A Captain's Duty

pirate cage bars on the engine room, which the crew liked because they allowed air to pass into the hot interior. But that meant the heavy watertight door was often left open, and I wanted it secured at all times, as the engine room led directly into the house and intruders could race straight up to the bridge. Mike agreed to get the pirate bars off and to have the big steel door secured at all times. And we’d previously agreed that deadbolts needed to be installed on the inside of the watertight doors, in case the pirates were able to shoot off the locks. We’d already done that on the superstructure, but there were a few doors elsewhere that still needed the deadbolts. Mike ordered his guys to get on it.
    “Good,” I said. “I know these precautions are a pain in the ass, but they might save our lives. We need to do better next time.”
    With that, I let the guys get back to their work. The drill had taken fifteen minutes, the critique thirty.
    Another captain might have taken that moment to pull some crew aside and chew them out. But over the years I’d learned a different way of command. I didn’t want to be a screamer like my father or some captains I’d sailed with. I knew how completely that had turned me off to what he was saying. I didn’t want to aim for perfection when some guys weren’t capable of it. We had to crawl before we could walk. Then we could think about running.
    That instinct also went back to my initiation into the merchant marine—my first trip on my license.
    When I left the academy, I had a third mate’s license, which allowed me to work at the bottom of the officer ladder on any ship. But you have to wait for the call. I went home and started painting houses, waiting for the right job to come along. I’d passed on Florida and Bahamas runs—too boring for my taste. I was at a girlfriend’s swimming pool when a personnel guy for a shipping company called me and said, “I’ve got a ship and I need a third mate.”
    “Where you going?”
    “Alaska.”
    Alaska sounded different, alluring even. I was on a plane to Seattle three hours later.
    After half a day in the air, I pulled up to the dock in a taxi. The driver stopped in front of what looked like a floating junk pile. “Wrong place, buddy,” I said. “I’m working on a ship. This is a barge.” And he looked at me like I was slow or something and said, “You’re the third guy I dropped here today. This is your ship.”
    When I walked onboard, the second mate said to me, “You’ll never be on another ship like this one.” He was right.
    The Aleut Provider was heading up from Seattle to Alaska and back. We were scheduled to go through the Inland Passage up through Charlottetown over to Kodiak, through the Aleutian Islands, and then up to the Pribilof Islands in the Arctic Circle, hitting a bunch of tiny fishing villages where they process the salmon and king crab that the trawlers bring in. We would also be bringing supplies up to the Indian villages on a contract with the U.S. Government, but anythingwe hauled back at a price was pure profit. So the ship was loaded down with every kind of frontier product you can imagine: seal skins heaped in the cargo hold, salmon meat stuffed in the refrigerated holds. And piled on the deck, high above the gunwales, were trucks, empty beer kegs for refilling in Seattle, motorcycles, telephone poles, snowmobiles, and fire hydrants.
    It looked like the Beverly Hillbillies’ Cruise to Nowhere.
    I was a third mate on his first trip. I rarely spoke to the captain, that’s how low on the totem pole I was. My room was a tiny space with a wooden door, which would later be ripped off its hinges by a storm and be replaced by a wool blanket, my only protection against the arctic winds. I would wake up in the morning and there would be water flowing under my feet. I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into.
    My third week on the water, there was trouble. The captain had logged (that is, reported) myself and the second mate for a minor infraction—not doing the tide report for our next port. We’d actually written the tides down, but then the chief mate had mislaid them, thinking our report was scrap paper. The chief mate went to the captain to argue our case, but the guy refused to hear him out. So the chief mate quit. The second mate quit in solidarity, followed by his wife, who was working as the steward utility. The bosun quit. The able-bodied seamen quit.
    Everyone quit