On The Dock

It was a strange trip from start to end. Leaving St. John with the tow
we had on board one new deck hand and a psychopathic person who called
himself a cook.

The new deckie, whom the mate sarcastically referred to ( even to his
face ) as AB, had never been on the water before in his life, save in a
canoe on Lake Muckamuck when he was a boy scout at the age of ten. He
was a business man from the Port City, and a successful one at that. We
regulars on the tug would lie awake at night trying to figure out what
the hell he was doing here. He turned out to be an excellent shipmate.

While we were still making ready for the tow, the cook straightened me
out, and the chief as well, and made no bones of telling us that if we
didn’t mend our ways, he would proceed to alter our countenances to such
a degree that our own mothers wouldn’t recognize us. Since he stood six
foot four and was broad accordingly, we took him at his word and behaved
ourselves.The tow was an old and tired Laker. */St. Lawrence Prospector/* had
been cut off at the engine room and the forward end was bound for the
breakers at Brownsville, TX. We trimmed down along the Eastern Seaboard
of the US, staying inside the effects of the Gulf Stream, and eventually
made the towers of Miami Beach. By now all us regular types were
spending all our off watch time laying around on deck in the sun,
drinking beer, a beverage that was _not_ in short supply. I had a unit
air conditioner in my cabin that with the front grill off held  six
bottles neatly.

The skipper was a Brit and spoke with a proper British accent. But he
was no match for the cook from Whitney Pier, who would go charging up to
the wheelhouse when the tug would start to roll, and tell the hapless
captain that he better make her stop it……..Or else. ! We couldn’t see
what all the fuss was about, because it was too hot to eat; by the time
we got in the Florida Straits the temperature in the engine room was
running at 130F.

We towed the hulk of the Laker slowly in across the Gulf until one fine
morning just after dawn we passed the lighthouse built on stilts that
marks the entrance of the Brownville ships channel at Port Isabel, the
man made channel that leads in to Brownsville, seventeen miles from the
open waters of the Gulf We slipped our tow to the tugs from the Breakers
yard and continued to a berth down town.As is always the case,
the engine room was so backed up with
maintenance that couldn’t be done underway, that neither the chief or I
got ashore. Instead we stayed and sweated it out in the 120F heat, all
the while taking care to keep ourselves well hydrated with beer. The
skipper, mate and three deckhands arrived back after lunch and the
psycho cook came a little later. The skipper ordered the pilot and we
sailed for Fort Lauderdale about 1600hrs,

We romped along through the startling blue waters of the Gulf;
unfettered now and free of the tow the tug churned the water to a white
froth as she steamed toward the Dry Tortugas. More tanning and beer
drinking sessions, until we arrived in Lauderdale on a Thursday afternoon.
The dry-dock was owned by Tracor Inc. It was a syncrolift, a unique
type of dry dock that lifts the ship vertically with about one thousand
small reduction geared electric motors placed along it’s perimeter. We
tied up at he approach dock, until the dock master and his crew got the
keel blocks in place for the */Birch/*. A scuba diver went in the water
and stayed under log enough to explore the Romanche Trench. When he
surfaced he was savage. He yanked off his face mask and cursed the dock
master up in heaps, all the time averring the whatever the hull plan
they had given him was for in was definitely not for the tug that was
here to be lifted. He was so irate that he swallowed a couple of good
big gulps of water; our cook said he would like to give him an attitude
adjustment.We finally got lifted when it was found that the office in St. John had
sent Tracor the hull plan for the */Irving Miami/*. The yard crew hooked
up shore power and water to our fire mains. AB went ashore and got
himself a beach front suite rented a high end car and sent for Mrs. AB
to join him.Things were going along at the frenetic pace that seems to be the norm
in every dry dock in the world; ship yard fitters of every discipline
wanting to know this or that from the chief or myself as they went at
the task of repairing or overhauling whatever was on the list. The
majority of the yard gang was Cubans; some very limited in the English
language. Transport Canada had an inspector on hand who had flown down
from SJ. He had no knowledge whatever of Espnol. The Lloyds inspector
was however, bilingual.

About 0130hrs the following morning, the mate, the skipper ( there
 because he couldn’t sleep ) and I were on the forecastle head. The mate
and I were running out both anchor chains for re-marking. The mate was
running the windlass and I was down beneath the wildcat, watching for
the almost invisible paint links as they came up the spurling pipes.
Every time a mark came up, I would dab a slap of white paint on it for
easier reference later.  A  Cuban  driving a Bull Moose was towing the
chains out along the dock, in loops.Over the starboard side,
just about abeam of where we were, eleven
Cubans were putting up staging for a welder. Their task was just about
complete, the welder was on hand, ready to start; There was a lot of
laughter and bantering in Spanish; he was about to weld a connection on
the overboard discharge for the sewage tank. This would be piped to a
holding tank on the floor of the dock. They should have gotten at it
earlierDave, the skipper, standing near the starboard bulwark, yawned and
stretched and said he thought he would turn in; that he could probably
sleep now. Then almost in the same breathe, he said, “ Ow, I believe I
smell s..t ! “
A cold hand reached out from the place where the demons and dragons
live and grabbed my heart. I lurched to my feet and run down the boat
deck for the engine room. I got to the sewage plant just as the running
light winked out. I grabbed a stanchion for support, as I contemplated,
in fast forward, all the implications of this fiasco. After I caught my
breathe I went back on deck and peeked out around the break deck and up
along the starboard side. What met my eyes was even worse than anything
my imagination could have devised. Eleven dock workers and one welder
were standing on the planks of the stage, two lifts up, running their
fingers through their hair and slatting it on the dock below, gasping
for breathe,  trying to cope with the emission of three hundred gallons
of raw human waste.I climbed the ladder to the boat deck; knees shaking
so badly that they threatened to withdraw their support and let me fall
face first on the deck to await my execution. When I reached the forecastle head, I
immediately learned something that heretofore I had not known; our
captain had a perverted sense of humor. He was lying on the deck, on his
back, beating a tattoo on the plates with his heels, all the while
guffawing loudly whilst the tears streamed from his eyes.The old
Lunenburger mate on the other hand, couldn’t see any humor in
it at all. He looked at me with his rheumy eyes and said softly, “ I
tinks we’re in big trouble, you. “ I couldn’t have agreed more.I looked
cautiously over the bulwark to see if the Harbour Authority
had arrived yet and saw the yard workers spraying each other with a
garden hose.  When they considered themselves fit to travel, they all
hied off to the showers, appearing back after about a half hour all
spruced up in clean dry clothes, and immediately fell to cleaning up the
dock and staging, leaving it spotless. The welder climbed up and welded
the fitting on the ships side, and while he was at that task, the other
guys brought the holding tank and piped it all up.The chief was ashore so
I couldn’t advise him of the imminent incarceration of his second engineer, so we went back to sticking out the chains, while we awaited the arrival of the Florida cops
 ( CSI Miami) The skippered had recovered after about fifteen minutes,
and declared it was the funniest thing he had ever seen in all his years of sailing
the oceans of the world, and headed off for the bunk, clutching his
belly, which was very sore due the convulsions he had had, while
thrashing around the deck by the anchor windlass in paroxysm of mirth.
We talked it over at breakfast the next morning. The chief was on board
now, and he said that he thought that I had closed the overboard
discharge valve on the tank; I countered by saying I thought that he
closed it. Too much assumption going into a drydock. We were still sure
there would be hell to pay yet, and decided to wait it out. We never
heard a word about it to this day, and came to the conclusion that the
Cubans figured that the gringo crew of the tug had dumped on
them…………..literally.

That afternoon the cook tackled the mate about the way he had put up a
ladder, and it took the combined efforts of me and the chief to
physically restrain the mate from going at the cook and getting himself
killed. The cook quit after we got back to SJ and we threw a party to
celebrate that event in the bar of the Admiral Beattie.

AB said he was glad to have made the trip with us; said he had learned
a lot. My wife and I ran into him later at the Rebecca Cohn. He said he
had moved to Halifax. I see that his wife still sells real estate in HRM.
And now you’ve heard the story of how an old great lakes freighter got
to the breakers yard at Brownville, and how the crew of the tug that
towed her there escaped the chain gang in Florida for the rankest kind
of pollution.

*DGC*



*Sydney**, April 2, 2007*