Happy Holidays

Happy holiday wishes everyone. I hope you all have the type of season you want, be it food and family, adventure, time off, or whatever spins your Christmas wheels. In an effort to go an entire holiday season without encountering the guy who rings that bell outside the grocery store, I am traveling to Bali where, I’m hoping, the Hindus and Muslims are eschewing the Klaus. Perhaps Jolly Old St. Nick will cut me some Hallmark slack this year and take a break from the far east. Doesn’t mean I won’t miss everyone and wish I could share the holidays in your company. Bah humbug to the commercialism and the fact that companies depend upon the holidays for such a large portion of their yearly gross, and up with time off with family and good meals and charitable acts. Share time with your loved ones and give the gifts of patience and empathy. Or an iPod and a Starbuck’s gift card. Those are always popular. Happy Holidays and hope to see you back safe and sound in '09.

Goodbye Old Friend

I always said that if the place I lived caught fire, the first thing I would grab would be my Underwater Kinetics HID Light Cannon. Something about the concept of hyper electrified gasses juiced until they radiate appeals to the same testosterone rejoicing pleasure center in the base of my brain as muscle cars, big guns, and any piece of gear that comes nestled in its own water and shockproof Pelican case. The pure white beam blasting out of the thing makes me feel like I am driving a German sedan underwater. I have used it on hundreds of dives and have been in love with it, coveted it, for five years now. It is my baby.
I’ll loan you my car, you can borrow some money, here’s my ex-girlfriend’s phone number, but please don’t ask to take my HID diving. If, in a moment of weakness or friendship I say yes and give it to you, I’ll be anxious as a freshman daughter’s parent with his kid at the senior prom. When you get back I’ll be fighting the urge to rip it out of your hand and inspect it. Heaven help us both if it is damaged. I’d rather just not let you borrow it and save us both the heartache. That’s how much I love my HID.
You can tell where this is going. The other night I was leading a dive on a wreck known for its particularly beautiful and lush soft coral formations. The ship was hauling depth charges when it was sunk, and in the 1970’s a group of engineers removed them, all 278 of them, to make the wreck safe for diving. Many of the charges were cracked and leaking picric acid, a commonly used explosive of the time. The acid leaked all over the wreck during the removal project, killing most of the hard coral growth and leaving the door open for the more rapidly growing soft corals to gain a foothold and surge to dominance, thus enveloping the wreck in their beauty. So there I was, enjoying the way the brilliant HID light made the indescribably rich purples and reds and yellows encrusting the mast of the ship pop brilliantly against the inky nighttime backdrop.
It’s painful to even type this. My light flickered, and then the beam started to dim. As I looked closer, I could see what looked like waves forming in the ray of light. Then, blackness and despair. HID was dead. The paltry yellow glow of my backup light seemed sickly in comparison. Though it got me back home, there was no joy in the journey.
A close inspection of the dead light showed a misting of water inside the housing, source undetectable. Waterproof things eventually leak. It had to happen some time. Parts are replaceable. I can get a new one. I know these things, rationally. But this is about emotion and sentimentality, about covetousness, about testosterone fueled gear fetishism.
I’d like to wrap this up with a moral about how attachment to material things is futile and misguided, leading to inevitable disappointment. But I won’t. I’m pissed and forlorn at the loss of the HID. Goodbye, my bright and faithful friend.

Much Obliged

Obligation. One of those words that, through trite usage, has lost its intended impact. Common appearance of the word in legal context is partially responsible for this dulling of what is historically a monumental concept. To be obliged to someone or something, bound by morality, by honor, by a sense of duty, commitment, or plain necessity; that’s serious. Recently I have been contemplating the gravity of the word in the context of decompression obligation.
The pressure exerted by the weight of water pushes nitrogen from inspired air into solution in the bloodstream, more nitrogen than the body would normally have at sea level. Increase in the depth and time spent underwater loads more nitrogen into the body’s tissues. Eventually the diver must return to the surface, preferably slowly, so that as the pressure lessens, excess nitrogen has a chance to come out of solution, return to its gaseous state, and be harmlessly transferred to the lungs and respired. Rapid depressurization during quick ascent causes the nitrogen to, instead of leaving through the lungs, form bubbles in the bloodstream. If those bubbles collect and join together, then move into vital pinch points such as joints, heart, and nervous system; bad things happen. Think of opening a soda bottle after you shake it up. Open the lid (ascend) slowly and the bubbles hiss away harmlessly. Rip the cap off in a single motion and the pressurized gas in the bottle comes out of solution and fizzes out all over the place, not dissimilar to what can happen in the body.
Extended time spent at depth causes enough nitrogen accumulation, or loading, in the body that the diver cannot proceed directly to the surface, but must make a series of planned stops on the way up to allow the nitrogen a chance to slowly and harmlessly come out of solution. These stops are called decompression stops. Basically, it means you twiddle your thumbs in shallow water holding on to a bar affixed to the boat or you hover or play paper rock scissors with your buddy or count jellyfish or watch the minutes tick by on your watch, as long as you don’t come to the surface until your decompression stops are completed.
Required decompression stops are also known as decompression obligation. The diver is obliged by nothing less than the laws of physics, gasses, and biomechanics to not proceed directly to the surface. Obligation. Serious stuff.
It’s not just that the wrecks here are deep. It’s that they’re deep and, for the most part, horizontal. So, unlike reef diving, where a dive plan might be to go deep, look at something, and then spend the rest of the dive slowly ascending while cruising the reef, eventually ending up in shallow water, the dive plan in Truk often involves going deep, staying deep, then coming up. This practice leads to decompression diving and also a different perception of depth than I have before experienced.
I rarely get in the water now without hitting 100’. Once you get used to descending into the engine room of a ship at 130’ and staying there up to or beyond the point of creating a decompression obligation, exiting the structure or moving up a few levels in the wreck to, say, 80’ starts to seem like a relief. I haven’t in my diving history found myself saying, “Thank goodness I am only at 80’ now. I’m home free.” 80’ seems reasonable, 60’ is downright shallow, just a depth through which I pass to get back to the boat, and at 40’ I’ve started to depend on my body to begin efficient offgassing. The depths which I used to consider deep are now shallower stops along the way up from depths at which I have spent considerable time.
Lest you think me glib or careless, let me assure you that the seriousness with which I consider this issue is what brought me to reevaluate the term obligation as it relates to decompression. Ignoring an obligation underwater can have the same dire consequences as blowing off a moral, legal, or personal obligation, but in a much more immediate arena. Sure, you may sometimes be able to cheat the laws of theoretical physics in the same way that you can try to sidestep a financial or legal obligation, but if you fail or you get caught, you can be in serious trouble. Moral obligations may be overlooked, but the guilty aftermath experienced by an essentially moral person are not unlike those experienced by a prudent diver overlooking decompression obligation. To be obliged to do something is a heavy responsibility.

Back to Truk

So I’m back in Truk. Have been for a while, misleading as my last few posts may have been. Just cleaning out over the last few weeks reflections on the Philippines and the return journey. Wanted to thank you for reading, assure you that I am ‘home’, and let you know that further entries will follow, dealing with the wrecks, the job, the people, the boat, and the day to day. The diving is outstanding, and the boat runs impossibly well for being in a remote location with limited access to, well, everything, a tribute to the organization, infrastructure, and relationships the owners have created over the last almost decade. The maintenance, supply procurement, amenities, and crew are all superlative, and I am stoked to be here. Don’t let my blogs about working hard and getting dirty at drydock fool you. I am having the time of my life. Thanks again for tuning in and I hope to see you back soon.

What I did on 9/21/8

Motored past Yap again today. A lot has transpired since we passed on 8/8/8 going the other direction, but Yap looks the same. They are supposed to have big mantas in Yap Despite their legendary size, I was unable to see them from here.

Pacific Window

Some people can see the Pacific from their window. The Pacific is my window. The porthole in the room where I stay is about two feet above the waterline. As we cut through the waves on our journey home, they wash over the porthole and all I can see is blue water. The noise the ocean makes as it slips over the window is an eerie, sloshing reminder that I am living underwater, a layer of steel between me and the ocean. With a window in it, even.

PacShower

I like a bathroom with a view. I spend a reasonable portion of my life in the bathroom, and it is nice to have something at which to look besides walls. Some of the places I have lived and visited, some of my friends and family, have it set up so they can see the ocean from the bathroom. Nice to stand in the water and look out at the water. My pop can see the S.F. bay. I got to look at the waves breaking on the reef while showering in Fiji. Matt, Krista, and Danny have great Pacific views from their bathrooms and even take it a step further with outdoor showers.
I’ve found a new twist. The Odyssey has a high flow warm water shower rigged with a pull chain on the dive deck. Handy for a post dive rinse. As no one is using the dive deck on the crossing, I can have complete privacy there after nightfall. I eat dinner, grab a towel, sneak off to the dive deck, and shower away the day’s filth under the stars, the Pacific Ocean roiling past at eight to ten knots, three steps down and two steps out. The air is warm and even if it is raining I can warm up under the fresh water. The decking consists of non-skid aluminum diamond plate with wet divers in mind, taking away the risk of slipping and falling.
Sometimes I am down there when we switch generators, a process that kills all the lights on the boat for about eight seconds. Eight seconds with only stars and moonlight, naked, alone, wet, warm, clean, traveling on the ocean; some of my favorite things in life. Blissful. Lest you think that it’s all vacation city out here, I assure you that I earn each and every shower with filthy menial tasks, but a back deck Pacific shower is a fine way to wash all that away.

8 to 12 on the 10 to 2

Standing night watch during a storm is like riding a bull blindfolded. Wedge yourself in somewhere and hang on. For four hours. With no visible moon, stars, or horizon, the unchanging view out of the pilot house is a big ball of black, an odd sensation, as my eyes tell me that I am not moving, but my inner ear assures me that I am. Over the last two days, the seas have been high but predictable, allowing a certain surety of rhythm. As anyone who lived through the nineties and was exposed to all the boy bands knows, however, just because something has rhythm doesn’t make it tolerable.
Night watch during high seas is not nearly as fun as when it is calm. There’s no chatting with Mike the Mechanic. No working out or stretching. No bowl of ice cream and iPod under the stars. No ocean breeze gently moving through the open doors of the pilothouse. No watching the clouds shift or the moon rise. There is only wedging myself into a half sitting, half standing, all braced position in a corner, trying vainly to anticipate the next jarring crash as the boat wallows through crests and troughs like a sketchy carnival ride. There is the sultry heat of an un-airconditioned room heated by a dash full of electronic equipment and the tangy nervous sweat of two grown men cowering from the elements behind doors closed to keep the ocean, twenty five feet below on a good day, out as it rears up and knocks insistently. There is a radar screen that shows nothing but a mass of patchy green, the microwaves sent out and bounced back dutifully reporting the stormy impenetrable soup ahead and behind. There are cabinets duct taped shut to keep their contents from flying all over the confined space. There is the disconcerting black nothingness of zero visibility out the front windshield.
The Odyssey was built as a small cruise ship to ply the somewhat protected waters of Fiji, offering luxury and a smooth ride to its passengers. Part of that smooth ride was obtained by giving the boat a well rounded bottom that lacked a sharp or deep keel. The effect is a gentle ride in gentle waters, without a lot of snap or roll.
Well, add big open ocean swells and she wallows like a pig. It is crazy to sit in the wheelhouse and feel the waves lift and tilt the boat at the same time, the hull not really biting deeply into the water. I can hear one prop cavitate as it moves close to the water’s surface, then the other as the boat slides down the other face of the wave, an unnerving change of pitch in what is supposed to be the monotonous thrum of power transferred from engines to water.
Rain squalls come and go, forcing us to lock down the wheelhouse and stifle inside, listening to the rain shellacking the boat. The radar screen and assorted electronics cast a ghostly glow throughout the wheelhouse that are comforting when the doors are open but seem sickly when we are shut up inside. The squalls pass and we can open the doors and peer over the side, watching in the dim reflection of the mess hall lights as the boat jacks up on the waves and seems ten feet taller than it usually is, making the fall down to the water thirty feet. I hold on when I do this.
Doing space checks during a storm is interesting if for no other reason than moving from area to area on the boat is like riding an amusement park ride without a seatbelt. As I move from room to room, peering in holds and hatches, I find one question going through my mind again and again: “Where the hell is this water coming from?”
I make it sound like this is all miserable, but it isn’t. The Odyssey is a fine, seaworthy vessel who does her job well, and the tragically misnomered Pacific Ocean has been nothing but good to me. An occasional reminder of nature’s power keeps me humble and cautious. Too long at the top of the food chain, master’s of our environment, makes us soft and complacent, and some comparatively small waves are a pretty painless way to shake things up a bit, put me in my place.

For Sale: Used Shop Vac

If you ever have the opportunity to buy a second hand Shop-Vac that has been used on a boat, don’t. You don’t want to know what kind of stuff that thing has been vacuuming. Trust me.

Shakedown Street

Two days out of the Philippines we brushed past the tip of tropical storm going the other way, back towards the PI. We’d been watching it picking up steam for a few days, upgrading from storm to tropical storm. As we crossed paths a couple hundred miles south of it, the thing graduated to cyclone status, careening into PI. We left at a good time, but got a taste of the disturbance in the form of heavy rains and eight to twelve foot swells.
Not much productive work to be done on such an occasion. As the captain put it, “Your job today is to stay on the boat.” Good advice and not overly challenging as long as one hand is kept free at all times for holding on to some portion of the boat. Moving around on a ship slogging through swells like that is like doing lay-up drills in a gym someone has installed on top of a wave pool, and every once in a while, the whole gym, instead of just the basketball, takes an evil, unexpected bounce. One minute I’m moving down a hallway thinking I’ve got it all together and the next minute the ship slogs sideways and falls down the face of a wave at the same time. Then I slog sideways and fall down on my face at the same time. Navigating stairs is entertaining, too; as the boat leans one way it feels like I’m in heavy gravity on another planet, but I hit a landing as the boat leans the other way and I get going so fast that I’m afraid I’ll go right through the wall at the bottom of the stairs.
There is no shame amongst the crew as we lurch around like drunks and stumble into one another. No matter how ridiculous your friend looks hugging a pole for dear life or taking a tumble while trying to navigate a hallway, it isn’t really amusing because, apologies in advance here, we’re all in the same boat. We nibble what sustenance we can choke down that does not require uncontained liquids, cooking, or preparation beyond opening a package and moving food to mouth. We sympathetically meet each other’s queasy green grimaces and try to keep it together. I was about to say that we give each other a wide berth, plenty of leeway, and then I realized just how penetrated the English language is with seagoing terms and thought you guys might think I was pushing it if I used either of those descriptions.
Anyone who hasn’t experienced an extended period on rough seas, think about your worst case of motion sickness ever. Now imagine you’re shop vacuuming a mixture of diesel and bilge water out of a cramped tunnel space in an enclosed environment with no fresh air or view of anything outside to orient the inner ear. Now imagine eating a lukewarm pork fat sandwich garnished with cigarette butts and rotten mayonnaise. Well, maybe not that last part, but all the rest, which makes the stomach feel like the last part is a reality.
It is unnerving to feel what is basically your home and your lifeline roiling around, listing heavily in the swells, and shuddering as it impacts troughs, sending rumbling shockwaves all the way through the steel of the boat. Doors and cupboards pop open and slam, things fall off shelves and slide across floors, furniture tumbles, refrigerator and freezer contents obey the laws of gravity and entropy, moving towards lowest level and maximum disorganization. Three hundred gallons plastic fuel tanks on the dive deck, each weighing in at not much under a ton, break free and start sliding around, tearing up big strips of the non-skid rubber deck coating, making me feel like I just entered the bumper car arena at the fair and I’m the only one without a car. Basically anything not bolted down breaks loose and goes flying; you can stand still and listen to objects crashing and tumbling all over the boat, and you are getting tossed around enough that you just don’t care as long as none of it is crashing and tumbling onto you.
Then comes the bad news. Remember all that mechanical, plumbing, and welding work done at the yard? Well, now we’re on Shakedown Street, that part of town where any and all problems, issues, discrepancies, and errors make themselves apparent. Piping that is supposed to move water starts moving diesel infused bilge. Piping that is supposed to move diesel moves air. Piping that is supposed to stay dry carries all three liquids at once. Places that are supposed to stay dry get wet. Places that are supposed to stay wet run dry. You get the idea. Cats and dogs living together in harmony. Congress in accord. Balanced budgets. Respectful, attentive teens. General chaos. Shakedown Street.

Props

Pretty much as clean as the boat bottom and props will ever be.  Everything under the boat absolutely gleams, and the propellors have an almost mirror finish.  One of the prop blades was bent when we arrived.  They used the biggest propane torch you could possibly imagine to heat it until it glowed, then some brave soul beat it with a hammer wrapped in wet newspaper.  Amazing to watch.  Almost as amazing as watching them remove the rudders, props, and shafts.  Now that everything is reinstalled, you could eat off the bottom of the boat.  If you could make the food stick.

What makes a country third world? Some places I have been pretty much scream third world. Chuuk is third world, no question. Drive around for five minutes and it is apparent. Other countries, though, can be hard to pigeon-hole. The Philippines Islands, or at least the portion I saw, are a difficult place about which to make broad, sweeping generalizations. So what are the ingredients of the third world recipe, and how do the Philippines fit?
Sure, some of the roads were ridiculous in their lack of traffic flow, street signals, and upkeep, but they did get people where they were going pretty effectively, and with much less apparent driving stress and road rage than you see in a major American city.
I was not panhandled or accosted for money a single time while I was in Cebu. I saw very few homeless people and was not once approached for a hand-out. There is a certain sense of community and pride there that seems to preclude throwing oneself on the charity of strangers. In addition, I never felt threatened or in danger, even at night. When people stared at me it was more curiosity at the goofy white boy than sizing me up or staring me down. People were friendly, helpful, and all smiles, as well as tolerant of my ignorance. Except for that bitch at the hardware store. The same could be said for very few of the large metropolitan areas in which I have visited or lived.
The majority of children in Cebu attend school. During normal school hours, there are few truants roaming the streets. Any children who are on the streets are wearing neat parochial school uniforms that vary in color and style as one moves between neighborhoods and the Catholic schools that serve them. They form in gaggles before class starts, during lunch time, and after school. When I started seeing uniformed youngsters later in the evenings and on the weekends, I asked around and found out that there are not enough teachers and desk space to teach all the school aged children at one time, so classes are also held at night and on weekends. Try getting an American teen into a classroom on a Saturday morning, much less in a uniform. Then try to imagine getting the funding to keep a school open and full of teachers at such a time.
There are neighborhoods in and around Cebu, specifically in city slums and on the outskirts, that smack of the third world. Mangy dogs roam poor streets winding past ramshackle homes. Corrugated tin, concrete blocks, and poured cement sprouting twisted snakes of rusty rebar are the building materials at hand, reminiscent of the third world the world over. Vacant lots are home to Brahma cattle. Chickens hustle around yards, and there are more goats than John Deere products. Residents deter theft with pointy wrought iron, barbed wire, and, my favorite way to gently underscore the concept of private property, broken glass set into concrete. Graffiti is all pervasive and quite clever, ranging from basic name scrawling to witty respellings of common words and phrases to symbols from the Greek alphabet and other, more esoteric signs. Take a wrong turn down an alley and you will quickly find yourself on squalor street, and the art of loitering may have been invented in the Philippines. Yet even the poorest dirt yards sprout lush flowering vegetation, some planted with extravagant care and attention to beauty.
Pollution is rampant. The sources are power stations, heavy industry, the myriad vehicles on the road, and the constant byproduct generation of millions of people consuming and bumping shoulders every day. Lots of stuff winds up in the waterways between the islands, and watching people bathe, swim, play and splash made me cringe. Think Los Angeles in the 70’s before catalytic converters and heavy EPA regulation.
Folks are clean and neat here. Even in poor neighborhoods, tattered or hand me down clothes are clean and mended. In the business and school sectors, you can practically smell the soap and shampoo coming off the folks commuting to work in jeepneys. Uniforms are crisp and tailored. Whites are brilliant white and any shoes that aren’t sandals are shined. The restaurant staff is squeaky clean, eager, friendly, and, no matter how incompetent they are, they look good in their uniforms and have the kind of genuine smile you won’t find in an American McDonald’s.
There may be no glass in the windows or central AC, but every home has a television, and they are all on at night, reminiscent of every American neighborhood, regardless of class. The idiot box is a universal common denominator among people with ready access to electricity.
Speaking of, electricity and phone service are reliable. Though the above ground wiring is a nightmare tangled bird’s nest that seems impossibly complex and sub-code, I experienced no outages or rolling blackout periods. Can’t even say that about California.
There are nice neighborhoods, too. The college section of town has hip cafes, book stores, and a wealth of restaurants. The tourist section of town has a massive hotel/casino complex of the Tahoe/Reno caliber. Upscale residential areas in the foothills have palatial homes on gated grounds with sweeping views. Mind boggling, agoraphobia inducing malls with six stories, full sized grocery stores and movie theaters, department stores, the works are as nice as anything in America, with the added bonus of pat down and metal detector security at every entrance. If you plan on going West Side Story at the mall, you’re going to have to get creative by wielding a coat rack or hot pan of brownies.
If you were to white out the people and place names in the local newspaper, it could be the daily from any developed nation in the world, with the same doses of greed, corruption, misappropriation, scandal, tragedy, crime, Angelina and Brad, tasty recipes, fluff pieces, cultural calendar, sudoku, funnies, and crossword.
Bottom line, the Philippines I saw has more in common with America or Italy than Mexico or Chuuk. It may not be first world, but it is definitely not third. I’m thinking second world, and I’m thinking I like it.

Do You Know the Way to Talisay?

Not wanting to spend over a month in the Philippines servicing a dive boat without doing at least one dive, the boys and I arranged to make a two-tank boat dive off the south side of our island, Mactan, on our day off. The method for choosing amongst the many dive companies: open the phone book, pick the one with an English advertisement. Simple. We found out that an English ad is no guarantee of English speakers in the office, but we did get our reservations booked.
Came Sunday, Jonah was at our hotel to pick us up and take us to the dive shop. I was a little put off by the fact that we were being led to a boat by a man named Jonah; turns out he was just the van driver. Once at the dive shop we met up with our captain and guides for the day, as well as the owner of the shop, a lady who has apparently been instrumental in creating marine sanctuary legislation that has closed some of the local areas to fishing. It was to one of these areas that our dive guide, Edwin, suggested we go.
We schlepped our gear down to the shore and boarded a 70’ diesel powered outrigger, a unique experience for me but a common vessel type in the local waters, used for fishing, tourism, short inter-island hops, and, from what I can tell when driving over the bridge that connects Mactan to the island where the shipyard is, beaching in the mud flats for no particular reason. Basically a big canoe with pontoons rigged on either side for stability. It was roomy and spacious for the four divers and five crew, with a shaded lower deck, a sundeck above, easy water access, plenty of room for gear, everything a dive boat needs.
We motored away from Mactan and headed east across a wide channel towards the northern tip of Olango Island and a dive site called Talisay. I know you probably couldn’t care less about the names; I am writing them more for my memory than anything else. The journey took about twenty minutes. Talisay, according to the dive shop owner and due in part to her, has been a protected area for about three years, which has given the fish population a chance to recover somewhat. Seemed like a popular spot, as there were several tourist boats, mostly snorkelers and day cruisers with a few dive boats moored up along the reef.
It’s funny to be in a foreign place and not know the language but still know exactly what someone is saying. I’ve been in the dive business long enough to know what the first question is when you pull up next to another dive boat, and I can now ask in Tagalog if there is any current.
Oh yeah, there was current. My four friends and I, accompanied by Edwin and his mildly muddled sidekick Peter, went on a great drift dive. Water was 84 degrees and shallow where we hopped in, eel grass sand with healthy patch reef. We kicked off shore fifty feet and descended over the lip of a steep wall, letting a maybe one-knot current pull us along. A quick word on drift diving from a guy who makes a living figuring out how to get his customers back to the place they started their dive, the boat. Love it; not having to worry about how to get home is a great way to dive.
We descended to about eighty, kicking back by not kicking at all, and watched the world pass by. Huge sea fans, healthy hard and soft corals, not overly abundant but colorful reef fish, and schools of durgeons and some sort of silvery fish you’d expect to see someone around here chasing with a net to put in a can whole with some spicy tomato sauce. Highlights included a clown triggerfish, several nudibranchs and flatworms, lionfish and scorpionfish, a cuttlefish, and not having to worry about the other divers in the water.
Clown triggers- how does nature select for a fish whose lower half is black covered in big white spots shifting suddenly in the middle of the fish to neon highlighted stripes with orange lips? What evolutionary function says, “Oh yeah, let’s select for that color pattern. This guy’s a survivor,”? Mystery.
We slowly worked our way back up the wall and over the lip into the flats, passing a partially burned wooden vessel surrounded by schools of colorful reef fish of all types in about forty feet of water. Not spectacular but enough to give the wreck-heads with whom I work something to discuss.
Speaking of colorful reef fish, you know how clouds of juveniles hover in close proximity to coral formations for protection? There are really large, healthy table corals around here that support such schools, and I had a flashback to my childhood diving days as I watched our assistant dive leader, Peter, garner great joy from jumping at the juveniles, watching them dive down into the table coral in a single wave of color, only to reappear a few seconds later so he could spook them again. My enjoyment of his childlike (simpleminded?) interaction with the reef faded quickly over our two dives together as I watched him pull out one of those stupid metal pointer rods and use it to jab at stationary fish such as the myriad lion and scorpionfish we found, just to watch them startle. When I saw him using the stick to carve words and initials into the corals and hold himself stationary in the current, I was done, and by the end of the second dive I was wondering maliciously just how the hell someone holds a regulator in his mouth with, and I’m not kidding here, one visible tooth. The reef is now protected from fishing. I wonder who is going to protect it from Peter and his ilk?
Between dives we pulled up to an offshore restaurant for lunch. This place was an island unto itself, moored on pilings a hundred feet offshore. It catered to tourists and served seafood. Live seafood that we got to pick ourselves. As soon as we stepped aboard the restaurant (neat, huh?), a couple kids hustled over to a hole in the floor in the middle of the dining room and started hauling nets and baskets out of the ocean beneath the hatch. They brought them over to a display table and started transferring all sorts of live and recently deceased animals into tubs of water on the table. Huge prawns, reef fish (not from the sanctuary, promise), whelk looking mollusks, small abalone, squid, and some sort of bivalves, all spread before us for our gluttonous inspection and selection. We picked our victims and the cooking style and they whisked them out of the tubs and off to the kitchen. While trying to choose, I noticed one of the small green abalone oozing out of its tub towards me. The lady overseeing the selection process knocked it back in the tub. By the time I had picked a squid to be calamaried, the same abalone was back out of the water, again headed my direction, thus sealing its fate in the sauté pan with garlic, onion, peppers, and butter.
After our lunch of ridiculously fresh seafood, we went back out for our second dive. The current had changed direction, so we did a similar dive profile going the other way. Many of the same cool sights, especially the lion and scorpionfish and another cuttlefish. Also, a stationary filter-feeding organism on the order of a sea fan or sponge called a sea quill, the first I have ever seen. In an underwater world where many things appear alien, this thing is straight out of area 51. Picture a squirrel’s bushy tail, shaved flat on the side closest to its body, stuck into the ground at its base. The remaining what would be furry part of the tail in our analogy was an intricate series of small, spongelike vents designed to filter food out of the water. The base and central stalk ware a beautiful lavender, and the vents were lime green. Seeing new things underwater makes this job worthwhile, and makes one forget that the next day will be spent tearing the fresh water manifold out of the engine room.

No Thanks, I'm Sweet Enough

Everything in a Philippine grocery store has sugar added to it. You can’t buy a can of corn doesn’t have sweetener on the list right after the corn. Want bacon? It’s all ‘honey glazed’, really sugar and artificial and natural flavorings. If you leave a dried mango slice out of the bag in this warm, humid climate, before long it is oozing melting sugar on whatever you were dumb enough to set it. Canned meats and vegetables have sugar added. Is no tinned food sacred? Everything from tomato sauce to hot dogs (a duo they serve together at the local McDonald’s; McPasta, anyone?) has some form of sweetener as or tucked in right behind the first one or two ingredients. High fructose corn syrup, brown rice syrup, glucose, sucrose, maltodextrin; whatever guise it wears, it all boils down to sugar.
Sugary foods in fact, monopolize about a third of every Philippine grocery store in which I’ve shopped. The above-mentioned dried mangoes take up an aisle. There’s at least one local cookie isle, filled with regionally made baked goods, the most popular of which is otap, a flaky pastry cookie dusted with, any guesses? Sugar. Also in this aisle are shortbreads and a variety of other gooey treats like the heavenly butter cookies covered in a chewy layer of sugared peanuts and flavored with lime. Sounds weird, tastes great. This baked goods isle is not to be confused with the regular packaged cookie aisle. You know how, in American grocery stores, the cookie aisle is also the chip aisle? Not so in the Philippines. The cookie aisle is jam-packed both sides with packaged cookies, with some crackers thrown in. There is a separate isle for chips.
Neither is the cookie aisle to be confused with the bakery stand just on the other side of the cash registers. Most grocery stores here have a food court at the entrance. There is always a bakery, serving, aside from decorated cakes, a selection of white breads, mostly pastries and buns stuffed with sweets like chocolate or peanut butter or heavenly coconut paste died, for reasons unknown, bright green. As long as I am eating bleached white flour and corn syrup, what’s a little food coloring amongst arteries?
Back inside the grocery store, there are two candy aisles, one for small servings like candy bars and bags of sweets, another for bulk candy. Not to be confused with the separate section of the store, the duty free type area that sells the booze and imported chocolates and candies.
Then there is the ice cream isle. It is actually a regimented maze of small isles made up of flip door or glass top waist high freezers chock full of all kinds of ice cream sold in big tubs. Nestle is in the ice cream market here and in many foreign countries, and they put out some outstanding flavors, like banana with graham cracker chocolate pieces and caramel swirls, and just plain old delicious mango. The ice cream islands are intermixed with the frozen meat section, so don’t be surprised if, in your ice cream frenzy, you crank open the lid of a chest freezer and are suddenly faced with a sea of unidentifiable chicken parts and cheese injected hot dogs loaded with, you guessed it, sugar.

Merging Culture

Riding around in Cebu is quite the experience. Once you get past the initial terror involved, it is entertaining. Though the fear never dissipates completely, daily, utterly miraculous avoidance of potentially catastrophic incidents serves to habituate or at least anesthetize one to the real potential of collision. The first couple weeks I puckered up something fierce at every crazy near loss of life, but now I don’t even blink when a jeepney loaded with passengers whips into the intersection or a motor scooter veers into our path. Which happens quite often. Cebu has few stoplights but plenty of intersections, few crosswalks but lots of pedestrians, a galaxy of vehicle shapes and sizes, and more than enough crazy drivers to pilot them on what range from pockmarked one and a half lane dirt tracks serpentining through semi-rural areas and slums to heavily crowded urban streets whose narrow shoulders hardly contain the foot, vehicle, and commercial traffic spilling over like clogged gutters in a rainstorm. Don’t get me started on what the roads look like when there actually is a rainstorm.
From what I can tell, the two most important components of driving in this town are a functioning horn and a great clanking pair of brass balls. Merging, changing lanes, and bulling a path through crowded, unregulated intersections are all done by sheer force of will and guts. Crossing intersections involves choosing a line and sticking to it in a game of chicken played at ninety degree angles with other drivers trying to cross from the left and right without the use of brakes, much less traffic signals. Add pedestrians and a slew of motor scooters weaving through infinitesimally small, constantly shifting gaps and you get the idea.
No sexist offense meant with the brass balls comment, and quite accurate, as I have seen extremely few women driving here, maybe one in a hundred drivers. I don’t know if I am seeing an accurate cross section and I have no desire to make broad sweeping generalizations, but the drivers in Cebu seem to be almost all men. You’d think it was a testosterone thing, and there is a certain amount of that. Driving here is a series of fearlessly foolhardy acts performed for fleeting temporary gain and personal gratification: testosterone in a nutshell.
That’s where the testosterone factor ends though, because here’s the astounding part: there’s no road rage. None. The angriest gesture I’ve witnessed on the road is a horn blast lasting more than half a second. Horns are in constant use, and mean many things: “Hey, I’m over here so don’t merge into me,” “I’m passing you,” “OK pass me,” “Thank you for letting me pass you,” You’re welcome,” and so on, but almost never, “Screw you for cutting me off,” or whatever insane maneuver is occurring.
And folks do indeed pull some of the craziest moves I’ve ever seen on the roads here. Inconveniently placed median or ramp between you your destination, forcing you to shoot a U and backtrack? Nonsense! Cross into the oncoming lanes and drive to your destination, against traffic, on the shoulder. Oh, you do want to shoot that U? By all means, even if it is against busy oncoming traffic and requires a five point turn that will stall all four lanes of a two way, four lane road. That oncoming traffic is going to stop, right? Right? I really hope so, seeing as to how I’m riding in the van’s crumple zone if we get broadsided. Go up the wrong ramp or cross street? Throw that thing in reverse! Back up to where you started and try again. I’m not kidding, I’ve seen it all.
The point is, other drivers will stop for you if you nose into the gaps and, in essence, insist. The amazing part is that they will do it graciously, patiently, and stoically. No expressions of exasperation such as yelling, rude gestures, or even a roll of the eyes. No grudge braking or cutting you off a few miles down the way to get even. No honking, other than maybe a short beep to say, “Sure, pass me on the uphill side of this two lane bridge even though you can’t see the oncoming traffic and I have nowhere to go if somebody pops up over the crest of the hill.” Once you get used to the terrifying maneuvers and traffic, riding around is quite pleasant because there isn’t the constant fear of retribution when you piss off other drivers. They just don’t get upset.
I may have painted the driving here as wacky. Totally intentional. So where are all the traffic accidents? I’ve spent about two hours a day in the van since we got here. I’ve seen the aftermath of maybe two or three accidents, and witnessed none. When I got my first taste of the driving here I thought people would be careening into one another left and right, but apparently not so. Unpredictable, crowded, aggressive, and…safe? Amazing. Granted, one of the accidents I did see was a three axle truck whose trailer brakes had failed during a turn, tossing a steel cargo trailer into a busy street and, if the ambulance was any indicator, squashing at least one person. Still, an impressive number of drivers on the road behaving in an irrational fashion in tight quarters and making it work.

Mango Madness

Maybe Billy Bob Thornton was on to something. I have really adapted to this orange food thing. Specifically mangoes. Living in the Philippines has, in fact, made me an addict.
If you buy a mango in the store, whether fresh or dried in strips with sugar and sulfur dioxide and packaged, chances are that it came from the Philippines. Mangoes are big business here, and they grow and sell them everywhere. Any place that sells fruit, from the fanciest supermarket to the most ramshackle roadside stall, has a pile of ripe, juicy, pale yellow mangoes stacked and arranged like jewels. I bought them five or six at a time, six days being about as long as I could keep a ripe one from going over the hill in the fridge.
Morning mango became a daily ritual, and it was usually my first conscious thought upon awakening. One of my first conscious thoughts. Breakfast is a good time for mangoes, as you have to be near a sink to eat one; not a fruit you just pop in your lunch pail and snack on in your business suit. You eat a mango, you’re going to make a mess. A delicious, sticky, juice all over your hands and running down your chin mess.
The bartender at the hotel restaurant showed me how to prepare one. I thought I knew what I was doing when I lived in Hawaii. It wasn’t until I really began paying attention as Manuel deftly lifted the yielding flesh away from its pit with practically no waste that I realized I had been a rank amateur fumbling in the mango dark. Wash the fruit. Wash all your fruit, in fact, as you just don’t know where it’s been. Rest the mango in the palm of your off hand, stem end facing you. Lay the flat of a long sharp knife on the meat of your palm, very close to the stem. I can’t be responsible for what happens next when you try this, but start moving the knife back and forth through the fruit, using your palm to guide the blade. You can feel it scraping right against the edge of the pit; don’t wander away from it. Stay close all the way through. Flip it, do the same to the other side. If you do it right, there will barely be any meat next to the pit, it will all be in the two halves you cut. Then use the tip of the knife to cut a grid pattern in each half through the flesh but not the skin, turn inside out, and either bury your face in it or spoon out the cubes, depending on how genteel you want to be. Me, I’m standing over a sink trying to wolf the thing before I go to a filthy shipyard. Gentility is not my watchword.
Side note: if you dump all those mango cubes in a blender with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a big slug of dark rum, good things happen.

Adhesives I Have Known and Loved

White caulk. Silicone caulk. Crystal tub and tile caulk. P-tex boat caulk. Two part marine epoxy. Two decks worth of three part self rubberizing deck paint applied in four steps. Multiple cases of liquid construction adhesive. Rubber cement. Contact cement. Lock-Tite. Wood glue. Super glue. Carpet glue. Grout. Tile sealant. Lacquer based putty. Water based putty. Plus enough stain, varnish, and paint to cover all of that adhesive. It’s sticky out here.

Farewell, Phil

Boat’s almost buttoned up and we are almost out of here. Finishing touches going on now. More on the Philippines, drydock, and the trip home once we arrive back in Chuuk. I’ll try to get a couple photos up as well. Thank you for checking in and hope to see you back in a couple of weeks.

Getting Huffy

We’ve turned a corner on the boat. More stuff is going in than is being taken out. This means coatings: layers of paint, varnish, shellac, etc. to protect the new materials and construction inside and outside the boat. As you can imagine, salt water is a rather harsh environment, so this is a pretty important step, one they luckily don’t entrust to me directly.
I am still working around the process every day, though, which exposes me to the fumes. Today was paint and varnish day, with a top coat of paint on the upper hull, anti-fouling paint on the bottom, and varnish on the new beds, fixtures, and walls in some of the staterooms on the lower deck. In other words, very few places on the boat not being doused in something noxious.
As you may have guessed, the regulations regarding carbon chain polymers, resins, petroleum and acetate products, and basically anything designed to stick to anything else are not as stringent here in the Philippines as they are in the U.S. Good for lasting integrity of boat coatings,. Bad for brain cells.
Inhalants are branch of the psychotropic tree I have never stood on and bounced. I just think I would have trouble taking myself seriously while huffing gasoline or model airplane glue. Perhaps my disinterest in said substances never blossomed due to the fact that the makers of that gateway inhalant, Liquid Paper, shifted to a non-toxic formula when I was still in early grade school and we dealt with mistakes the old fashioned way, with the pink end of a number two pencil. Anyways, killing my brain cells fast enough that my body panics and releases endorphins because it thinks I am in critical danger and pain just never caught on with me.
Perhaps I have been cheating myself all these years. I was loopy as a loon today. Thank goodness for handrails or I might have walked right off the boat. I was doing finish carpentry, a job for which I am more woefully unskilled than painting even. I was reassembling the dining room, ‘mess’ in boat jargon. Oh so aptly named by the end of my day. When we took it apart, all the trim, molding, tongue and groove slatted walls, and finish pieces, we meticulously numbered and labeled them and stacked them neatly. Then, over the course of a month, we thrashed the room, moved everything five times, shuffled all the piles, and walked on more than a few of the pieces. I say this simply to give you an idea of the starting conditions.
Then add toxic fumes. Even though I was not working in an area directly exposed to them, every time the breeze shifted I started having trouble remembering my measurements on the way back and forth to the saw. Numbered boards were confused, misplaced, seemingly mislabeled. By lunch I was having trouble remembering how to use the saw. By the end of the day, I just didn’t care. You guys have got to come out to Chuuk if for no other reason than to start at one end of the mess and walk all the way around, taking in the progression of my work over the course of the day. It would be quite funny if it weren’t so, what’s the word? Permanent. With the windows newspapered to prevent overspray from the painter, it is nice and dark in the mess. As every college grad and bachelor with a touch of romance knows, mood lighting hides a lot of dirt and, in this case, poor carpentry. I am nervous about the inevitable unmasking.
That’s just me on the upper deck, too. There’s a lady who does staining and varnishing who spent all day in an enclosed room with the stuff, below decks. She just started working on our boat last week, as we began having fresh carpentry available for staining, and she struck me as being a little off. Something beyond the language barrier. Something in the way she babbled to anyone who came near her, and to herself if she was alone. Something to do with the way she zoned out while running the orbital sander back and forth over the same piece of wood for hours. Something about that demented, snaggletoothed cackle. Now I know! She’s pickled! And having a fine time of it too. Good for her, I say. I’m not condoning that you all go soak a rag in paint thinner and see for yourselves, mind you, I’m just saying that one man’s combustible propellant is another man’s livelihood is yet another man’s Saturday evening.

Attention Blog Respondents

Hey, I noticed that you guys are leaving neat replies to my blog. I am most appreciative for your attention and participation. Internet traffic is really slow here, and for some reason it takes quite a while to check each blog entry, notice new replies, and pull them up. Unless you are eager to have your reply made public, which is, of course, fine, could I impose upon you to send your replies to my email address? I will be much more likely to notice them and it will also take less time to receive them. Thanks again for reading and responding, as it motivates me to dribble this stuff out of my head.

Portrait of Durian Green

One of Anthony Bourdain’s books has a story of his encounter with a fruit called the durian. It was such an odd description of what sounded like an odd food that it stuck in my head. His final conclusion was that he loved it, but it would be impossible to serve in the U.S. because there would be no way to ship or store it because it stinks so much. This, of course, from a man who eats congealed goat’s blood and cobra venom sacs.
Imagine my surprise and excitement when I passed by a whole passel of durians at the grocery store. I hiked up my skirt, asked the lady in the produce section to pick me a good one, gathered that she didn’t touch the stuff, and picked one out myself, going on…nothing.

Next came the adventure of getting it home. The durian is just plain dangerous. It is a medium green color, about a foot tall, eight inches in diameter, and would not look out of place on the end of a chain attached to a wooden handle in the hands of a medieval knight looking to stove in the helm of an armored opponent. That is to say, it is covered in small, hard, sharp spikes and is heavy enough that holding it pushes those spikes into a hand with enough weight to hurt. Pure murder on a plastic grocery bag, but better than an umbrella or walking stick any day to discourage would be muggers or aggressive wildlife.

Assuming that this thing would be better cold, I displaced some stuff in the fridge to make room for my new durian, which mainly meant moving beer around. I live with five guys. Got up early the next morning and went out to tackle this thing.
The knife provided to us in the apartment kitchen was simply not up to the task, partly, I’m sure, from Madison the Chuukese dive master using it to open cans of potted meat, but I doubt it was all that sharp to start. So, out with the new dive knife and into the durian.

From all the hype, I’d expected a worse stink once I finally got past the spikes and the tough skin to the pale yellow flesh. Though pungent, it was not off-putting. It smelled, I dunno, ripe? Like a mixture of freshly washed baby and banana just starting to turn brown, promise with a hint of danger echoing deep in the hippocampus. The meat, wrapped in segments around large, hard, khaki seeds, was firm yet yielding to the touch, like a mango in consistency.

Not knowing what else to do, I dove in. The taste was a strong combination of equal parts passion fruit, feet, the crust on top of the cream cheese, and my great grandfather’s basement. Somehow that description does not sound as tasty as the fruit was, but all those flavors were present. It was remarkable, memorable, delicious, nasty, and utterly unique, like eating foie gras. Not something you want to do every day, but a good experience and an exotic treat. Only Mike the Filipino and Madison would come near the thing. We put the durian down and then disposed of the skin and seeds as you would crab leftovers, sneaking them into a garbage can down the block as quickly as possible. What, you don’t throw stuff in your neighbor’s garbage? Now, to get the stink off my new dive knife. Apologies to Wilde on the title.

Smith and Galungung

Everyone in the Philippines is armed. Every store, factory, warehouse, restaurant, and pet shop has a uniformed guard out front. Actually, I haven't been to the pet store yet, as I don't want to see what I am probably eating. Each guard is strapping either a crappy looking wheelgun or a well worn 12 gauge pistol grip pump gun on a sling. I take that back. Not all the guards carry a gun. But they do all have a holster, even if it is empty. And six bullets snugged each into a little leather loop on his belt, cowboy style. Even the guys without pistols carry the six bullets. Perhaps, in the event of a large gun battle, they anticipate a fellow guard's need for spare ammo? My favorite is the boatyard guard who only has four of his six bullets. Maybe he misplaced them? Loaned them out to a friend in need? Did he already use two of those things on somebody today? Whatever the reason, I straighten up around that guy.

The guards come in two flavors: white uniform and blue uniform. All the uniforms are so similar in style as to be indistinguishable from one another; perhaps there is a central armed guard uniform distribution center somewhere in the city? The unis are pretty snappy, actually; fancy gold badges and buttons, a whistle, epaulets, name tags, embroidery. Just the right combination of flash and paramilitary style to let you know you're in the former sovereign state of Ferdi and Imelda.

There are several armed guards on rotation at the shipyard. There is always a guy at the gate, usually one wandering around the yard, and one on our boat, I guess to make sure that the yard workers don't make off with any of the big stuff. Normally they just stand around getting in the way, but several times as I have been struggling to get a large load of something up the two stories of stairs to get on the boat, or I am staggering around a corner with something unwieldy, the boat guard is the only one paying enough attention to lend a hand, as everyone else is engrossed in burning, cutting, grinding, sanding, or hammering something. Except that one kid who wanders the boat forlornly with the hame made broom, tackling the Sisyphean task of sweeping up, in face of the fact that forty dirty dudes with power tools and arc welders are just going to continue thrashing it day in and out.

Most of the yard guards are quite friendly and unimposing, all smiles and good cheer. I guess it is easy to be happy when your job is to stand around and watch as others around you sandblast, heft sheet steel, and haul the effluent dregs of assorted waste tanks in old paint buckets. There is one exception, a dour, serious looking fellow I have yet to see crack a smile. Whereas I will mug and goof off at some of the other hard cases around the boat until they smile, this guy, the armed guy, I leave to his own cranky devices. Instead of wearing a holster, he just sticks his revolver down the front of his pants, mobster style. Maybe the source of his unhappiness stems from his lack of a holster. Let’s face it, even the guys without guns have a holster.

So the other day I climbed down the scaffolding from the boat to find my crew in a tight little knot around one of the guards. Isn't it funny that boys up to no good, when gathered in a group, always appear the same, no matter their age, maturity level and surroundings? Since I like to be up to no good myself, I climbed down and stuck in my nose.

One of my friends was holding a chromed Smith and Wesson .357 revolver that the guard was trying to unload. Neat. Can I see? Wow. Feels light. And loose. Flimsy. Almost...shoddy. You did say this was a Smith, right? Yep, says so right there on the barrel. Wait a minute...Are those letters...routered? Because they are a little off. What about the stamp on the other side? Hmmm. Shows uneven fading and again, like the letters, something just isn't right. Let's take a closer look at this thing. Well, nothing fits snugly, the trigger is mushy, The wood grips are hand carved, the cylinder fit is sloppy, I'm pretty sure this is some sort of poorly chromed alloy instead of steel, and, oh my, the cross hatching on the end of the ejector rod, is that done by hand? Did you make this in your basement?

Turns out that bogus handguns are just as prevalent as pirated movies in this country. I told my Chuukese friend Madison that if he bought the gun 'for his cousin' as he was contemplating, I would pistol whip him with it. Not much of a threat considering that the thing would probably fall apart.

Where There's Smoke...

…There’s probably a small Filipino man swathed like a ninja, smoking a butt, sporting fake Ray-Bans, wielding an oxy-propane cutting torch, burning what would seem to be important hunks of steel off the boat.

34

I tried to keep 34 low key. I didn’t mention it to anyone. Somehow they knew, perhaps from my passport. No one really said anything until lunch. We were eating at a Japanese place. I stepped across the way to buy some treats for the boys at the bakeshop, not really intending to state the reason. When I returned, I was presented with a special dish, the Fruits of the Looms Salad. Don’t ask why in the world it was called that; many things get lost in translation out here. I had been craving fresh greens and salads on the crossing, so this is what the boys opted to order.
The salad was tasty, but the best part by far was the singing. Here I am trying to be low profile about the day (no one wants to make the birthday boy take the hatches off the poopie tank, and I, as the new guy, am not looking for special treatment), and I turn around to find the entire Filipino staff massed behind me to sing happy birthday. Imagine the Fa-ra-ra-ra-ra scene in Christmas Story and you will get a good idea. The rendition was so outstandingly bad that they stopped in the middle, started over, got to the middle again, and pretty much gave up. As lunch continued, we could hear them in the back practicing for the next time some dirty white dude came in for a birthday. Each of them individually came up to me afterwards and said, “Happy Birthday, sir.” It was very touching and most memorable.
Then I went back to the boat and took the hatches off the poopie tanks.

Land Ho

I wonder if Macarthur felt this way when he steamed into the Gulf of Leyte. Somehow I don’t see him as shirtless and blasting Golden Earring, but who knows, maybe he was into that sort of thing. Anyways, we’re here; spent yesterday cruising through passes between Philippine Islands. Dodged every size boat from outrigger canoes with two stroke engines to big car ferries last night on the ten to two, moving from the radar to the binoculars to the tiller to make sure we were on course, not of the collision variety.
Arrived in Cebu this morning and squeezed into a drydocking facility. The shipyard is…functional. Ought to be interesting to spend the next month or so here. I’m not going to use the word squalor. Wait, yes I am. Shanty shacks of rusted corrugated and discarded boat fragments along the drydock slips serve for cooking, eating, and maybe some sleeping. A fine sheen of some petroleum product floats atop the water, and assorted garbage collects upon the banks, but that does not stop folks from bathing, washing clothes, and scrubbing their teeth in it. I am getting a bit ill typing this and thinking about it, actually. Dogs roam the shipyard making out as best they can. A guard tower consisting of a tin shack affixed atop a rusted water tower gives the armed guard sweltering inside a commanding view of the area where our boat is tied. Other boats are moored along the edges of the slip, and maneuvering within the strict confines is a tight squeeze. We pull up right behind a military patrol boat that has completed repairs and is getting ready to leave the yard, already bristling with guns and a new coat of navy grey paint.
The most striking feature about the yard is its workers. As we squeezed past other boats under repair, work ceased and heads poked out along the shoreline, the shanty shacks, the assorted decks of the large ferry boat under repair beside us, including, most comically, a hole cut out of the hull near the waterline. I got the impression that I was being scrutinized by a clan of thrift store ninjas. The workers are, of course, Filipino, but you cannot tell by the way they are done up. Most of them wear a t-shirt on their head, by poking their head through the head hole and tying the sleeves behind the head, allowing the body of the shirt to gather around the neck. They complete the look by pulling the bottom part of the t-shirt’s head hole over nose and mouth, exposing only the eyes, which many of them cover with sunglasses. The idea is to provide some protection from the sun and assorted dangers of the shipyard.
Said dangers are myriad. This place is not, repeat not OSHA approved. Welding grinding, cutting, painting, winching, scaffolding, hoisting all occurs with a lack of protection that would make an American job safety manager go apoplectic. No ventilators, hearing protection, eye protection beyond cheap plastic shades, or steel toed shoes. There are some hard hats around, but for the most part, a t-shirt on the head ninja style suffices. That is not to say that these guys are careless or in considerable danger, just that things aren’t run to stringent U.S. standards. Part of the reason we’re here, I guess.

Into Each Life...

…A little rain must fall. Luckily it was not accompanied by eight to ten foot swells. The sea stayed surprisingly calm. Despite the fact that the ship was heeling over due to the intense wind, she plugged along at a steady 9.5 knot speed, unhindered by the sheets of rain hitting the boat sideways. First inclement weather we’ve seen. Happened to be on my watch, and I was glad of it, as, after we got through it, we were treated to an excellent lightning show that lasted for hours. The whole sky would light up every minute or so. Some of the flashes were far enough and high enough that they were indistinct and just lit up the distant clouds. Others were low enough that they were vivid bolts unwinding across the sky in horizontal discharge patterns that left afterimages like Chinese dragons on my retinas. Under the sway of Mike the mechanic’s favorite band, I cued up AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”, pulled my chair outside, and marveled at the show. Better than commercial T.V. by a long shot.

What I Did on 8/8/8

Motored past Yap. Neat, huh?

Reciprocation

Never in the history of hand held work implements has there been a tool more aptly named than the reciprocating saw. For those not familiar with this device, also know as a sawzall, it is a hand held tool, either battery operated or in this case 220v wall plug driven, with a blade projecting out of the front. When activated, the motor retracts the blade into the body of the tool and then forces it out to its original position on a straight line, thus reciprocating. It will do this as long as you hold down the trigger. Fast. Different jobs and intended cutting material call for different types of blades.
For the last four days straight, I have been burning through heavy duty fire/rescue metal cutting blades like wine coolers at a high school house party, trimming about an inch width of quarter inch thick plate steel all the way around every exterior door frame hole in the superstructure of the Odyssey to make room for new, wider doors. Thirteen of them. I won’t go into the math, but trust me and my now constantly vibrating hands when I say that this is a lot of plate steel.
It was around the third day that I began to formulate an understanding of and develop a relationship with the saw. With my back to hundreds of miles of clear blue ocean and sunlight, my face to the task of cutting steel, the edges of a theory became tangible. Not so much a theory as a simple truth.
The reciprocating saw does exactly that. It reciprocates. Yes, on a basic mechanical yank the blade back and forth at a thousand RPMs level it reciprocates, but also on a deeper, more metaphorical level. The reciprocal saw gives back to you what you give to it. I know this sounds corny, but I’ve had four days of hard sawing to consider it.
I’ve always claimed that the reciprocating saw was my favorite power tool. I think I was in love more with the idea of the saw than the actual use of it: a portable tool that hacks through metal. It appealed to my petty larcenous high school hijinks tendencies, and it was handy for light demolition work; deconstructing, if you will. Pick it up, plug it in, cut through a pesky nail or framing two by four at an odd angle, impractical to reach with a less maneuverable tool. Somewhat unique amongst power tools in the free form, swashbuckling way you can wave it around, use it upside down, push cut, pull cut, curve or angle the cut. A power tool wild card. Handy for a short, finite job.
There’s nothing short or finite about enlarging a hole in plate steel, millimeter by millimeter. Or thirteen of them. Thus, through hours, days of constant companionship with the reciprocating saw, I began to understand just how aptly named it is, and my theory was born and verified.
In the beginning I was eager and sloppy, and the saw responded in kind, wandering all over the place and jumping about in my novice hands. When I say jumping I mean that, as the saw retracts and then springs forward again, if you have pulled it out of the cut or bent the blade at an odd angle, when the blade tries to shoot forward again, it will not return to the cut but ricochet the whole tool back at whatever body part you are holding behind it at the time.
It only took a few instances of this to pass from the eager sloppy phase to the nervous jumpy phase. Again the saw picked up on my mood, giving me reason to be nervous, heating up through continuous usage to temperatures necessitating a thick leather glove, pelting me with hot metal shrapnel, and, as mentioned before, eagerly jumping backwards at me when I mishandled it. Scary.
On to the angry, aggressive phase of the learning curve. Determined to dominate the saw, I began mashing and pressing, forcing it into the metal until the motor slowed and protested. Sparks and smoke flew, the stench of hot metal permeated the air, and saw blades dulled at an alarming rate. Progress was, unfortunately, no faster, fatigue was higher, and the extra force applied made not only for wasted blades but the sloppy cutting of a second grader marked down for not staying in the lines. Mike the Mechanic sighed when he saw my work and, in his wonderful, broken English, he asked me, rhetorically, I think, “Why you cut this one like this way? Now too wide for door. Who this guy cut like this?”
On the third day, the seeds of harmony were sown. A beautiful morning, a new blade, a fresh arm, and a positive outlook all combined to give me the patience to pay attention to the saw, listen to it, let it guide me. Light, steady pressure, a firm but not overzealous grip, and the blade followed the line by itself. If I started bending the blade, the saw gave me hints; by paying attention to them I was able to get back on track before the whole saw came jumping back at my face. By the fourth day, the saw was even showing me sweet spots where it liked to be held to cut the most efficiently. It was reciprocating. Zen metal cutting.
Things were going so well by this time that I had trouble relinquishing it to anyone else so they could take a turn with it. I was becoming possessive, protective, covetous. In fact, I wonder where that thing is right now…

The 10 to 2

I like my sleep. As sleep traditionally is a night-time thing, I usually miss a good portion of the night. I am on the 10 to 2 watch shift, which has given me the duty/opportunity to better appreciate those hours for something besides reading or causing trouble, and I have enjoyed it thoroughly, in no small part due to my surroundings.
The weather on the crossing has been superlative. Whatever piece of wood the captain knocked on when invoking peaceful travels is a powerful one, as the seas we have crossed are living up to their Pacific name. Very little swell, light wind, only one brief period of rain have made our journey easy, and have made the ten to two most enjoyable.
I am on watch with Mike the Filipino engineer wizard. That’s right, I’m hanging out with Mike the mechanic, so eat your heart out all you eighties music aficionados. He is a witty dude who has Chuuk wired; when we travel together through town everyone acknowledges the guy who used to keep their cars running, no mean feat in this place. When we are on watch, we talk sometimes but often pass the hours in pleasant silence, taking turns doing engine room checks and using my iPod. Mike is a hard rock fan. He gravitates to AC/DC, Aerosmith, Van Halen, etc. on my iPod, and I find myself stocking it to keep him happy. Sure it is nice to keep the engineer happy, but I also do it for personal enjoyment, as Mike loves to sing along. He does so with a childlike disregard for what I may think about his singing. It is really amusing to sit just outside the pilot house and watch Mike, slumped in the captain’s seat, rocking back and forth and singing along in a quiet, high pitched, keening voice that, though awful, is quite Axel Rose-like when he is jamming out to Guns n Roses. Classic.
Aside from watching Mike jam, the primary source of joy on the 10 to 2 is the open ocean. Keep in mind that we are in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from land. During the daytime, the view stretches to infinity, where I feel that I can detect the clouds arcing downward to wrap around the curvature of the earth. The sea is this perfect blue described too many times for me to add my own trite description. Suffice to say that it is enchanting.
It looks different, of course, at night. The color is the source of midnight blue. I have a spot next to the pilot house where I set a chair. It provides a good view over the
railing and I can still see the radar through the window, not that there is anything on it. I sit on the windward side of the boat and am usually quite comfortable without a shirt, soaking up the mild breeze and the sights.
Our running lights are the largest source of light pollution for many miles, so the heavens are vivid in the clear weather. Distant galaxies are so bright and tangible that they appear as clouds. Red stars wink like the running lights of a stationary airplane forever frozen in its course. Every night the moon waxes and performs its descent at a later time in the watch, shifting colors as it drops into the sea, projecting that picture postcard line reflection of moonlight across the dark water as it falls. The stars here are different, in different places in the sky. My astronomy is weak anyways, but instead of the usual constellations, I have found friends visible from my port perch to keep me company. Instead of Cassiopeia I have the Penguin. I have traded Orion for the Bowing Man. Like countless generations before me I find shapes in the outlines of the heavens.
Despite messing with my sleep schedule, the 10 to 2 is pretty cool.

Middle of Frickin' Nowhere, Bro

We began our Philippines trek by passing out of Truk Lagoon yesterday morning, moving by exposed reef upon which the remains of a motor vessel, broken in half, lay as a reminder to the incautious navigator. The boat immediately took on a steady roll as it reacted to the open ocean waves that had traveled thousands of miles, waves from which the lagoon protects us during normal operations. The roll of the vessel was a noticeable symbol of the undertaking ahead; I’ve never made a crossing this long before.
Three pairs of crewmembers each take two four hour watch shifts, monitoring the boat as she slugs along at a steady nine and a half knots. Good time to get to know someone, sitting in the pilot house in the middle of the night, watching the radar and the GPS for four hours. My partner is a Filipino mechanical wizard named Mike. He is the engineer; for my money the most important person on the boat besides the chef, and since we don’t have a chef on this cruise, Mike is it. He is a trained jet mechanic who also used to run a garage in Chuuk’s capital, but now he slums it on the Odyssey; I imagine marine diesels are tinker toys compared to jet engines.
This morning I did a few minor projects around the boat, getting her ready for drydock. Upon completion, I checked in with the captain, who told me not to start anything else as he planned to slow down and dump us for a dive as we passed over Mogami Bank, a shallow area on our route, the remains of an atoll that is now just a submerged reef. Don’t bother looking for it on a map. The other instructors and I ran around getting ready like kids for the first day of spring break. As we stood on the dive deck in our gear, prepared to jump into the ocean with no land in sight in any direction, the New Zealander, Mark, a perfectly wonderful, upbeat, competent human being pops his reg out of his mouth, looks over at me, grins like a kid, and sums it all up by saying, “Middle of flippin’ nowhere, bro.”
In we went. Crystal visibility to the bottom, a flat reef in the sand at about a hundred feet. I was the last to begin my descent. J.J., one of the instructors, started rapping on his tank and pointing out sharks cruising the reef, three to five foot reef sharks moving in a distinctively sharky way below us. I was engrossed until, still in fifty feet of open water, I noticed movement behind me and turned around to greet the bottom dwelling sharks’ four larger six foot cousins who had come up off the bottom to greet me. Not aggressive, mind you. We call it curious in the dive business. I continued to drop.
The coral was in pristine condition at a hundred feet. Big table corals, soft corals, anemones, all alive with colorful reef fish. The butterfly fish here are abundant, with species that we would wait months to see in Kona showing up in droves. Also a big school of unicorn fish hanging out above the reef, not afraid to let us get in the middle of them. And always the sharks, poking around behind us and shying away when we turned towards them.
We spent about twenty minutes in open ocean reef dive bliss before heading to the surface. I can’t, of course say for sure that we were the first people to ever dive that spot, but if not, I bet we were pretty close.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Bid farewell to our guests this morning and proceeded to rearrange and unload the entire boat: mattresses, bed frames, furniture, kitchen goods, housewares, laundry, SCUBA gear and tanks, weights, the pictures on the walls, boutique items, extra line, a dryer, a fridge and freezer, the works. Everything not involved in the open ocean running of the boat and the essentials for six people to live for a couple of weeks came off the boat either by skiff to shore or by van once we were parked at the local industrial dock. Stuffed it all into storage spaces belonging to the company, and when I say stuffed I mean to the ceiling.

Cleared the entire dive deck of camera table and gear benches, which also went into storage, and replaced them with eight 250 gallon diesel drums, then loaded them with fuel. Took on new exterior doors to replace every door on the boat. New windshields, new shower enclosures, hundreds of square yards of carpeting, a workshop of power tools, a hundred yards of PVC pipe, etc.

The entire process was carried out by what I have come to think of as the Odyssey army. The local crew usually alternates weeks of work, so there are more than two complete crews as well as an auxiliary staff that shows up on Sundays to help get the boat ready for the next charter. Well, they were all here today, probably twenty-five people total. Everything that we moved, loaded, or unloaded was done as a line of humans passing gear from one to the next. Heavy items drew hordes of folks who piled on with ant-like determination. If we’d been moving limestone blocks we could have knocked together a passable pyramid by day’s end. Maybe that’s stretching it a bit, but many hands do indeed make light work. And thoroughly exhausted, smelly workers. I had one of the most blissful ocean swims of my life after the work day closed, though the fish probably resented my filthy presence.

The items we took aboard are headed with us to the Philippines, to be installed either on the way to or during drydock in that country. The plan is to leave tomorrow around noon and drive for eight days straight, a bit over 1600 miles. When we arrive, we will, if thing are on schedule, drive right on to a massive trailer and pull the boat out of the water. Then the real fun will begin as we take apart everything on the boat and rebuild, fix, or replace it. Weak sections of the steel hull will be cut out and replaced. Water and sewage tanks will be cut out and replaced. Walls will come down and be rebuilt. Then we coat the whole ship in new paint. The process is going to take two months; we are due back in Chuuk in early October. I am looking forward to visiting a new part of the world. Painting boats, not so much, but it ought to be an experience. One I will continue to update about as time goes by. Thanks again for tuning in.



THE

First Impressions

After a three and a half day delay in getting to Chuuk Republic, Federated States of Micronesia, I arrived at 4:20 AM local time. Great way to start a job, showing up almost four days late and getting your new boss up in the middle of the night to skiff across the lagoon and wait for an hour and a half to pick you up at the airport. He was surprisingly understanding, and seems to be a thoroughly pleasant man who has carved himself the life he wants by learning how to do things and then doing them, whether running a dive business in the middle of nowhere, building a house, or sailing the seven seas. I feel like I have landed in the proper place to soak up a lot of knowledge.
I had my first look at my new home as the sun came up over the lagoon. The Odyssey is a three-decked steel hulled vessel of 132’ and 362 gross tons. She’s a good-looking boat. Take a look if you want at www.trukodyssey.com.
By the time I got my gear stowed it was time to move the boat through a pass between two islands, a trip fraught with shallow reefs requiring zagging course changes. We arrived at our first dive destination of the day; I set up my gear and took my first dive in Truk Lagoon. Next thing I know I’m following one of the locals into the exploded bow of a 300+ foot Japanese vessel, trailing him through rusty corridors down rusty stairwells into a rusty engine room, through holds loaded with unexpended ordnance, past bathrooms with tile that is in better shape than the stuff in my old apartment in Venice Beach, and out a jagged torpedo hole near the stern that puts us in 140’ of water right next to the massive prop. A reef shark rises from underneath the boat and swims up to check me out; he seems to grin as he glides within feet of me. I swear I heard him say, “Welcome to Truk Lagoon.”
Next dive we move outside the lagoon through a narrow pass and moor up next to a shallow coral wall. Sharks begin to circle behind the boat before the engines are even dead. Some of the crew toss some scraps and the sharks go nuts. They dissipate after a bit and we suit up and jump in. They follow us like puppies to the preordained feeding area, and a couple of the crew set up a sling system that drops a frozen tuna into our midst. Seven hours in Micronesia and I’m in the midst of a feeding frenzy watching forty sharks vie for the tuna popsicle prize. I think I’m going to like it here.
Third dive of the day on the Rio de Janeiro Maru, a turn of the century luxury liner steamship pressed into service at the outset of the war and converted into a transport ship. The guide I follow traces a passage through the boat that takes in the forward holds, the superstructure, the engine room, the stern holds, and the poop deck, all without swimming outside the boat. In other words, for twenty something minutes at depths of 80’-120’, the only light I saw was projecting from my flashlight or filtering from a distant opening. Epic, until you consider that I will soon be counted upon to know these routes and be able to guide them myself. Lots of floor plans floating through my head; many wrecks, similar layouts, and one rusty corridor starts to look a lot like all the others.
I’m working on getting a handle on how to describe diving in the wrecks, what it feels like to shine a light into a yawning black hole and then make the decision to pass from daylight and open ocean into an overhead environment that is a sunken graveyard, a historical monument, a potential deathtrap. Amongst the layers of silt and debris, I come upon sixty year old scenes that look like someone might have just left, stepped outside and left the kettle on the stove, hung their welding goggles up on the machine shop drill press. Eerie.
The camera hasn’t been out yet, but I will get to that soon. We leave for drydock in the Philippines on Monday, at which point I will probably have more reliable internet access and be able to post further. Thanks for reading and I hope you are well. Check back at your convenience.


THE

Not there yet

But thanks for checking.  Keep the link around and I will post here when I get to Truk.

Todd