First, some background….

After leaving school, I spent a tortuous year in a London Office as a trainee Structural Engineering Draughtsman.  Although the career itself was quite interesting, commuting 3 hours a day on smoky trains to spend the day as a tea-making dogsbody was not very inspiring.  I started looking around…

I applied for a career as a Cadet in the Merchant Navy, and I was called to an interview in Liverpool – and told I would be given overnight accomodation. This in itself was an adventure! as I had never travelled so far, and it was a break from the claustrophobic London suburbs and routine.

I was expecting a fairly formal greeting and a whole day and night of being on best behaviour in a strange environment. I was a bit apprehensive about the whole thing.

Ocean Transport and Trading were an umbrella company of a number of shipping lines, but mainly Blue Funnel and Elder Dempster.

Blue Funnel was established in 1866 and was a stalwart of quality British cargo ships for more than a century, mainly trading to the Far East. They trained cadets to the highest world standards and I was very privileged to train with the best of the best.

Elder Dempster was another long established shipping line which started in 1868 and focused on the West Africa routes.

As a cadet, I was entering into a 4 year apprenticeship, ultimately resulting in qualifying as a 3rd Officer after passing all Department Of Trade requirements to obtain a 2nd Mate Foreign-Going Certificate, which would allow me to be in charge of a watch on any sized vessel in the world, be it cargo, passenger, oil, bulk, etc. From there I was on a path to be God (Captain).

But first, I had to work for a few months in a bread factory (with a hair net!) to earn the money to pay for my uniform and starting kit!  It was all worth it...  Here is an overview of my ships and experiences;-

After my first trip to Africa, I was starting to think that the life at sea was not all it’s cracked up to be!  The Glenogle changed all that.   A great social midshipmen’s deck, we all travelled to the most exotic locations on earth, and had a ball.  All before the internet of course… so being away for 4 months in the Far East really was an amazing adventure – no globalisation back then… no MacDonalds!  No communication with home!.  Just exciting exotic new sights and experiences at every stop.

I received a phone call from my head office to asked if I wanted to cut my leave short and join a huge OBO (Oil Bulk Ore) carrier in 2 days time… in the Indian Ocean!  WOW!

I flew from Liverpool to London, and then London to Cape Town via Johannesburg.  I was pretty tired on arrival so was booked into a hotel but was awoken at 2am to say the ship was rounding the Cape Of Good Hope, and I was to get ready for a fast helicopter transfer.

It was an amazing experience seeing the massive floodlit ship in a sea of black sailing at full speed as we dropped down to land on it.

I remember stepping out of the helicopter and was roughly grabbed in mid-air by someone as I tried to jump off of the heli-pad.  The next day I awoke to a beautiful Indian Ocean horizon – and noticed that the helipad was about 15 feet above a very hard metal deck!

It was incredible to think that 36 hours ago I was having a beer with friends in a Liverpool pub, and here I was now on watch in the Indian Ocean!  It was 1975 after all, people just didn’t DO that back then!   I was also promoted from a cadet to 3rd Officer – I have a feeling the company were an officer short that week, and I got promoted for the gig!

Egory

 My last voyage in Ocean Transport & Trading.   After 4 years, I was hankering for some shore life, and get into my hobby of playing in bands, and keeping friends close by instead of always leaving them behind.    So I decided to leave the Merchant Navy behind, but not before qualifying as a Second Mate Foreign-Going – which basically qualified me to have my own bridge watch on any sized vessel in the world.  There were not many openings ashore for a qualified Navigator!

Thus I spent a year doing tedious factory jobs.

 One day, whilst working stacking loaves of bread in a huge bakery for minimal wage, I was called to the bakery office to find a shipping agent had left a message for me.  I called him, and he offered a stunning amount of money to be a contract Navigating Officer. 

As I stood there, dressed in a green boiler suit and hair net! I realised that my experiment with shore work was over, and it was time to return to the sea. …. for BIG $$$, and BIG hassle as it turned out. 

I could write a book about this trip.

Once again I was employed as a 2nd Mate. This time, seeing as I has recently completed a first aid course, I was asked if I would also be the “Medical Officer”!

On my first day of work as a 2nd Mate, I started by checking the charts – and found none had been updated with any Admiralty notices… e.g. latest shipwrecks and lighthouses were not on the charts. While I was starting the mammoth task to put things right, the new 3rd Mate arrived. After introductions, he looked at what I was doing, and said “wow that looks interesting! I can’t wait to learn this navigation stuff”!!! I discovered later that he had only worked on fishing boats – which in my agent’s eyes qualified him to be a 3rd Mate!

For the first week, I didn’t see the Captain. He was drunk and out of commission. The 1st Mate was occupied in the running of the ship, so all navigational duties were resting on my young shoulders.

Baptism Of Fire

Although I had some help on the way to USA from the 1st Mate, when we left USA and sailed to Africa I did all navigation and position fixes on my own.   As we approached the coast I was starting to get nervous as no-one had checked my work. Remember, these were the days before GPS, and the only way to fix your position was with a sextant. There I was on a ship with 40 crew pounding towards the African coast, hoping all my chart updates were correct, my course did not take us across any reefs, and my positions were correct.

One day from the destination, the Captain sobered up enough to join me to take a position fix at noon. Our locations differed by over 30 miles, and instead of taking the usual approach to meet in the middle, he arrogantly declared the ship’s position to be where he fixed us.

The next day as we made landfall, the radars put our position running exactly from my fix. He never bothered me again.

Our ship very soon started running short of supplies – firstly food. Once we made our way up the Benin River, we started buying fruit and vegetables. from every native coming alonside the ship.

At that time, there was a lot of political unrest in Nigeria  (as is now) and we had guards with rifles on board.

As designated “Medical Officer” I started having crew approaching me describing very openly personal descriptions of their ailments. They seemed to think I was a doctor or something! I usually looked up their symptoms in the Captain’s Medical Journal and prescribed a pill or ointment.

One day an African wharf worker was hit by a crane and they brought him to me in a very bloodied state. I opened up the medical room and sat him down, and looked at all the bottles in the cupboards wondering what the heck I should give him, without betraying my lack of knowledge. I grabbed some kind of spirit, poured onto cotton wool and pressed it onto his wounds (he gasped) and wrapped a bandage around him, and a few minutes later I could see him making his way home feeling very happy with his professional treatment.

Not a happy ship

There was a lot of tension on the ship. One day there was a fight among two of the crew with an axe. They brought up the injured man to the medical room, and I had help this time from the Captain as we stitched his wounds together with tape and bandages.

I even had a (now) comical incident myself – the 1st Mate and I set upon each other with fisticuffs, which continued into the Captains cabin!

The next day we were both wandering around the ship covered in bruises and I knew it was time to get off. But we were up a river in Africa, so I had to carry on as normal.

The 1st Mate had an obsession with renovating the ship. To paint a ship usually involves chipping away rust outward bound with a chipping hammer and applying undercoat, then on the final leg of the journey home painting the top-coat. This is normal practise for all ships; to look their best arriving home. Usually the noisy “chipping” part can be tolerated for a few days… bang bang bang of a hammer by 10 crew for a short while is a horrible sound.

But the Chambly Era was a rust-bucket, and the banging of hammers was relentless the whole time on the ship. It drove us all crazy.

Getting out of the Sapele

When we were ready to leave the Sapele, we discovered in the morning that the dockers had not been paid, and they had strung a huge hawser across the river to block the ship in. Things were turning REALLY nasty now, and I was not alone in wanting to leave the ship.

The Captain decided to just run the gauntlet and drive the ship through the barrier and boats. We were on stand-by and ready for the manoeuvre with a lot of tension… when in the most incredible fashion that only a Hollywood movie could make, a fast speedboat came racing up the river with a huge fat white man dressed in flowing white robes. He stepped off, paid the dockers, and we were released with no further incident!

It was time to leave Africa and head to Gibraltar. We had great difficulty getting through the bar at the river entrance due to unfavourable weather and had another couple of days delay. We were all getting thin from lack of decent food, sick of banging and chipping, and by now were starting to question whether we would get paid.

Once we finally got out of the Benin River into the open sea, the engines started to fail one-by-one.   These engines were the same used in the "Rock Island Line" trains.  Instead of a ship's engine we had four train engines!

As each one broke down, the ship correspondingly slowed down and our ETA to Gibraltar was pushed back. We were on one engine only with a few days to go, when that last one failed too. We spent a day floating around in the ocean whilst the engineers tried to get one engine running from parts from the other three.

Getting home

We finally limped into Gibraltar – only to find something like 30 holes in the ship which urgently needed plugging. By this time two officers and I decided we needed to leave ASAP… but we had to wait to get paid. The ship’s owner turned up with just one suitcase full of enough USA dollars to pay the whole crew for 2 months, the fuel, repairs, port fees etc. Who knows how much that was! But we managed to get paid and left within the hour… flagging down a local taxi to take us 100 miles to Malaga airport.

We were so happy to get to the airport, we had more than a few beers to celebrate. When it was time to board the flight, we walked across the tarmac and up the steps to the plane. The doors were closed, the engines were started, and the Captain made the announcement for the flight to ……. WHAT! WE WERE ON THE WRONG PLANE!!!!

After a quick explanation to the flight attendant, the door was opened, we jumped down to the tarmac and raced over to our correct plane.

And so ends my final voyage, and my career in the Merchant Navy!