Chapter 13: One push too many: I move on

It was five weeks later. I was tired of being bitched at by the women. All I heard was little smarmy comments about sexy this and men that. Nothing I did was right. There was nothing I could do that they wouldn't pick apart. I was desperately tired of their shit. This was not PMS. This was not early-onset menopause. I cried to myself in my berth. My crew had abandoned me. A part of me, deep inside, died. Back in the day this would have gone before the mast and someone would have died.

I had the fuel tanks filled and sailed for Puerto Vallarta. Once there I took a hotel room and stayed by myself. When I got tired of that city I sailed for the U.S. Naval Station at Long Beach, California. I stayed watch-on-watch until the ship reached its berth.

Once there I had all the HUD helmets and automated launchers offloaded into military stores and signed off as being received. I had the Brownings, the SAM missiles and the contents of the arms locker packed into a one-quarter-sized maritime shipping container and sent to a secured storage facility.

I re-packed my duffel, folded my clothes, packed my laptop and sat phone. They all went into my duffel bag. My passport, master's papers and all the other trivial bits of paper that make up a man's life went into a nice Samsonite briefcase that I bought to keep everything together. I left the ship's papers and signed on the dotted line, naming Angie as the new owner of record.

I walked away.

I wrote a succinct note to the commander, Parris Island concerning the toxic environment that I had faced. I wrote to him of my solution, Pyrrhic though it may be.

I refused to be ruled by fucking walking estrogen factories that were never wrong. I still had over sixty mil in the bank. There was nothing holding me down. There was nothing holding me back. Let the women play their bitchy games. When push comes to shove they found themselves attacking against the wind. I refused to push back. I was the empty fist. I wondered when they'd notice that I was missing.

I drifted for a while, trying to distance myself from my bitterness. I looked deep inside myself, and asked some hard questions. Yes, I still adored the sea. I decided that I would approach this from another direction.

I bought a little Subaru Outback that could easily hold all my crap and headed up the coast. I stopped in a little town called Waldport, on Alsea Bay, in Oregon. I took a room in a 'bed and breakfast' with Wi-Fi and spent some time looking for a new ship. I didn't look very hard--I was there for four months.

I found an icebreaker/tug out of the Netherlands that had failed its rating test and was half-rebuilt as a houseboat. It was about 130 feet long (39 Meters) and had a displacement of about 300 metric tons. I bought her for less than $200,000 U.S. and took a flight to Rotterdam to oversee her rebuilding. She was over fifty years old (She had launched in 1958) and had never undergone a full refit.

That was about to change. The hull got an ultrasound scan to check for cracks. It was stripped down to the bare metal, ion sputter-coated to smooth out the surface and deposit a fresh coat of fairly thick, very hard metal and then she got a professional coat of the best anti-fouling paint I could find. I had her outfitted with stabilizing keel winglets fore and aft. This would combat the characteristic roll while in heavy seas, of a hull designed for icebreaking. (She'd tend to wallow like a pregnant cow.)

I had the single engine replaced with a pair of brand new Fairbanks-Morse 38 8 1/8 12-cylinder vertically opposed diesels driving twin propellers. I had the poor ship stripped to the hull and rebuilt. I had it equipped with individual staterooms for three engineers, two cooks, three watch standing officers and six more auxiliary crewmen, all in luxuriously oversized cabins. She was designed for three full decks with an open space at the stern of the first two decks some 30 feet long each, hopefully big enough to carry some cargo. From the side the ship had a high blunt prow and the stern had a stepped-back effect.

I liked my old ship's deep tub so much that I had a 6'x6' by 4' deep one installed in the owner's suite (mine) and a larger one in the crew's space. (Oh, I'd never fill either unless we were in port and they would be kept empty if there were any chance of high seas.) I had no problem putting in a large sauna, either.

I had an open all-stainless galley installed with a nice work island. I had a brand new Hobart floor mixer and lift-gate dishwasher installed along with a 24" lava rock char grill, a 6-burner double-oven stove with a nickeltop on one side, a small baker's proofing cabinet and a full height reach-in split half-and-half for cooler and freezer. There were grab bars everywhere. I had a flash heater installed into the galley's hot water line so the pre-rinse sink could damned near steam-sterilize the dishes and pots. The ice maker was near the door to the mess. A high-volume fume hood vented outside, and kept the place comfortable.

After being in a couple of birch saunas that smelled like unwashed armpits and crotches I had ours made of cedar wood. Instead of an afterthought the laundry room was full-sized and had plenty of room. I planned for only one mess with one long table so the crew could be served family style. I had a JetSpray two-bay refrigerated drink dispenser put in for lemonade or limeade and horchata. There was room on the table for restaurant-size coffee urn, and a big stainless iced tea dispenser too.

The generously-sized salon at the rear of the mid-deck had computers that were connected to the internet while in port. An expensive movie projection system and a carousel-driven CD player fed good speakers throughout all the crew spaces.

I tried to adopt many of the good things that had been on my previous vessel and added a few new ideas as well. The ship's air handlers were oversized and could not only provide zone-controlled heating and cooling but insure that a non-condensing humidity was maintained throughout the vessel. Ionizing air cleaners would keep the vessel smelling clean.

I had a weapons locker built into a wall-length closet that made up the rear of the wheelhouse. It was covered in wood paneling to match the rest of the room. There was no real lock on it. You just put your fingers and thumb into a set of holes, squeezed and gave it a quarter turn to the left and the hatch opened. It made for fast access. The weapons were racked on the wall and stored on heavy wire-rack shelves. As before, I kept a .357 revolver in my quarters or on my person. I kept a lot of batteries in stock for the lasers mounted on the pistols and shotguns.

I bought eighty kilos of Semtex and a dozen blasting caps. on the black market. I kept it all in four padlocked foot lockers in our refrigerated storage. (Well, not the blasting caps. I stored those separately. I'm not insane!) (We boasted a 12x12 refrigerated walk-in cooler and a 12x12 walk in freezer.) Four floor hatches in the engineering deck were built in to accommodate the foot lockers, with a 24-volt pigtail terminated into each one. A padded box mounted just below the deck at each hatch held two blasting caps and a short length of linking wire. An innocuous-looking key-locked switch was on the navigation console. It was set up to initiate a 30-minute timer, and then shoot 24 volts down each of the four lines. They were our scuttling charges. I planned to have each watch officer wear a key, along with myself.

This was not done as haphazardly as it sounds. I hired a professional marine architectural firm to design and oversee the build-out. I just had a few (all right--more than a few!) specific requests that were built into the design; such as heavy acoustic insulation everywhere and over-sized mid-deck and lower-deck center passageways. A damned-near silent 6'x8' electric lift traveled through the ship, opening onto the roof of the top deck. It was sized to be the width of the corridors and had a pass-through cage.

A reinforced beam was designed in next to the elevator shaft to support the top-deck crane. We didn't have the capacity to handle containerized freight en mass, but we could handle either four full containers or quad-length pallets, such as were needed to ship mid-sized marine replacement engines, water makers and pump assemblies. When fully built-out and fueled she topped out at a respectable twenty-seven knots. A more fuel-efficient engine speed turned out to give us eighteen knots.