the hull and see the sky above.

Lloyd.