A Captain's Duty

The standard pay at the port was $1 a day, which was actually a good wage in Monrovia. And this guy earned it, working hard for seven or eight days straight, no messing around, which I liked. On payday, he came to me and said, “I don’t want cash, I want plywood.” The country had been so devastated that there was no building material there, and plywood was like gold. I tried to talk him out of it, telling him cash was safer, but he insisted. I gave him a truckload, packed it down to the springs, and he was ecstatic. The next day he came to me and he was beaten to a pulp. The man could barely walk. As he’d left the port the day before, the peacekeepers started to steal the plywood from the truck, and he just lay across it and took a vicious beating so that he could keep a third of the stuff. I gave him money and clothes and we took care of him, but they’d nearly killed the poor bastard over some flimsy wood.
    In Monrovia, Liberia, every day at one o’clock would be the Show. We would off-load the first pallet of peas and wheat and then, when it hit the deck, this huge crowd would converge. Hundreds of people milling around the pier would just pounce on it and policemen would lash them with heavy wooden clubs. Guys would heave these sixty-pound sacks of wheat throughholes in the pier and then dive in after them. And the security forces would come up behind them and stick their guns in the holes and blast away.
    Any captain who sailed East or West Africa saw the desperation of the people there.
     
    By 1 p.m., we were safely away from Djibouti without any incidents. As we made our way around the Horn of Africa and mirrored the Somali coastline, I knew we were still in the middle of the most dangerous part of the trip.
    I scheduled a “fire and boat drill” for 1300 hours. We were training the new guys, checking out the lifeboat and going through how to launch it. Then we went over to the MOB (the “Man Over Board” or rescue boat) on the starboard side and showed the new guys how to adjust the safety harnesses. Each man is assigned a position on the lifeboat, so we also practiced taking our places on it. Shane was running the drill, asking each sailor what he’d do in a particular situation and then correcting the answers. It was a blazingly hot day, with a little bit of swell on the water, caused by the first of the monsoon winds. The bridge was baking in 95-degree heat and visibility was seven miles.
    I was up on the bridge alone, scanning the horizon and keeping an eye on the radar. About 1340, three blips came up on the screen, seven miles behind us on our port quarter and moving fast, at least twenty-one knots. I looked up and caught sight of a bow wave. At seven miles, you can never see the boat, just the wake it kicks up as it slices through the water.
    My training kicked in and I steadied the 7 × 50 binoculars on the tiny white blip. I turned the little wheel at the top of the binoculars and saw the wake again. Another look at the radar. Now there were two other fast boats back there, plus a larger blip following eight to nine miles behind us, over the horizon and out of sight but visible on the screen. The mother ship. I checked his vectors; he was trailing us. Every move we made, he shadowed.
    I thought I’d spotted a mother ship once before during my career, but now I was seeing a pirate outfit in full array. My heart pounded.
    I radioed down to Shane.
    “Possible pirate boats approaching, seven miles, port quarter,” I said.
    “You want us to end the drill?” he called back.
    I thought about it.
    “Not yet. We may have to call it off, but right now I’m just keeping you apprised.”
    I still wasn’t convinced it was pirates. Their normal time to attack was just after sunrise (5 a.m.) and just before sunset (7:45 p.m.). Those are the times when it gets hazy in the Gulf of Aden and visibility falls from seven miles to four or so. At 1 p.m., there was maximum visibility. It was a strange time for the Somalis to mount a sortie against a ship.
    But they were closing fast. I called down to Shane to send up an AB named Andy. He was an old salt who had the best eyes on the boat. I’d been with him on the bridge previously and he’d called out, “I got a ship coming up on port side.” I’d looked at the horizon, saw nothing, then checked with thebinoculars and sure enough, there was a ship fifteen miles away. I couldn’t believe he’d caught it. So now I wanted his eyes on watch with