Transcription of an MP3 Audio Diary, kept between Friday January 11th

and Saturday March 15th 2008. Part Eleven.

Wednesday, 5th March

We put the clocks back so that the crew could gain an hour of daylight for
maintenance and repair. But when I was woken at 3 a.m. by flashes from arc-
welding, I thought that was going it a bit. Still, the only photographs I'd taken
on deck when it was dark were those during the barbecue on the 26th January,
coming south. So I put on a pair of shorts, grabbed my camera and some spare
batteries and headed out on deck.
To be met by a waterfall !
No-one had been slave-driven to spot-weld in the early hours; we were heading
towards the centre of a receding tropical storm. Towards, but not into. We
were still on course 317, give or take a degree or two for compensation, but we
had reduced speed considerably. The sheets of rainwater continued,
diminishing an egg-cupful at a time, as the storm gradually left us in its wake.
But the rain finally abated only after breakfast, having cooled the whole
superstructure considerably: when I cleaned my teeth, the cold water was only
luke-warm, whereas you could have brewed tea with it yesterday evening !
So, a cooler day ?
We shall see: the sea-water temperature has risen to 28.8°C ! It's one minute
to ten and the 3rd Officer is filling the pool... probably because he caught me
staring at him as he was having his 'coffee break' when I was on the bridge 20
minutes ago. It was fascinating watching the storm leave us behind, but I
couldn't face a tenth listening to the Elvis EP that he's recorded to his laptop,
so I'll go and amuse myself with Eddie Izzard at San Francisco's expense.

But first, it's time to throw my summer singlets into the washing machine; next
time around it will probably be December doublets and winter woolies. I'll
leave the washing machine to its own devices for a while and visit the Chief
Engineer and the engine rooms again, before piling my washing into the tumble
dryer.

Then it's off to the pool-side, betting against myself in the 'Flying Fish Handicap
Stakes'... the record so far: I've measured (guesstimated) a 'flight' of 192m
perpendicular to the Grey Fox. But then of course I have to make allowances
depending on which deck I'm making book from, because the angles are all
different: at least I don't have to offer different prices to other punters ! 192m
i.e. about the same distance as the length of Grey Fox. Then I visualise the
right-angled triangle and find myself working out the square root of 2... and if I
give myself odds of 3:1 that the next flight will be over 100m and odds of 5:4-
on, that the one after that will be over 50m, what would I have to pay myself
on a three-flight-accumulator ? (06/05/09 Here I had a lengthy fit of the
giggles. I was certainly very thirsty. I think the sun and heat had really got to
me).
And suddenly I'm back at the Mermaid in 1964, playing word games with Barry
Ingham and A.L. 'Bert' Lloyd, as I am getting out of my 'Shoemaker's Holiday'
costume and they are getting ready for 'The Buxom Muse'. A.L. 'Bert' Lloyd,
folk-singer, poet, merchant sailor and active communist was Wynne's cousin.
Or uncle, once removed. I'm sure I asked her, but I don't remember what their
exact relationship is/was. When Bernard Miles brought back 'The Buxom Muse',
Bert was replaced by Martin Carthey, who was later in SteelEye Span... I need
to drink more water, the heat is getting to me.
It really is warm today. I've made a point of keeping my head wet and just now
I went to get a hat from my chambers. I bought a proper leather bush hat from
the 'Drifters' Inn' in Jo'burg, but what I needed here was something that I could
keep damp. So I'm using a baseball cap, with the peak keeping the sun off my
neck.

I think I had a touch of the sun earlier on. I came back to my chambers and lay
down on my bunk and dozed off for a while.
A luke-warm shower, then a hot one and then I transferred the photos from the
the last couple of days onto my laptop. My sunsets are becoming more and
more luminous, interesting compositions. But this afternoon's flying fish are
like photos of the one(s) that got away. All that mental arithmetic for nothing.
A couple of dozen photographs of uninterrupted sea. And surprisingly dull sea
at that. The only photograph I have of a flying fish is of one that landed on
deck. I borrowed a plate from cook to set up my photo, but it doesn't look very
edifying; and it definitely won't be a dish served with English chips.

Thursday, 6th March

For the first time, I photographed the sunrise. Because of the relative lack of
heat haze, the rising sphere seems much more solid, much more three
dimensional. So no heat haze as such, but a strange hanging curtain of pale
grey muslin makes it possible to look straight into the sun without much of a
squint.
A lazy day. Pool. D Deck lounger. Cooling off in my chambers and catching up
on bits & bobs of transcription. Spent a very long time just staring aft,
watching the Grey Fox wake. No dolphins. No birds. At one point we bisected
the wake of another vessel, but she was well over the horizon, even though the
wake had hardly dissipated. Back out in the lounger, where the wind distorted
and amplified the Polish conversations that were leaning over the rail, below on
B Deck. A continuous stream of sailors chatting to or chatting up the oiler's
wife...

Friday, 7th March

March 7th, 1988. Twenty years ago today, I was coaching the head of training
at Rive-Reine, the Nestlé Training Center, in Vevey (CH) when Rahel phoned to
tell me that my mother had just called to say Dad had died during the night.
Dad was my step-father and someone I loved AND liked very much. I liked him
much more than I liked my mother. I suppose I must have loved her, but I
certainly didn't like her very much...
When Charles and I met up again and realised that this new relationship would
be on-going, my father tried to get me to call him 'dad'. I remember gently and
painstakingly making it clear to him that 'Dad' was my name for my step-
father, Arthur Jackson, and that there was only one 'dad' in my life. Charles
had been 'Daddy' when I was small (not really a sobriquet with which either of
us would have felt comfortable 20 years later), so then it became a clear
choice between 'Charles' and 'Father'. He agreed to 'Charles' and I was
relieved, 'Father' being far too third personal for my liking.

Sometime today is 'Dakar'. That means a course change and we will no longer
be heading off-west, but turning north towards the Canaries, Vigo... and
Rotterdam. Eight days if we have good weather. The captain and the crew
would obviously prefer that, whereas I am secretly hoping for (not too grave or
dangerous) engine problems in the next couple of days, so that the end of this
journey can be eked out for a little longer. I need a few extra days to get my
thoughts in order before asking myself what conclusions, if any, have to be
drawn from this pilgrimage, odyssey, opt out or cop out, or whatever you want
to call it...
But I mustn't be too selfish and pray for problems just yet; this evening is the
barbecue and already at 0855 preparations have begun. The cook has been
marinating steaks and chops for two or three days and the suckling pig had to
be defrosted very slowly. The oiler's wife has already taken her place on the
bench outside the 'Engine Pub' and is chopping vegetables by hand for the
various salads. Her husband has obviously organised his working day around
this evening's big event and, as he did on the trip south, soon busies himself
attaching the suckling pig to his home-made rotisomat, a complicated process
involving wooden cross-struts, the central spindle and an apple; then, once he's
got the brazier alight, he'll start basting and will repeat it every ten minutes
until it's 'done'; then, at about 1815, the captain will present himself clutching
an empty plate, ready to be served...
The fitters have already started to set up the sound system for the evening,
which will obviously need testing for the next 9hrs...
The crew has very little time free when at sea, so an event like the barbecue
counts as part of their foreshortened time off. They each have a few hours free
on Sunday, according to their watches when some of them at least, would be
able to sleep off a Saturday night B-B-Q. But as the captain brought the
barbecue forward by 24hrs, they will have two separate breaks in 3 days: an
extra perk that keeps the crew sweet.

At lunchtime, the Chief Engineer remarked that the sea-water temperature had
dropped to 20°C, which was great for cooling down the engine room, but not
much fun for any passenger foolish enough to risk the swimming pool. As I'd
been in and out of the pool since they filled it at 9 o'clock, I didn't really agree
with him, but I kept my mouth shut, as he started to talk about his time at
sea...

He was in the Persian Gulf between 1981 and 1987, working on a supertanker.
From what I could gather, very many of the tanker companies were consistently
breaking the US-declared Iranian embargo: sailing out of Saudi and switching
ships' papers and picking up oil from Karg Island.
Arrogant US presumption, to expect to control world supplies of something that
is not theirs to control; their attitude hasn't changed very much since they
became a dominant world power:
In the mid-1960s, the United States (believing that they could account for
every ounce of available gold) imposed a completely illegal ban on the
transportation of gold to the Far East. The British, French and Dutch, who had
colonies and dependencies in the region (and the Swiss, who had more gold in
their bank vaults than the Americans even knew existed) naturally decided that
their good standing with their subjects and ex-subjects was more important
than an embargo that anyway leaked like a sieve... and so they continued to
make gold available to Asia; offerings to various gods and temples and the age-
old belief that precious metal was vastly preferable to printed currency,
ensured a healthy continuation of the traffic. In the mid-60s, gold was $36 an
ounce; a waistcoat with 36 pockets, each holding 1 kilo of gold was worth
around $45,500.
But that's another story and you'll have to wait for the fictionalisation...

The Chief Engineer was also in Hai Phong Bay round about the same time that
the Chief Mate was there; they both worked for the same Polish fleet, but on
different ships. Again, if you believed US propaganda, the Yanks had sunk
every ship in Hai Phong Bay 3 times over. Foreign traders looked on with
amusement as the Vietnamese repainted and refurbished the 'unsinkable' fleet
of one-tenth-filled oil drums, bamboo poles tied to tarpaulin and old rubber
tyres: 'cargo boats', ready for the next US bombing mission. Meanwhile, the
real cargo boats quietly got on with their lives, their casualties being far, far
lower than was claimed by the Pentagon as 'necessary collateral damage'.

The healthy, 170-ship Polish communist state shipping company sank without
trace when the EU and capitalism invaded Poland...

In between my afternoon dips in the pool, the 2nd officer called me from the
port wing of the bridge: dolphins, hundreds of them. I ran to my cabin to get
the camera... and the phone rang. It was Kristian calling from the starboard
side of the bridge to tell me that there were dolphins all over the place. I
thanked him in haste and went back out on deck to catch the tail end of the
dolphin show, as they were all swimming South. I managed a couple of photos,
not very good ones, and for only the second time bewailed the fact that I
hadn't brought my video camera with me. Leaping dolphins are not animals
that you want to try to do justice to with a still camera; if you catch one in mid-
air, it's pure luck ! I tried with the video facility of my digital camera, but you
can do nothing with the zoom or focus change, so what it appears that I have
filmed is a nice selection of white-topped waves, rather than a posse of
dolphins plopping back into the briny one after the other.
Yesterday, when there were dolphins much closer to the Grey Fox, I was really
surprised by one thing: the noise. Years ago, my daughter Hannah (who was a
very talented and original artist, until school teachers 'explained' what they
expected to find in a drawing or painting in primary school) started drawing
dolphins. They, their movement and their environment were all based on
circular movement. Stylised, but also idealised. Nothing that would have
produced yesterday's noise. Because the open sea is NOT like a mill pond,
over and over again, dolphins were doing belly-flops. Where the mammals had
obviously planned to slice, nose-first, into the briny with scarcely a ripple, the
sea was suddenly pulled away from under them, then, just as suddenly,
bunched up under their rear ends. Belly flop.
Don't really see the connection, but they reminded me of Lino Ventura, Aldo
Maccione, Charles Denner & Jacques Brel in a Claude Lelouch film where a
group of middle-aged has-beens kidnap a young Johnny Halliday. There's one
protracted scene where they parade across the beach (and across our screen)
trying to attract bikini-babes with their OTT strutting. Now, I can think of
several animals and birds that do that, but can't for the life of me think why
belly-flopping dolphins should have reminded me of that film... but now I can't
get Francis Lai's theme tune out of my head.

I have ordered the 2 bottles of Polish vodka for the crew tonight and will add a
bowl of 'Amira Makam' (tamarind-filled sweets) to the dessert trolley. The
Swiss chocolates went down well the last time around and I tried out an Amira
Makam on the Chief/first mate last night with very positive results.
The Chief has the 1600-2000 & 0400-0800 bridge watches to himself at the
moment. In this strange part of the world, dusk arrived on March 6th at about
1657, becoming totally dark not long after we started our 5:30pm dinner. I just
had time to take a few photos of the setting sun, then it was suddenly pitch
black – I haven't seen the moon for some time.
So the Chief paces his quarterdeck until 2000 - he only stops pacing when he
has to make an entry in the log, call the engine room, or when someone asks
him a question.
He then comes back on watch at 0400 and paces until he comes down for
breakfast at 0806 when, because we have been toying with the clocks, the sun
is just starting to rise.
The Chief, and anyone else on the 1600-2000 watch will start their barbecue a
little later...
After I'd served the crew vodka for the second time and wished them a
pleasant evening's drinking, I repaired to the bridge to join the 3rd Mate and
make my weekly phone calls.

But on the bridge, I found a certain amount of drama, as the LNG Bunny was on
a collision course with us.
We need 5½ miles to change course and, looking her up in Jaynes' Ships,
Bunny needs even further: we find she's 300m long and carrying Liquid Natural
Gas ! Things are not improved by local vessels using the international Channel
16 to amuse themselves by doing animal imitations for each other. Someone
from much further West asked them politely, then not so politely, to change
channels and anyway to reserve the emergency radio communication for
'proper' messages; this was greeted with howls of laughter and more animal
imitations...
It soon becomes clear how two leviathans of the sea can crash, even without
the distraction of 'funny ha-ha' communications on the emergency waveband.
The courses are set out like traffic motorways and each ship is expected to
maintain course accordingly. But not all ships are equipped with radar and
GPS. Tonight was a good example: while searching for a visual confirmation
with LNG Bunny, there was a ship off to starboard, lit up like a Christmas tree,
but not showing up on our traffic screens. We had to go back to the old-
fashioned radar screen to establish distance, route etc and the closer we got,
the brighter the Christmas tree shone, making visual identification of anything
else in the same general direction next to impossible. We and LNG Bunny
started changing course when we were 6 N miles apart, but, remember, we
were closing on each other at over 25 knots, on exactly the same 360-going-
north/180-going-south course, in the same traffic lane; we eventually passed
with just 1.7 N miles of clear water between us, which is quite close enough,
thank you very much ! As we passed, the LNG Bunny was silhouetted by the
Christmas tree which, by then, was also at 90 degrees away to starboard. I
wonder if she was the nameless vessel whose wireless operator offered to act
as DJ for the other bored crews riding at anchor or slowly circling, lazily straying
into and out of the internationally-established shipping lanes, while waiting for
their turn to be piloted into port ?
After we passed the LNG Bunny, I came back to my chambers, to attack my
diminishing supply of 'Hunter's Extra Dry Cider' and to watch a video:
'American Psycho' which I missed when it first came out.

Saturday, 8th March

I decided I wanted to get up-to-date with writing about what happened
yesterday, so I skipped breakfast. We have sun this morning, but, it's true,
since we arrived in the northern hemisphere, temperatures have started to
drop and we are heading for late winter/early spring, depending on what
Europe has to offer us around Easter-tide. Saturday: Fish & chips for dinner!!!