One Hand For Yourself, One Hand For The Ship

One Hand for Yourself, One Hand for the Ship A True Story by Arjay Morgan Copyright © 2009 Arjay Morgan, all rights reserved.

It was just one of those days. The ponies were all running against me at the track and here I was, back at the miserable, hot, shabby place I called home when the phone rang. It was Joe and he wanted me to go along with him on one of his “walks.” Oh, oh, here we go again. Joe's a nice enough guy, personable, energetic and curious; he's the most curious soul ever been set 'pon this earth. That's why a walk with Joe gets us into the strangest, most unlikely places and, odd as it might seem, whenever I go for a walk with Joe I end up learning something about something I didn't even think I was curious about, but I was. I've known and walked with Joe for years, in all parts of the country. His life reads like a hobo's. Here one place for a while, then off to somewhere else. No, I never saw him hop a freight train, but I'm willing to bet he'd know how to do it. Chances are he's interviewed a hobo or two and picked up the finer points of hopping a moving freight. He manages to get himself invited into places that don't invite tourists and he gets people to talk about what they're doing, maybe even spelling an inside secret now and again. That's how life is with Joe. Just sort of prowling around and picking up stories. Best part of all is he remembers 'em, remembers 'em down to the tiniest detail. And, they almost always have a point, although you sometimes have to look deep to see it. This time Joe wondered if I'd like to go on a cruise. Now, I avoid cruise liners like a cat avoids a bath. “No, this is a different gig,” he said. “What we'll do is get on the ship right by the dock and sail out with the harbor pilot 'till he gets to the 12-mile-limit, then we'll get off. We might end up having

dinner aboard if we're lucky. See you at the Holland America pier tomorrow at 5.” That's how Joe does things – doesn't give his friends a chance to back out. He knew I'd be there. So did I. The ship was leaving from a terminal in Tampa where the port is aptly named Hooker's Point. Tied snugly to the bollards was this lofty slab of steel. Her sheer side, painted black, just went up and up. Joe paid no attention, he was heading for a mobile office that bore the sign Tampa Pilot Office in blue on a white background. He emerged with what I assumed was the Pilot in tow. “Cleve, meet Captain Gary Maddox, he's the one taking us for a ride” said Joe, propelling my right arm toward Maddox' outstretched hand. “Let's go guys,” said the rangy pilot. I could just tell he was a pilot by the squint wrinkles around his intense blue eyes. We trundled up the passenger ramps and trundled some more until we found ourselves in the wheelhouse which is the nerve center of the ship. This will be Maddox' office for the next couple of hours. Down below on this spring Saturday evening in Tampa, Florida the cruise liner Nieuw Amsterdam has been boarding passengers for about two hours. The atmosphere is festive. There's a band playing and the bulk of the passengers crowd the starboard rail, waving to friends and relatives who line the quay. The stay-behinds also are waving farewell. Not a one of those passengers paid a bit of attention as the stockily-built Maddox, his salt-and-pepper gray hair belying his late-30s age clutching a nondescript shoulder bag, is made his way with his two friends toward the gangway. They don't see the white-uniformed, British accented, security guard who stops the trio and inquires whether they have booked passage. The brief exchange also goes unnoticed. As the band plays and the passengers begin to toss confetti and particolored streamers toward the dock, we three make our way to the midships elevator which takes us to the bridge deck and to a firmly closed and locked door. We pay little attention to the sign cautioning that passage beyond that door is forbidden to all but the authorized few. Fact is, the pilot is not only one of the authorized few, but without him the voyage would not begin.

Another fact is that the 1,500 or so passengers down there on the lower decks are, probably to a man and woman, safe and certain in the knowledge that this ship -- their ship -- is under the command of that white-uniformed and very competent-looking man they saw standing on the wing of the bridge. They are very, very wrong. You see, it's that very nondescript man who encountered the guard and who made his way through the ship without attracting anyone's attention who is the man who will take the ship through the most dangerous waters of its week-long voyage from Florida to the Caribbean and back. He will be the person in whom they are trusting their very lives and in whom Holland America is trusting it's reputation, not to mention a multimillion dollar ship. He will sail the ship west, sometimes blinded by the setting sun, then south, then west again through 44 miles of narrow, shallow and twisty channels. His task will be made more difficult by Saturday Sailors in their outboards and ketches who will sail under his bows unaware that it would take him a mile and a half to bring the Amsterdam to a halt. He will sail the ship under the Sunshine Skyway which, just five years before, was half destroyed when another sailor, bedeviled by wind, current and an errant thunderstorm, hit it and knocked it down, killing 36 motorists in the bargain. The man who will be sailing the liner for the next four hours is our guide, Capt. Maddox, a Tampa Bay harbor pilot. He's a captain, yes, but with a very limited and very specialized venue. He's an expert on those 44 twisting miles of channel and he makes a very handsome living just sailing other people's ships in and out of the harbor. He's not unique in the world of the seafarer. His is a brotherhood of pilots working in virtually every port in the world. Anyone who has read Mark Twain, himself a Mississippi River pilot, knows the special lure and romance of a craft that is steeped in maritime history as old as seagoing commerce itself. In the days of sail, pilots were staunch independents and rugged individualists. The way they got piloting jobs was to sail outside harbor limits so as to approach incoming vessels which they "spoke" offering their services. Obviously the jobs went to those pilots with the fastest pilot boats

and those willing to sail farthest offshore. It also meant that the poor skipper of a small or unlovely ship was left to fend for himself. Various state and regulatory pressures were brought to bear around the turn of the century -- pressures aimed at insuring the competency of pilots and equality of treatment of their seafaring clients. Soon, pilots began to band together and their rather unique associations took shape. Tampa's group, which Maddox heads, is typical. But, that's only part of Maddox's business. Even though heads the pilot's association he's also a pilot, and that's why he's standing on the bridge of the Nieuw Amsterdam. Even though it's admittedly an ulcer-making business it doesn't seem to bother him. He smiles readily and is an easy person to be around. Outside, on the wing of the bridge an officer checks his watch and toggles a brass lever. Overhead the bass-voiced ship's horn gives three long, low hoots. `Maddox sits his satchel full of charts, binoculars and assorted paraphernalia on a chart table. It's time to go to work. Now, he's all business. Maddox tells us that Captain Von Driel, the ship's master, likes to get things started himself and since it is a very modern ship she is capable of unberthing herself. No tugs are needed as bow thrusters -- little propellers that point outward from the vessel's sides -- are manipulated by the captain. When several feet of green-greasy harbor water separate the 700-plusfoot ship from the quay it's a breezy, "I'm ready when you are," captain and pilot nod to each other, and control of 33,000 tons of ship and the lives of upwards of 1,500 passengers are in the pilot's hands. He'll sail the ship, using his unique knowledge of the tides and currents, the good spots and the bad, the quirks and foibles of those 44 miles of narrow, sometimes congested, always dangerous channels that lead to the Gulf of Mexico. It`s not likely that he'll stand on the wing of the bridge and ponder the beauty of the half-moon-lit night, the pall of haze on the horizon or the smell of the sea. It's more likely that he'll be watching for the solitary shrimper crossing his bow, or the silent wraith of a sailboat seemingly unaware of the behemoth's passage. His orders to the Indonesian helmsman are curt and crisp; "port 20,"

followed a few moments later with "midships" as he cons the vessel around a particularly narrow spot in the underwater, and hence, invisible channel. He talks on the marine radio to another pilot who is bringing in the Scandanavian Star, a former car ferry now doing service as a day-tripper running cruises to nowhere beyond the three mile limit in the Gulf of Mexico. He arranges to have the two ships pass in a straight stretch of the nowdark fairway. Right on schedule, the other ship emerges from the haze, brightly lighted from bow to stern. The seaway between the two is a scant 50 feet, but Maddox confides that things get a lot worse when two ships 60 or so feet wide have to share a 140-foot wide channel. His concentration on channel markers and buoys is intense. He points out that what he's doing is making the passage via a series of range markers, channel markers and an inbuilt sense of what the ship is doing in response to the invisible forces of tide and wind. "Remember, when we do something up here it happens 700 feet back there," says Maddox, referring to the ship's rudder in the stern. He also says he has to put his mind and, hopefully, his eyes a mile to a mile and a half ahead of the ship. "You always have to think ahead of her," he muses. Once we're comfortable that Maddox had things well in hand we asked permission of the captain for a trip to the engine room. He dispatched one of his junior officers to the task and the three of us traipsed down and down into the bowels of the ship leaving Maddox to his work. All the while we were being told it would be noisy and, of all things, windy. True to his word 2nd officer Sasha had to use all of his weight to pull the engine room doors open. The engine room proper is pressurized against danger of fire. Noisy it was, but Joe had no qualms about scampering about the open decking while I stayed moored to the complex control stations – just about the only place engine room workers were to be seen. They explained that the days of wipers and oilers were long gone, that the engines pretty much took care of themselves. Then came a phone call from the bridge telling us that if we wanted dinner it was served on the bridge, but since we probably couldn't make it on time the Captain had arranged for us to eat in the main dining room. Sasha, a

normally taciturn chap was ringed with smiles at the thought, so up we went. The Maitre'D was appropriately shocked seeing this pair of jeans-clad, sweaty guys presenting themselves at his 5-star dining room, but, nevertheless, he had us escorted right down the middle of the dining room to a private alcove. All the while the blue-haired biddies twittered that “they must be the stowaways.” It was a role Joe and I played to the hilt. Once seated, we were waited upon by --- and we counted 'em – three waiters, two bus boys, a wine steward and one guy whose only job seemed to be to ask, “is everything all right?” It was. Dinner was over all too soon and as we headed back “upstairs' we ran into Maddox on his way down. The ship was several miles beyond the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and the pilot boat was pulling alongside. We were traveling at 37 knots and a sea was running. It was dark. Upstairs on the bridge command has passed from Maddox to the staff captain who, in turn, gives his sailing directions to another officer who will guide the ship through the now-pitch dark night, and we were out of the dining room, meeting up with Maddox who had a few instructions to his landlubber friends: “Just climb down the ladder 'till you're almost to the bottom and when the guy yells 'jump' do just that and everything will be OK,” purred Maddox. It gets very noisy when you are moments away from meeting your maker in a maelstrom of churning seawater and grinding bones and steel. Luckily, it's dark as pitch so you can't see the exact moment when you'll be crushed between the Amsterdam and the pilot boat. What we didn't know was that the guy conning the pilot boat was a master at timing his craft's ups with the larger ships downs and when he said “jummp” we did, thudding on the aluminum deck of the pilot craft. Only when it is over does Maddox, his youthful face split by a grin, turn to his visitors and with obvious enthusiasm exclaim, "and to think I get paid for this!" Yeah, thought I, just as easy as that --- jumping off backwards from a rickety wooden and rope ladder hanging down 70 feet off a pitching ship onto a wildly heaving pilot boat, not being able to see where you are and jumping backwards when some yahoo you don't even know yells “Jump. Yeah, he gets paid for it, but not enough. ##