The Captain's Journal. Hans M.C. Mateboer
interrupted me. “What are you saying? Hang on!”
I heard him yelling at some guy, probably the company’s meteorologist.
“He’s having great weather! What are you trying to tell me?”
“Hello, hello!” I tried to get his attention, attempting to reduce the obvious damage being done. Nobody listened to me, and in the background I heard several confused voices. It was minutes before he picked up the phone again.
“What are you trying to do? You’re in a hurricane! Even CNN says so!”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” I told him. Of course, they couldn’t see the smirk on my face. This remark was met with at least twenty seconds of silence from their side. Then Bill came on, his voice expressing a clear lack of confidence in my mental abilities, but the undertone in his voice indicated the remote possibility that maybe he’d missed something.
“Not doing anything?” he asked incredulously.
“No, right now I’m fine. I took action last night and when I look out my window, I can see Havana in the distance. Tomorrow we’ll be in Cozumel. By the way, the weather really is beautiful here. How is it there?”
“It’s raining!” he gurgled, but then he exploded. “What do you mean Havana and Cozumel. Aren’t you in Nassau?!”
“Of course not! I’m not that dumb. A hurricane is headed there. We arranged everything. Shore excursions, a berth right downtown, happy passengers, you name it.”
The conversation lasted another thirty minutes, in which Bill frequently shifted from scolding me about doing this on my own, to praising me for making such a good decision. Putting the phone down, I smiled, happy with what I’d done. Instead of giving my passengers rain and rough seas, they had sunshine and were apparently pleased with my decision.
When we got to Cozumel, the weather was great there, too, while the weather channel reported heavy rain and near hurricane force winds in Nassau. This did a lot for my prestige as an accurate weather predictor, the fact that I advertised by placing reports on every notice board, notwithstanding.
In the meantime, I was in a much less superior frame of mind than I appeared to the passengers. The time for making a decision as to where to go next was approaching quickly. In my original, rather vague, plan I’d thought about the Cayman Islands, but another tropical depression had popped up in the Caribbean, so I had to throw that idea out the window even before we arrived in Cozumel.
The hurricane seemed to be tracking more to the north, and the staff captain and I agreed that Key West would be the next most likely port. It would give me time to see what the hurricane was going to do, and it would help me stay ahead and away from the brewing tropical depression in the Caribbean.
The passengers started cheering when I made my announcement over the loud speakers. By now they all understood the predicament we were in, and they thoroughly enjoyed the surprise itinerary I was concocting on an hour’s notice. The weather was still as beautiful as could be, and to be honest, I wasn’t above pretending that I’d planned it that way. On the bridge, however, the staff captain and I shared many anxious hours, pondering over our maps and trying to figure out what in the world to do next. Avoiding the storms was one thing, but finding a place to go was altogether different. Finding a port with some appeal in a location within easy reach that wasn’t under the influence of either storm system was almost impossible.
Key West was another beautiful port with even better weather than we’d had in Cozumel but the same old question popped up again – where to go next?
We spent another afternoon calling port authorities, checking availability, and monitoring the weather. By now, Bill was calling me five times a day, requesting that I make a complete plan for the remainder of the cruise. Al demanded it, he said! But no matter how much I wracked my brain, I couldn’t come up with any plan beyond a few hours, deciding on a next port while leaving the present one. It was clear to me that Bill had great difficulties coping with something as unpredictable as a cruise line. That ships sail, he clearly understood, but that ships could actually deviate from an itinerary was news to him. My remark that maybe he should take to flipping coins was a wrong one and, while the cruise ended at a private island in the Bahamas with very happy passengers and sunshine every single day, he never really forgave me for avoiding that hurricane.
I considered myself lucky that soon afterward Bill moved to another part of the company, a solid building that, upon him going home in the afternoon, would be in exactly the same spot when he returned the next morning.
Chapter 4
Wishful Thinking
When people choose a certain career path, they often find that the ultimate goal is not as easy to reach as their fantasies made them believe. Dreams conveniently skip a lot of the less pleasant steps necessary to be negotiated on the slippery road to the top. I was no exception, and my arduous journey was one of slips and falls, and many times I feared my career would come to a screeching halt. Also, the various positions I’ve held – including the present one – were hardly what my imagination had led me to believe.
As a child, I always wanted to be a captain and, full of ambition, I chose to go to the nautical academy. Once there, I expected to be taught what a job at sea is all about, how to navigate a ship, how to handle the cargo, but the reality was somewhat different.
The teachers, mostly ex-ships’ officers, no doubt knew what they were talking about. However, all too often they didn’t end up in their present teaching position because of a genuine desire to transfer their knowledge to the next generation. No! They often found themselves in front of a classroom because of the pressures from a nagging wife. Full of suspicion about the colorful tales she heard when the guys got together, she decided that her husband needed to be beside her at night and not in some foreign port full of lures of sirens and booze. Such nostalgic stories these teachers often told about the fun and the romance of life at sea rarely, if ever, touched reality.
For sure, we all know that there will be storms and adventures. But would anybody ever suspect that seasickness is such a terrible disease? Probably not. And even if some of us knew about it, we certainly didn’t expect to be affected. After all, hadn’t we crossed the local lake many times without being sick? Not only that, but you quickly find out it’s a disease everyone else seems to take a sadistic delight in when you’re the victim. I must say that having mastered the problem, I can’t help but grin when I see a literally-green apprentice seaman embracing a toilet bowl like a long-lost girlfriend.
Then there are those fantastic ports you’re supposed to visit. Sure, they’re exotic enough, but nobody told you that cargo work on a blistering hot deck would take twelve hours of your day. Often uneasy hours, too, when you see some bearded toothless longshoreman dressed in rags longingly eying you – a blond-haired boy fresh from home.
Finally the time comes when the long work hours are over and you head for the pleasures of the town. Never alone, of course. The captain is adamant about that.
“Make sure you stay together, and hide your money. Be careful about pickpockets. Never pay the price the vendors ask, always haggle, and never show your cash. Never stray into alleyways, and stay away from women and… ” The list goes on. But he’s not called the “Old Man” for nothing, and surely he worries too much.
In a boisterous mood you walk down the gangplank and head for the gate, only to discover that the city is miles away and taxis are hard to come by. The nice security guard will call a cab for you. He doesn’t even ask for any payment for this friendly service because a small gift will do. Then finally you are underway. The initial impression many times is that you have ended up in Japan, even though the scenery flashing by the car window suggests differently. But why else would that driver display all those Kamikaze habits? Soon you get used to the man’s erratic behavior and chalk it up to the fact that other countries have different driving habits than your own. That the man hardly speaks English doesn’t matter either, because he seems to know where we want to go.
But when he