Day 16

18 September, 2003

Bay of Bengal, monsoon clouds floating overhead, a medium sea. An “eggs to order” breakfast (yeah), for which I am a bit late. Incredible volume of shipping traffic, including a Maersk car carrier we have been slowly overtaking all night. Maersk is an amazingly huge, Danish shipping company. They are in everything from air freight to LPG transport. All of their ships have their hulls painted robin egg shell blue, which makes them immediately identifiable.

Yesterday, the captain pointed out a monster tanker, going back to the gulf, riding high. It looked particularly strange, as instead of the ubiquitous kind of red that all ships are painted below the waterline, this one was light green. The captain informed me that this was according to the new environmental standards. The old red stuff is very poisonous so as to prevent the barnacle growth that one used to see on ship bottoms. The new stuff is supposed to be better, kinder, gentler... but tres cher. The captain said it would be a million dollars to paint the Penang Senator’s hull with it, but that it would probably be done in a year or two.

It is a lovely day here, I just wished I trusted my back enough to go up the foc’sle. The air is warm, not hot, slightly humid. The sea is azure again. After a rough version of Spaghetti Bolognese (I will never feel embarrassed about my cooking again) for dinner, I venture a half an hour on deck. We have lots of flying fish, who seem to take advantage of wave crests to launch themselves, but not exclusively. They may skip off the water a few times during the coarse of their flight, like flat stones. Our silly looking seabird is still with us. Much more elegant in flight. Smaller then a gull, with black back edges to it’s wings. It skims the water looking for food, suddenly dropping to the surface to pick up it’s prey.

There is a certain type of movie, of which Hollywood takes joy in churning out, and I won’t even give the time of day. Action, bad cop, big bad city streets corrupt somebody, all with macho sounding cliché names. It seems even people one might think well of, directors actors and certainly composers all get sucked into these pieces of crap. These are the large part of the left video library on this ship. I rarely can make it past ten minutes of this crap, and right now I could almost watch Candlepins for Cash (have to be Bostonian for that). But I stumbled on one, today, that was really good. Good writing, acting, it all came together. The Negotiatorwith Samuel Jackson and Kevin Spacey, came out in 1998 when I certainly would not have paid it a passing glance.

Perhaps there is a little extra spirit going around, as we head for our first actual port of call, and one liked by the sailors for its easy accessibility as well as cheap shopping, Singapore. Rumor has it that our stay there is to be cut short. Amazing considering 2,200 containers have to be moved. Tonight clocks go ahead... again! We will be eighteen hours ahead of L.A., which seems to imply only six more changes to travel through. For a good ten days after Singapore, we travel mostly north northeast.

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