The morning of April 2, I walked up to the bridge and grabbed my cup of coffee. The radar was clear. I looked over at Shane, the chief mate, who’d been up there since 4 a.m. We talked about our plans for the day, what kind of overtime was likely to be needed, what projects he was working on. Fairly quickly, the conversation turned to bullshitting about sports and the latest news. I’d told Shane before the trip began, “I’m going to start backing away on this run. You’re going to step up and do more: overtime budgets, maintenance, safety and emergency stuff. You’ve already shown me you can do it.” He was on his way to being a captain and I knew he was ready for more responsibility.
After a few minutes, I said, “We’re running an unannounced security drill today.”
A chief mate is by far the hardest-working man on a ship. He’s running around fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and a security drill just makes his life more complicated.
Most mates would say, “Damn it, Cap, do we have to?” But Shane was different. “Great, I love unannounced drills,” he said. Music to my ears.
“Eat your breakfast and we’ll do it at 9 a.m.,” I said. “You won’t finish any work today, but we have to do this.”
“We’re ready,” he said. “Let’s—”
“Don’t tell me what you’re going to do,” I said. “Let’s just see how we perform.”
At two minutes to nine, I climbed up to the bridge. My third mate, Colin Wright, was there with an AB. I walked up to him and said, “There’s a boat coming along, starboard side. Four men, with weapons, acting hostile.” It was the start of the security drill.
He looked at me.
“Ohhhkay,” he said.
I waited. He was just looking at me. “Well, you’ve got to do something,” I said.
“Oh! Okay,” Colin said. And he rang the general alarm, which sounds all over the ship.
“No, we don’t want to do the general alarm first,” I explained. “We want to do the whistle first.” You want the pirates to know you’re aware of them and are getting ready to defend yourself. The general alarm rings only inside the ship, while the whistle can be heard up to five miles away.
Colin sounded the whistle. I watched the crew swing into action. Each man had a muster point that he was supposed to run to; about half of them were heading the wrong way. Not good.
“Fire pump,” I called.
“Right,” Colin answered. On a ship like the Maersk Alabama, you have probably thirty-five fire stations with hoses and nozzles. But the pirate hoses are specially placed to repel an attack. These five hoses—three on the stern and two facing back aft—are secured into position and left in the “On” position so that you can hit the pump switch from the bridge and boom, you’re shooting water. You want to be able to control the fire hoses from the bridge during a pirate attack. Not only is it impossible for the pirates to advance up a ladder when that stream is hitting them full force, but the fact that the hoses are going full blast tells the intruders that we’re ready for them, even if they’re miles away.
When Colin hit the button, however, nothing happened. It turned out a valve on the fire pump had been left open, which meant no water could flow to the hoses.
An absent-minded able-bodied seaman was on the bridge, just standing there looking like he’d lost his dog. He needed to know the correct routines, as well, so I started going over them with him.
“We’re under attack by pirates,” I said. “What are you supposed to do?”
He looked at me. “I’m…supposed…to…,” he said slowly.
“You’re supposed to give the security signal first.”
Sounding the proper signal takes the right touch; you’ve really got to accentuate the horn or it’s going to sound like “abandon ship” or another call. And this man could never do it. It always sounded like he was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the thing. Another foul-up. I ordered him to hit the fire pump, which has a red “off” button and a green “on” button. Of course, he pushed red and walked away. “No,” I said. “You have to push green and then check to make sure it’s flowing.”
“Got it,” he said.
No you don’t, I wanted to reply.
Next I sent the AB to lock the three bridge doors. If the pirates board the ship, all the key access points—engine room, bridge—should be locked. You want to prevent the pirates from gaining control of the ship. Because once they do, they can set course for the coast of Somalia, where there’s no police presence, and stuff you into a safe house where Jack Bauer himself would never find you. Then they could sell you to the highest bidder, like Al Qaeda.
That was my deepest fear, and I knew it rattled my entire crew. To end up in some stinking hole with a blindfold on, chained to a post like an animal and at the mercy of fundamentalist militants, is the worst fate imaginable. Every one of us worried about being the next Daniel Pearl.
The AB ran off the bridge. Colin was doing all the right things. He’d switched the ship’s radio to VHF, he’d hit the lights, he’d gotten the fire pump going, and he’d begun simulating evasive maneuvers.
“What’s the nonduress password?” I called out. That would let anyone inside a locked door know the mate on the other side of the door didn’t have a gun to his head.
“Mr. Jones,” he said.
Wrong. “Mr. Jones,” in fact, was the code for the SSA, or secret security alarm, which is a button the captain presses in the case of an emergency, instantly patching him via satellite to a rescue center manned around the clock. The agent there asks a question, “Is Mr. Jones there?” If you answer “no,” you’re not under threat and the agent will debrief you on the situation. If you answer “yes,” you have an AK-47 at your back and the agent will break off contact because he knows you can’t answer freely.
It is like the president’s nuclear code. The third mate wasn’t even supposed to know it.
“Not even close,” I said. “It’s ‘suppertime.’”
Colin winced. We clearly had our work cut out for us.
Meanwhile, the AB arrived back on the bridge. He’d been tasked with closing the three bridge doors, which should have taken about twenty seconds. He’d been gone five minutes.
“Where’ve you been?” I already knew the answer.
“I went to close the doors.”
“Which doors did you close?”
“Every door on every level.”
“Did they have locks on them, these doors?”
“Ah,” he said. “No.”
The whole purpose of locking doors is to isolate decks against penetration by the intruders, to create safe zones where the crew can move in case their hiding places are breached. Unlocked doors don’t offer much of a safe zone.
“So you were closing the doors, not locking them?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, “I was just closing them.”
“Which doesn’t do much good, does it?”
“No, I guess not.”
Colin shook his head. “I’ve gone over this with him six, seven times,” he said.
I nodded.
“We are in search of excellence,” I said, “but oh, we will accept so much less.”
A few of the guys laughed. They knew that was one of my sayings.
The drill ended. I gathered all the crew except the third mate in the ship’s office and broke down what had gone right and wrong. It hadn’t gone perfectly by any means. I don’t want to give the impression that this was a ship of fools. Most of these guys were good sailors, but every captain has their own way of doing things, and you have to teach the mates your approach. That first drill was a shake-out exercise. I knew the crew would step up and things would improve drastically.
During the critique, Mike, the chief engineer, called out, “What about a backup safe room in the after steering room?”
If pirates attacked, the chief engineer would go immediately to the engine room. The first and third engineer would go to the after steering room. The rest of the crew would run
to the ship’s office. But if the pirates breached that door, the crew would need a second safe room and after steering was a perfect candidate. It was hidden off a tiny corridor and would be nearly impossible for the pirates to find.
“Good point,” I said. “Let’s make it happen.”
“What if they’re listening in on the radio?” an AB asked.
“Unlikely,” I said. “But it’s a good point. So we won’t mention locations. If I hear from the chief mate, I assume he’s on deck. If I hear from the second mate, I assume he’s at his muster point. Engineers in the engine room. If you don’t have a muster point, I’ll assume you’re in the safe room. Everyone got that?”
The men nodded.
“What else have we got in case of pirate attack?” I asked.
“We’ve got twist locks and flares,” somebody called out. A twist lock is a heavy metal lock used to secure containers to the deck. They were great for throwing down at pirates and braining them, but completely inaccurate. We had ten on the bridge ready to go.
“Okay, everyone know what they need to work on?”
More nods.
Whenever you get a bunch of sailors together to drill for pirate attacks, there’s usually one guy who’s seen just one too many John Wayne movies and wants to go toe to toe with the bastards. Usually, he’s sixty-five years old and three hundred pounds and gets out of breath running to be first in the dinner line. Sure enough, as we were wrapping up the drill, this crusty old AB spoke up. “Cap, we got to have weapons,” he said. “I want to fight.” The motto of the United States Merchant Marine Academy is, after all, Acta non verba, or “Deeds, not words.”
But it wasn’t going to happen. This guy could barely climb a ladder and now he wanted to take on a group of young, fit pirates who would as soon gut him and throw him overboard as look at him.
“Listen,” I said. “We don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight. Fighting is an option, but we have to play it by ear. First, we muster. Then we get the hoses and lights ready. Then we secure ourselves. Got it?”
Nods all around.
“Then, if we find out that all they have is knives and clubs, we can use hatchets and axes and lead pipes that we have stockpiled. We can use twist-lock poles”—long steel bars used to secure the containers—“as pikes.” The image of doing battle with pirates like medieval warriors might seem ridiculous, but there had actually been cases where a crew charged out of their safe room waving poles and axes and the pirates freaked out and jumped over the side. It was a dangerous move, but the prospect of spending four months being held for ransom drove the sailors to desperation.
We also decided that if the pirates boarded, no one would walk outside with their keys. If the pirates captured one guy with a set, they could access the whole ship. I also ordered every seaman to lock every door behind them. On an earlier trip with Mike, the chief engineer, I’d complained about the 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 anything we 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 working and left the ship. Suddenly I, a glorified taxi driver, was the chief mate on a ship headed toward the Arctic Circle. We were so short of men we had to hire a couple of teenagers, one fourteen and the other sixteen, as able-bodied seamen. The captain didn’t care. All that mattered was that he believed everyone onboard was sober. The captain was an ex-alcoholic who’d banned any kind of liquor from the ship. But after hours some of the crew would get buzzed on Everclear grain alcohol. It’s very, very strong stuff and something about it and the weird light up there kind of made everyone a little crazy. So the captain would come out of his quarters once a day and shout at me, “Are those guys drinking, Phillips? I think I smell alcohol on this boat.” And I would say, “I’ll watch ’em, Cap, I’ll watch ’em.” Meanwhile I’d been drinking with the crew most nights.
I managed to coax everyone back on the
ship. But after a couple weeks we pulled in to Pelican Cove, Alaska, which has a fish processing plant, six or seven houses, one bar, and that’s it. The captain ordered some extra work and the entire crew marched off the ship again. Everyone walked down the gangplank and headed to Rosie’s Bottomless Bar.
We walked in and the bartender said, “Hey, did you guys see any bears?”
“No, why?”
“Well, two guys coming from a ship the last time around were eaten by bears.”
So not only did I have to persuade the guys to return to the ship again, I also had to watch my back for black bears while I did it. It took me until the early hours of the morning, but I finally shepherded all the deserters back to the Provider.
The captain was standing on the bridge wing as I marched the crew back.
“I brought ’em back, Cap,” I said.
He just glared at us. Everyone went to bed, including the captain. We got up the next day, had breakfast, and got back to work. No one said a word. It seemed like creative chaos was the order of the day in the merchant marine.
But the trip also had its glorious moments. From the deck of the boat, gliding along those beautiful waters, we’d see moose, bears, foxes. Orcas breached the surface twenty yards away and then swam alongside us for miles. We rescued two fishermen, a father and son, who were floating along in a rowboat in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska. Their boat had gone up in flames and even though they were in their exposure suits, the cold was so intense that they were near death from exposure. So the fishermen were debating who was going to shoot the other with a shotgun when we spotted them from the deck. They were so cold they couldn’t talk for hours; they just sat there shivering. For a day, they’d watched ships sail by, so close they’d been able to read the names off the bows, but no one heard their cries for help. And later in the trip, I saw an island with trees and snow on it growing out of the middle of the ocean where the charts said there was nothing at all. When the sun rose, the bottom of the island slowly melted away and then the whole thing disappeared. It turns out it was a phenomenon called super-refraction where at high latitudes you can see around the curvature of the earth. I was actually staring at a mountaintop three hundred miles away, but it seemed like we were going to glide right up to it.
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