Ship Comes In


Posted by Patrick Okens

November 11 – Docked in Busan New Port, South Korea

“Two, Eight, Five” says the Captain.
“Steering Two, Eight, Five.” answers the helmsman.

We reached the Korean coast early this morning, the bright floodlights of the fishing vessels like a string of pearls on the dark horizon. Short, jagged peaks appear, then a clump of skyscrapers.

“Two, Nine, Zero.” The Captain takes another drag of his cigarette.
“Two, Nine, Zero.”

Busan’s sea lanes are busy. Radar shows blips all round. I count more than three dozen cargo vessels. We also pass a new orange-painted oil drilling platform, then a small submarine.

“Two, Three, Zero. uh, I mean Three, Zero, Zero. Three, Zero, Zero.”
“Three, Zero, Zero.”

“Dead Slow Speed”
“Dead Slow”

The bridge VHF radio crackles and squawks in Korean and multinationally-accented English. A pilot boat speeds out towards us, performs a smart turn, and comes alongside. The pilot grabs the rope ladder, climbs up to the deck, then makes his way to the bridge. He’s wearing a blue uniform, shirt and tie, hardhat, yellow sunglasses, and an inflatable PFD. A handshake with the Captain and he takes command.

Hanjin Copenhagen glides past dark, moss-covered rock outcrops into a vast two-mile-long rectangle fringed with gantry cranes. A hard turn to port, then nudged dockside by a tug and our own bow-thrust engine. We’re at the Hanjin dock, with sister ships “Hanjin Miami” and “Hanjin Madrid” fore and aft, respectively. The crew replacements are waiting with their luggage. It’s not long before three massive pink-coloured cranes start slinging containers on and off. Behind them lies another vast Lego-block landscape, much bigger than Vancouver’s.

We’ll only be here for eleven hours and leave tonight at 2200, so there’s no time to go shoreside. No great loss, as the actual city is far from the port anyway. Technically, I don’t get to set foot on Korean soil, but I’ll still be able to say I’ve “been” to Korea. It’s warm and I’m sweating (Busan is roughly on the same latitude as Los Angeles); I briefly had Wifi reception on my Blackberry (thanks for the blog comments); and I’m walking funny since the ship’s dockside stability is throwing me off-balance.


Crew Dynamics


Posted by Patrick Okens

November 10 Noontime Position: Lat 38deg 46,0 N; Long 135deg 43,5 E
In the Sea of Japan

At breakfast, the Captain yelled at the Steward. “What’s this? Ten minutes it takes for bullshit eggs!” The Steward meekly said nothing. In Busan tomorrow, his contract ends, prematurely. Not because of the eggs. But it appears his performance overall has been found wanting. Later on, when the Chief Engineer and I were the only ones remaining in the officers’ mess, he told me another of his seafaring stories. An unpopular Captain ordered rabbit as a special Christmas meal for himself and his wife. The ship’s cook secretly prepared a feast of cat instead. The old man and his lady ate it all up, none the wiser.

It’s dangerous to generalize about relations between the world’s rich and poor based on one ten days on a container ship. And I don’t know whether conditions on the Hanjin Copenhagen are typical of the merchant fleet. But for the people who work here, this is no pleasure cruise.

The gulf between the Europeans and the Filipinos is immense. The Germans and Poles are physically large and in command. There is a blunt directness to these men. As I mentioned yesterday, meals are usually a glum, silent affair. Their vocabulary does not include “please”, or “thank you”, and they rarely smile. It is all about doing the job quickly, correctly, staying safe and on schedule. Building long-term relationships with shipmates means nothing. Contracts are only for a few months and you’ll likely never see the others again, so fuck ’em. Competence and cold cynicism are the professional requirements of the sea.

And then there are the singsong, sentimental Filipinos. They too are out here for the money, and they readily admit they earn at sea much more than they could back in Manila or Mindanao. But by global merchant marine standards, they are cheap labour. Not as cheap as the Chinese, but they at least speak English. And they do as told.

In stark contrast to the Europeans, the Filipinos are small, and they smile. There’s a steady flow of chatter from the crew mess during meals. When the recreation room isn’t filled with the sound of karaoke, it’s because they’re watching a phenomenally melodramatic Filipino movie. Despite their apparent good cheer, they tell me about missing home and family, and that the job is robbing them of their lives. The 2nd Officer will be leaving the ship in Shanghai. The tale of how he met his wife illustrates the storybook tenderheartedness of the Filipinos. He had seen her from afar and it turned out they were neighbours.  Introducing himself, his first words to here were: “I saw you on the bus and in my heart I knew right then you were the
woman I will marry.” She made him earn it through a long courtship, but they now have three children.

It seems there is some dispute brewing over wage payouts between the Captain/company and the seven crewmen who are leaving the ship in Korea tomorrow. Whether the romantics can ever prevail over the realists remains to be seen.