Day 21

23 September, 2003

A night of busy dreams, my paperwork was never quite right for China, I am always doing something wrong. I wake up as flashes of lightning fill the room (we are out of pirate waters so I can sleep with the curtains open again). Back to sleep.

Wake with the sun at 06:00, a flat but choppy sea. The sun is intense in a mostly clear sky but a freshening wind out of the northwest is bringing some big rain clouds on the horizon. We haven't seen weather from that quarter since the Atlantic! We have picked up a flock of seagulls (surely, that can’t... oh never mind). Back is feeling a bit better. Cruise past, at a hundred meters, a lonely but colorful fishing junk. It must be several days sail for them, off of the Gulf of Tonkin, 06:15 and I can see a few men sitting, looking like they are mending nets. Rainbows in the distance. This shows where rain is falling., but our course and speed takes us away from it.

A kind of Spanish omelet, cooked by a Filipino on a German ship in the South China Sea! These dopey looking gulls keep flying along my porthole and looking in. I always feel they are going to say something to me in Red Skelton’s voice. He really should have changed his name to Skeleton, or maybe I should see a doctor!

I am beginning to sea that the life at sea is pretty good if you are a just barely functioning alcoholic. Every morning, Bo and Reebo (the stewards) exit both of my neighbors rooms with garbage bags filled with clanking empties. I think the second engineer speaks the most minimal english, as we hardly even say a hello or gutten morgen or anything. If one has ones job down to a routine, you have your meals and all the inexpensive booze you can drink, alone in your cabin.

Around midday, we are cruising at about seventy percent in a smooth sea. Considering our rush to get out of Singapore, it is somewhat frustrating. But the rent on dock space is ferocious. Docks are usually owned by cities, and big money generators. That is why the stairway’s walls are lined with cheesy twenty dollar commemoration plaques for the first visit by the ship to each port. Apparently our dock berth and pilot times for Yantian are still being arranged so the captain is lollygagging to save on fuel. The slower speeds also help the chipping and painting crews working up towards the bow today.

The ship shudders when she is pushed back up to full speed. I go topside to see what is going on. The captain, in full Aguirre mode (shoeless, shirtless, baggy shorts pacing the flying bridge, ranting and raving about how the whole world is conspiring to make his life harder, and he isn’t going to take it)) says he has decided to get to Yantian at noon tomorrow and if they are not ready he will anchor outside. We are thirty miles off of the Paracel Islands. Fought over for their possible oil deposits.

My back feeling better, I decide to push it on account of the glorious sun, azure sea and fresh air and go up to the forecastle. It is still heaven inspite of the one sailor who is endlessly grinding out rust on an anchor windless. We have our cloud of birds over the bow, as do all the ships in these parts. That is because they aren’t seagulls.

They are gull like birds who live full time at sea and mainly eat flying fish, so ships bows are a natural place for them. The captain says they are named after a dutch navigator. They are lovely to look at (flying although I never saw one alight on the ship). The male has a light blue beak (ala Maersk line ships), bright white body and stark black edging on the trailing part of their wings. The female although white and brown has much lovelier patterns of brown then your usual female seagull type.

We have somewhere between thirty and fifty of them, and they work hard for their fish. They fly for hours without stop, at our speed, watching the water around the bow, surrounding me in my figurehead position. At any given moment two or three will dive bomb on the bet that some fish might just show up around the same time they are getting close, usually losing that bet. The others swoop in groups if they see some fish. They are not as successful as one might like to think. I would say a fish per hour per bird, which might just equal the amount of calories they use for all the flying. I never saw a male catch a fish, just females (somewhere I hear a voice saying “yeahhhh, typical”) and I watched carefully for ninety minutes. One female darted right beneath my nose, where I was “flying” on the point of the ship, in her beak she caught a flying fish whose dragonfly wings kept beating fruitlessly, but the bird had this giant metal monster breathing down her backside. It took her a few seconds of hard flapping and thinking (about ten feet below me) when she remembered and pulled off to the side and let the ship go by so she could eat her fish in relative peace. I only saw males get into occasional squealing squabbles with each other when they both dove (they will dive underwater) for the same fish, both coming up empty beaked (again, somewhere I hear a voice saying “yeahhhh, typical”).

We have some new stowaways, I think. Some kind of sparrows.

After dinner of a terrible, horrible version of what is called Pizza Napoli, yeah sure they would kill you in Napoli if you made pizza like this, I watched Cinema Paradiso in hopes of improving it. What a tear jerk!!! It was almost as wet in my cabin as out (a huge rain storm is raging). I am half tempted to go out and see it before I go to bed but I am too lazy to put my shoes on. The new load of containers are howling a bit in the wind as the boat pitches in the totally dark night. I go to bed in faith, cozy and dry. Tomorrow China!

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