Day 10

12 September, 2003

Ahhh, breakfast in the Red Sea, somewhere near the border of Sudan and Eritrea. Yes sir, I think some one has let a chimp loose in the kitchen, it’s hot dogs with a spicy curry sauce for breakfast. By tomorrow morning, after tonight’s wild on deck barbecue (they are hosing the decks down as I write) we should pass through the narrow pinching between Yemen and Djibouti. So tomorrow we should hang a left into the gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia and out past Karachi and Pakistan eventually. Apparently this area at the horn of Africa is rife with pirates as well. I can tell the officers are serious in their concerns about this. It ain’t no Johnny Depp coming for tea. We are at “economical” speed, as our eta at Singapore is 0700 the morning of the twentieth, which thrills me and the crew greatly. The crew as they want time to shop. Me, there is an AA meeting at 16:15. Otherwise I would have to try and get to one at 0700 the next day (I know I could use one, and if I don’t get to this one, our schedule makes it unlikely until Los Angeles). But we are normally scheduled to arrive at 1500 hours. And dock at 1600, with who knows how long for immigration and customs paperwork before we can leave the ship. Oh well, one day at a time.

There are a lot of goings on vis-à-vis tonight's barbecue. Decks being cleaned. and newly delivered, picnic furniture having to go up seven stories (block and tackle). They have even filled the pool. I am crazy to try it. Filled with the Red Sea. I have done a few turns of the deck and several reps of pecs and shoulders on the machine.

A beautiful setting, on the F deck space which is part of my usual solitary haunt. The decks have been hosed and scrubbed of the accumulation of ashes, cinders and sand (the latter being difficult to remove, a seaman informs me). It is hard to believe we have only seen a few minutes of rain in all this travel. The forward, port F deck opening has been tarpulined off to reduce what is already an almost windless condition (just enough to keep our smoke out of the proceedings). The smell of good charcoal burning replacing the now somewhat ever-present smell of fuel oil. Lines rigged with many of the flags associated with our voyage hanging as decoration. This includes the US flag, German, Philippine and Kiribati (a lovely sea sun and bird) as well as Malta and others. A placid sea from horizon to horizon. The occasional dhow village with fishermen waving from their brightly patterned, painted boats in the middle of the sea.



The chef has successfully gone all out, steaks, pork chops, chicken and sausage. Potato salad or rice salad. The tables have linen taped on, but otherwise little attempt is made to make the service pretty. The various bowls of side dishes are willy nilly with their covers on, and everyone is left to their own devices to find what one needs and to take a seat. It is very comfortable for this group of hardworking men, who are used to this once a leg of a voyage celebration. Beer is beginning to flow.

The Kirabase gather in a circle, one with a ukulele and another with a guitar and soon we are having a command performance of staggering quality. A music that is a cross between Hawaiian and the choir music of South Africa, expertly accompanied. The quality of the group singing is astounding. The old guy (one year younger then myself), a big, graying, bowlegged easy to grin fellow (as all these Kirabase are easy to smile) is the repository of music memory. He sings a colorfully toned second tenor to a regular, Aron Neville like first. The bosun, my savior the day of my arrival mit baggage, is a firm and commanding bass. The others follow in between.

Apparently the Kiribase all sing, and this is done whenever they get together, on all the ships they crew on. After one song the guitar player turns to me and softly says “that song is about a girl in a village”. Yes, like most songs they are love songs, although one was about W.W.II during which they suffered the fighting between the US and Japan on their islands. I can not imagine these thousands of brave men, contracted for a year, minimum! 365 days of work, all around the world, in ice and snow and burning sand storms with little communication with home, wives, girlfriends, growing children, dying parents etc. It seems a servitude of a different time. As the Captain says in proof of the magnanimity of us westerners “when they complain about money, I point out to them when they get home they are paid more then the President of Kiribati”. But the Captain of a ship is just a highly skilled manager who has to work within the confines of the shipping business and the demands of the owners of the ship. As he points out, in his youth when he sailed on smaller bulk carriers (before the massive rise of containerization) they would have a standard crew more then twice the size of this ship’s. The story of our time will be the search for cheaper labor. It is because of these cheap workers, that the shippers can still make any profit in their competition to bring cheap goods by the mountain to our yammering maw! More and more and cheaper and cheaper we must have. The cost of the pollution these ships put out is allowed by all those, very same, SUV driving environmentally concerned people. God forbid they went into a store and had to pay the real costs of things. What a revolution would happen then!! The more I see of the working side of this world economy, the more Schumaker (Small Is Beautiful) makes sense.

The singing and eating winds down around the time of the watch shift at 20:00, I went down and took a swim in the Red Sea filled pool. Lovely, warm, and mmmmm salty. I tried to watch The Partywith Peter Sellers but it was as mediocre, with great moments, as I remembered. And a good example of Hank Mancini at his most utilitarian.

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