Chapter 1

The story of a man reaching middle age and re-discovering how to live.

This has many themes transplanted from several other stories of mine. It's not all 'peepee kaka' as master Robin Williams has put it, or repetitious crap. Several new themes have been explored such as how to address piracy at sea and what the duties are of a captain in case of mutiny. There are some basic religious themes addressed pointing out the difference between Babylonian and current religious practices. A certain --unproved but possible-- technology is exploited and a conceptual remodelling of the South African nation is explored. This story has been written in three rather large sections and Deity knows how Stories Online will break it up, but there you go. Happy reading, and even I, the author, don't know where this horse will come to rest. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines...

Howdy! I'm Tony French, a mid-western Catholic boy that fell into a rose patch face first.

I'd been whacked by the alcohol stick and stabbed a few times by girlfriends but still got up the next day to go to work and do my job. At thirty-three I was wiry, thin and pretty bummed out over losing my driver's license from getting caught driving drunk--again.

I was standing in line on March first, waiting to pay off my final house payment, when a black whacko (He must have been the only black guy in Plano! What the fuck was he thinking?) tried to hold up the bank. He started dancing around with a .45 held sideways like he had his pants stuffed full of pit vipers, waving around that pistol and screaming. I got disgusted with his pissed-off-orangatang impression. I picked up a brass waste basket and clocked the motherfucker. He went down like a sack of grain. Just out of good sense I stepped on his pistol and stood there, waiting for the cops to show up, late for the dance, as usual.

Plano's finest blasted in like a wannabe swat team, ordering everyone down on the floor, including the little old ladies that didn't get around so well any more. I took out my fancy-pants phone/camera that my sister gave me for my birthday and started snapping pictures. One cop pistol whipped me and started screaming in my face. I took a picture of his face and his badge. When he went to kick me I caught his ankle on the second blow to dump him on his ass, then grabbed the idiot by the ear and pointed at the pistol still under my foot. "Calm down and get the fucking evidence." It took him a minute, but then he took out a fist full of baggies and got the .45 in a bag without touching it.

By then the captain had arrived. I heared him groan as he saw all the people on the ground and his keystone cops screaming at all of them. He walked around and whacked each and every one of them on the ear. They quieted down and slowly got their shit together. Cap came around to me, saw the pistol and said "tell me a story." He clicked on a little tape recorder and waited. I stood there and thought for a minute, then looked at my watch. I did my best to tell him what happened, as close to minute-by-minute that I could. When I'd finished he nodded, then reached for my phone. I shook my head-- "no-no, imbecile"--and put it in my pocket. "That's evidence that I don't want to dissappear. My lawyer gets my phone and your state's attorney gets a certified copy." He looked ugly, but he agreed. I walked over to a desk, got the okay from the head teller and called an attorney out of the phone book. She agreed to get down there as soon as she could get from Yorkville to Plano. While all the bullshit was going down I called over the head teller and paid off my home loan. There. I'd at least got that done.

One of the detectives sidled up to me and started threatening me with anything and everything he could think of. I had a hard time not grinning as I'd pushed the voice record function on my phone just after he started in on me. I talked over him twice, to get his badge number and his last name. When he finished I quickly took a snapshot of his face and ducked around behind another cop so I was out of his reach. When the captain saw him charging me he got the idiot in a thumb lock and had another cop take him outside. "Did he just do something really stupid?" "Yeah. Abuse of powers stupid." I watched his shoulders drop. "I knew that the deal I got coming to work for this burg was too good. Fuck."

I felt bad for the poor bastard. He must have been hired to ride herd on a station full of Barney Fifes and came in blind. There was a lot of compost about to be turned over. I was glad that I was on the stick side of the pitch fork.

After being deposed (interrogated within an inch of my life) I went back to life as usual. I sank my sixteen hundred a month into the bank rather than my loan and kept on putting one foot in front of the other.

Just after Christmas my case came up in Springfield. The venue had been changed because there was evidence of local corruption on a large scale that had been going on for decades.

I swear that the hair stood up on the back of my neck when I heard that I'd just made eleven million three hundred thousand bucks tax free from the several judgements. I didn't even ask what my attorney made. All I knew was that she walked out of that courtroom like the cat that got first dibs at the cream.

Somebody didn't think my jugement was fair. Hell, even I thought I got paid too much, but isn't arson a little steep? I didn't even get to pull my bicycle into my driveway. The house was on fire. The garage was on fire. The fire department wasn't even trying to put it out. They just tried to stop it from spreading. A grinning cop walked up to me and said, "Too bad. Must have been a gas leak." He smelled like gasoline. I didn't waste my time punching him out. I jumped straight up and kicked sideways into the inside of his knee with my weight solidly behind it as I came back down. While he screeched, yelled, bled and thrashed around on the ground I got into my pickup that, thank God, I'd parked on the street and headed out of town. I wasn't welcome there any more. In Yorkville, just down the road, I got an arson investigation started with the sherrif's department, then left the area to be safely anonymous for a while.

I drove up to Aurora and took a room for a few nights an an upscale motel next to the casino. I watched a show on Discovery Channel about the life and times of Jaques Cousteau. The idea of living aboard a ship caught my fancy.

I had my ticket as a CNC machinist and as a lead tool-and-die maker. I could set up, mill, form and finish a plastic injection mold with the best of them. I wasn't afraid of manual labor and wasn't afraid to let people know it, either. If you couldn't be proud of what you did for a living then why get out of bed in the morning? I could find a good-paying job about anywhere that they did metal cutting. The big question was, with eleven million in the bank, why get a job at all? I guess that it boiled down to boredom and habit. I'd been working since work-study in high school and didn'k know HOW to stop.

I stopped by a big international bank in Chicago to look for a personal banker. I needed someone to watch over me and my money. I found a young guy that no doubt still had college loan payments. He seemed serious and concientious so I hired him. His name was Jack.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Let that be known from the start. I did some reading at the local library and nothing that I saw or read put me off of my project. I kept on absorbing what I could by remote learning--through books. Since I figured I'd be traveling for the rest of my life I put down my bucks for a passport to get the paperwork started. Then I found a place in Beloit Wisconsin, a bit northwest of Chicago, that taught classes on how to operate, maintain and overhaul big diesel marine engines. They were huge! I was fascinated by all that moving metal working in concert, like a powerful dance. I took all their courses over eight months and got my certs. It was probably the best thing that I could have done. It gave me a lot of confidence and prepared me for what was ahead. Afterwards I was thirty-four and a bit.

I haunted a few 'boat for sale' sites on the web, looking for a new or used vessel that had my name written on it. Damn, but if I didn't find one, at least to use as a model to expand from.

A company in British Columbia had built forty-two foot steel-hulled custom trawlers as live-aboards. The owner made a business of building them, so it wasn't a one-shot with built-in peculiarities. It was listed at three hundred and fifty thousand bucks Canadian, new off the dock in British Columbia. It was still missing a water heater, generator, radar, auto-pilot and battery farm, but everything was--nice. I felt comfortable while touring it, and wherever I looked or reached I found what I expected. It was if I'd lived on it for years.

The only complaint I had was the thing was uncomfortably small for me, as I'd been living in a place where the entire ship could fit in my living room/kitchen. (Okay, the prow would stick a couple feet out the sliding glass door.) I contacted the builder and put down a deposit for another steel hulled live-aboard, one hundred and two feet long, twenty-three feet wide, (roughly 31M x 7M) with no goddamned high-maintenance teak. I was able to specify the engine used in the build-out. I had a "smaller" Fairbanks-Morse FM-MAN L27 38 nine cylinder diesel engine installed along with two Caterpillar diesel generators. Fairbanks-Morse was the place that I'd gotten my engine training and that was what I wanted to operate. I had her built as a wider vessel, with a partial twin-hull instead of a pure displacement hull, for lateral stability in rough weather. The ship's length demanded bow thrusters for docking and close-in navigation. When your engine weighs over thirty-seven tons the scale of ship's frame loading takes a left turn right out of the dock. What with the engine mass and the liquid tanks the center of mass was a lot lower than any sailboat could boast. She was designed with three decks. Bottom deck was engineering and stores. Mid deck was residence, galley and salon leading out onto the rear deck. Top deck was bridge, bridge crew residence and a hot tub.

I had a laundry list of things I wanted built in, such as a propane locker and lines run to serve a Thermidor four burner top/char-grill/nickel top propane stove with a pair of good slide-in ovens topped by a 1000cfm stainless steel hood. Everything in the kitchen was either stainles steel or a maple topped pastry table. I had a small propane-fired barbecue grill on the stern rail, nearby a bolted-down picnic table. I specified that LED light bars were to be mounted under the cabinetry and on the rear deck instead of the larger bulb-based 12-volt lights he'd been using before. We sat down together to specify a good model ship's radio, radar and water heater. FURUNO had a nicely integrated, if pricey radar/display/AIS/GPS/autopilot solution that I liked. It was a full navigation and control solution.

A dry food storage locker was built in next to the galley and a small washer/dryer pair were installed there. Normally chest freezers are frowned upon in civilian craft, but I built the operating cost into my energy budget. I bought the most efficient chest freezer that I could find. I also installed an upright side-by-side freezer for kitchen deep prep and dough storage. The water heater had to be large to accomodate the hot tub and the industrial lift-gate dish-washer. I liked my hot tea, so I had him install an instant-delivery hot water dispenser for me. Equipping the vessel with a medium capacity ice-maker was understood as I'd be doing some fishing and would want to preserve at least some of my catch on ice. (Large capacity ice makers are insane! I'd have to operate a cruise ship to need that much ice!) I insisted on a walk-in refrigerator, four feet wide by six feet deep. There were dedicated receptacles and locations for a big mixer (I specced out a Hobart 12-quart floor mixer), an electric fryer and a steam kettle. I bought a few things and put them aside, such as a small proofing cabinet, half sheet-pans, a rack for the sheet pans and a big electric pasta maker with a nine-inch throat. It would make pizza crusts with minimal effort. I'd learned my lesson while working in a restaurant kitchen in the summers off from school and bought pastry table with a refrigerated plate on top.

Why so much time and trouble expended on the kitchen? When you've spent ten years or so in a restaurant kitchen during the summers you learn what works and what doesn't. A friend of mine from high school needed kitchen help for his parents' catering shop. I learned pastry there and fooled around with pizza sauces for a couple of years. Oh, I supposed that I'd want a larger Kitchen Aid counter-top mixer for small batch stuff and sausage work, but I wanted the big appliances in first.

The extra length over and above his standard model went into larger fuel tanks, water tanks and a nice big salon. The extra range meant I needed a watermaker (Water would be my only critical resource other than fuel.) so that went into the plans as well. His template design was for two master cabins with attached heads. I didn't want to mess with his plans any more than I had to. The below-decks space gained a few more cabins on either side of the main passageway that carried emergency stores and a half dozen berthing cabins. At first I didn't equip them with more than a bunk, a table and a chair. They had hanging lockers and a filled bedding locker. I had a large unisex head with a shower installed for the crew space. I added another cabin with a small office near the stern for the ship's engineer. A larger table was installed in the salon instead of dedicating a room for a mess. Altogether the plans provided for over two thousand square feet of space to move about in. The claustrophobic feeling that I'd gotten on a forty-two footer didn't happen.

I took a year's lease on a forty foot trawler and hired a retired captain to show me the facts of living on a ship. Man, did he ream me out for having a drink after dinner. He told me that the easiest way to die at sea was to relax and take your attention off of what was happening. If nothing else, I was to buy a top-end self-inflating survival vest, then wear it everywhere but in the shower. I took him at his word.

He was an old merchant marine captain, and going by the book was the best way he knew how. Luckily for me, he commented on damned near every book lesson with what he'd seen and either gotten away with or not gotten away with. He was one hell of a teacher. He was fun, too. He played a concertina; a little, six-sided accordion thing that resembled an accordion as much as a ukulele resembles a guitar.

I learned the difference between a littoral and a pelagic waters, and what they looked like. I learned to follow the birds. I learned how to set the anchors for freshening weather, depending on the depth and composition of the sea floor. I learned what the Zincs did for me, and why. I learned how to find my optimal sailing speed. I learned how to rig a sail in case all my diesels crapped out. We spent a lot of time on radar returns. For every lesson in the books he told me two more. I learned about fire suppression, electrical fires and blocking air circulation as part of fire suppression. He even taught me how to hit a target with a rifle in six-to-eight-foot seas. I wished that old man was my uncle.

It wasn't all practicals--I did a lot of coursework out of textbooks too. I passed the tests and asked for the next textbook. One day I asked for the next book and found there wasn't one. He was sitting there grinning like a brass monkey.

One lecture he gave me was done after hours, over a cup of tea. It was on the responsibilities of a ship's Captain. "Some never get into the groove. You can take all the courses in the world but if it doesn't click you'll never be a captain. There's a responsibility there for the lives of everyone on that vessel. Anything and everything that happens is your responsibility." He gravely looked at me over his cup. "A Captain has to be in charge at all times. A Captain has to be able to take the upper hand. A Captain has to plan ahead for the worst possible outcome and have a plan ready to cope with it." He finished his cup and set it down. "It's like a drug. Once you get a taste for it you'll never forget. It's a part of you."

I didn't get much sleep that night. I lay awake thinking about what he'd said. In the morning I called the builder. I had them install another subsystem into the bridge C&C equipment. Now it made sense. It was an anti-hijacking subsystem. I also had a few electronic breakers installed in a welded-closed box. Lastly, I had them figure out how to speed-purge the fresh water tank in the event of a hijacking.

Just before he left he signed off on my captain's papers. I was surprised when the hard-copy confirmation came through from the merchant marine registry granting my certification. That old sailor did all right by me. His name was Patrick, or Pat.

I learned to live with two sets of underwear, four pair of socks, two pair of pants and two shirts. I spent a year docked in Seattle while I took courses in writing. For a diversion I started a web site and began doing 'guerilla dining' on every restaurant that I could find in the Seattle area. I about busted a gut laughing when I asked a Korean restaurant where their meat came from. The way that they objected made me curious though. I think their business volume doubled for a while from people wanting to try dog meat.

When the news came down that my ship was ready I packed my bag, checked out and took a bus up the coast to Vancouver. That's where the builder had his shop and docks. I hired a reputable third party marine assessor to go over the ship with us and to witness the sea trials. He brought up a few things in a pick list, but it was a remarkably short one.

The contractor had everything ready within two weeks, during which time I paid a visit to a ship's chandler to make my choices of linens, galley equipment, food supplies, cleaning equipment and emergency supplies. I got the tool bench fully provisioned. I also studied the ARRL handbook (which is still an ongoing project) and the license study guides. I stayed at dock another three weeks after taking receipt of Redhead (I had them paint the outer walls of the pilot house dark red), and studied until I was able to pass my amateur radio license. I bought an Icom IC-746 Pro transciever and a printed manual for it. The G5RV antenna mounted well above the water line and the impedance match box tuned me in without a fuss.

With all tanks full of fuel my maximum speed was 10.4 knots. Cruising speed came out to 8.1 knots when fully bunkered with fuel and water.

I spent a year and a half exploring Puget Sound. I quickly found out why the drop-down table over the little raised dining area just behind the pilot's seat was suspended from chains. It made a wonderful chart table in any seas. I found the storm locker to be a bit smaller than I wanted as it was difficult to get my slicker, boots and overalls in there. I bought my own concertina and learned to make some fearful, dreadful noises. I bought a few zydeco albums and learned to play along.

I also found that when tied up to a mooring buoy during rough weather I took my life in my hands getting the landing raft unloaded, to shore, tied up, untied, to the ship and winched back aboard. In an obscuring rain other pilots just didn't see that little thing in the water. I went back to the builder and called he in an engineer to help us. I wanted a heavier boom crane installed which would support a six meter fast recovery boat. It would use a minimal amount of deck space if it were mounted cross-ways behind the flying bridge. I was surprised that so much mass mounted at a distance from the center of rotation didn't have much of an effect on the ship's heavy weather handling.

The engineer pointed out stress points and reinforcement issues for the mast, the boom, the winch and the cradle for the boat. Even the keel plate under the mast would have to be reinforced but afterwards the crane would be much more robust. The winch had to be upgraded as well. I got a fairly large spool and long cable installed on it. Why? I got a kick out of buying a 1.5 meter dip net that would let me do a little deep sea fishing. That big orange thing sure looked 'unique' but it was weather proof, fast and would bob like a cork in heavy seas. It was big enough to carry a pallet of freight too. I had it fitted with a portable hold behind the helm so that I could dump the fishing net directly into the boat. I didn't forget to get the storm locker capacity sorted at the same time. I was thirty-six that spring. I needed some exercise equipment on board so I had a room full of free weights in racks and a couple heavy bags set up.

I thought about that escape boat and how to make it dump to water faster. I had the prow cradle changed to collapse by using a mechanical throw. Once the fore-cradle dropped the whole thing should slide right into the ocean. Granted, it'd be at the cost of an eighteen foot drop, but there you go.

A big part of operating a ship of that size was keeping track of the expenses and various inventories. I had a desk with locking drawers and a computer, flat screen monitor and printer kitted out as the ship's office. It sat in the salon so I could look away from the paperwork and take a look outside occasionally. I spent at least three hours a week there, usually in the quiet of the morning. It paid to sit at dock and run off of shore power. Otherwise there was a constant drain on the diesel tanks and a build-up of hours on the clock for the engine or engines running the generators.

By then I'd turned thirty-six. Once the weather packed in I docked at Aberdeen Washington for the season and got a land job as a tool and die man. Boy, was that a pain in the ass. Nobody had any free berthing that they were willing to rent on the river. I ended up paying a guy that owned a materials handling yard at the end of South Washington street. He had the cranes necessary for the construction and the pilings already in place from an older structure. I paid for the lumber and the build-out. He put in two fifty-foot quays alongside the shore and I leased one of them, with the option to renew my lease each winter for ten years. It wasn't that expensive--another operation just up the river had raw dry lumber stacked up for sale. We rented a portable lumber mill, trued up the beams and had a good, solid set of piers in no time. Within two weeks, actually. He ran water and electric for me while I picked up a local cell phone for communications.

I'd worked with 3-D CNC milling machines and made good bucks while refreshing my skills. There were plenty of good take-out restaurants in the area for me to choose between. I took out a six-month lease on a little pickup truck and kept it down by the wharf where I'd tied up for the winter. Since the temperature rarely went below sixty degrees, on dry days (Yeah, right. Dry days in coastal Washington?) I paste waxed the ship's superstructure and used a random-orbit sander with a sheeps wool pad to make it shine. The synthetic teak deck and the epoxy-painted hull were washed down with a pressure washer after the storms blew through, to clean off the dried salt spray. I bought a pair of steel-toe workboots and a couple pair of heavy coveralls for work. My washer and dryer got a good workout about every day.

I re-activated my restaurant comment site and reviewed every place with a serving license in the area. Some were pizza places, some were bakeries, some were coffee shops. I put together a simple category system and wrote under it. I tried to be fair. I published a point system and graded the places by that. Some, I admit, weren't scientific but 'welcoming small children' or 'children eat free between x and y' was an honest grade, even if it did drive away the older adults that appreciated a quiet meal. I gave the local paper, which didn't have a restaurant review section, rights to freely publish my work.

When the early year snow squalls blew in I sat in the dark, watching out the pilot house windows with a cup of tea at hand. When the sleet and snow blew in sideways I was of two minds. I was thankful that I was indoors and warm, yet I wondered what the hell I was doing on a floating carnival ride. Being out at sea in a storm like that would, um, test one's sense of humor, not to mention one's tolerance to large doses of dramamine.

That spring I decided to push myself and the Redhead a bit. I had heaters mounted in the fuel, sweet water and black water tanks to keep everything at forty degrees American or about four degrees C. I tanked up, called my chandler to overload my supplies and set out north for Anchorage Alaska.

The way up the coast was beautiful. I took the inside passage. There was a lot of traffic, though. I had to watch out where I steamed and where I tied up. It took me about twenty days to make it, tying up at night.

Boy, the view of Anchorage Alaska from the water is a disgusting mess compared to the beauty around it. I contacted the municipality of Anchorage (the port authority) and arranged for a seven month lease of a pier and facilities. I even had cable TV and internet! I didn't know how well the ship would behave in temperatures around zero F so I bought several electric fans with heating elements and installed immersion heaters into the oil crankcases of all three diesel engines aboard. For land transportation I rented an F-150 Ford pickup that was in pretty good shape. I bought a couple pair of wool shirts and wool pants for the climate. I wanted a big, bulky wool cable-knit sweater so I bought one, along with a wind cheater jacket to go over it. Then I went looking for a job. I'd have time to screw around later.

Once again my CNC milling experience paid off, as did my Fairbanks-Morse training. With the factory maintenance and rebuild certs I already had along with a couple more tele-classes under my belt I got my ticket as a factory authorized mechanic. I made a POT full of money!

I asked around about who really needed some help with power plants. I got the names of some of the fishermen that worked family operations, but were going under due to the reduced catch permits and the price of doing business. I did quite a few engine rebuilds off the cuff. My boss didn't mind if I used his shop on off days as it gave him a good rep as fallout from my work.

Some of the guys I helped out were Native Alaskan--tribal folk. I got invited to a Potlatch. Now, between you and me, it was pretty damned confusing. There were a bunch of people standing up and talking, a bunch of other people fancy-dancing in the damnedest costumes you ever saw, another bunch doing slow ritual-like dancing and later, all-out indian-style barn dancing. It seemed like everyone brought a dish to pass but me, so I called a local chandler to have a pallet of fresh oranges delivered within the hour.

(That's what a chandler does--he gets what you want where you want it and when you want it. That's why he can charge on hell of a premium for the service.)

Everyone seemed to enjoy the fresh fruit. The kids, as kids do, went nuts and wasted a bunch which brought the wrath of their grandfolks, aunts and uncles down on their asses while the parents sat around looking apologetic for their little monsters. So what else is new? I danced with a few pretty ladies, but patted no asses and made no promises.

After that a lot of people smiled at me and said "Hi!" when I was grocery shopping or out having a cup of coffee and a pastry. A local Methodist minister even sat down and talked for a bit one Saturday over coffee and fresh apple Danish. (Yum!) He pretty much gave me the third degree but was nice enough doing it. I couldn't figure out why he was so happy that I wasn't really a religious sort of fellow. I guessed that it was to rub an agnostic samaritan into the Catholic priest's nose, but I never got another inkling about it.

For the rest of the summer at least four Salish women would wake me up on Saturday mornings to clean the ever lovin' snot out of my ship. I think that I dissapointed them as I was a clean livin' sort of fella. There wasn't much room so I tended to clean up behind myself as I went along as a matter of habit. This was because I didn't want to get kilt tripping over crap on the floor when seconds counted. I always slipped 'em each a twenty for their efforts.

Once Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's had passed, people tended to get cabin fever. They either (a) hit the bars, (b) did church things, © hit the schools for winter classes, (d) hit the libraries, (e) went to concerts, movies and performances, (f) joined mating/dating sites, (g) hung out at the malls or (h) went mad in their own special ways. I guess that I did a little of all of them, sort of tasting the menu. I'd learned Euchre at my mom's knee and played a pretty mean game. I hosted Friday night Euchre parties on board the Redhead. We drank a few beers and had a rauciously good time. Towards spring, when everyone was desperately looking for something else to do with someone else I invited the local Methodist minister, Baptist minister and Catholic priest over for Sunday afternoon Euchre. They were taken aback to find a sign on the door--