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October 15, 2006
East Coast Beach
I walked and then took a taxi to the East Coast beach today. It is the first time I’ve taken a taxi to get somewhere when I am rambling about. It felt like cheating.
A 200 meter concrete pier juts out from a point along the beach near the food court. If you walk to the end, you can see line after line of cargo ships, tankers and supertankers sitting in their lanes, rolling imperceptibly out to sea and back, not one person visible onboard. The trick to spending months at sea probably lies in keeping busy so I can understand why nobody was seen lounging at the rail. If you are lounging onboard in tight lanes with other ships bustling starboard and aft you are probably expendable.
And lots of people have become expendable. The crew size for a tanker today ranges from 22 to 27 people. Car carrier ships, bulk container ships and others use 20 to 23 people per ship depending on the age of the ship. The newer ships need fewer people. It is something to keep in mind the next time you see a massive cargo ship pulling into port. I’d have thought that the ship would require hundreds of people but instead you could fit the crew into an average public high school classroom with a few seats to spare.
Like every other public facility, the pier looks as if it has been washed daily. Thirty or maybe 40 fishermen stood along the railing and most of them were using old surf fishing rods. I found a barnacle encrusted rod poking out of a trash can along the pier. Some fisherman probably snagged it with his line and wrestled it up. He may have thought that it was a big fish but instead it was a fishing rod. Had he set down his own rod and used the sea damaged one, he would have caught a third rod. Repeating the process, he could have caught a fourth. At first this would see crazy, and he would catch and exchange a few rods just because it seemed so improbable. After his tenth rod, this activity would take on new meaning—as if he were pulling a great zipper out the ocean. Maybe a crowd would collect around him to watch and disperse. He would spend the night there alone, pulling rod after rod out of the iron water. At three am he would feel a great jerk on the line that would rip him from the pier, the pile of rods clattering off the cement behind him. There would be no sign of the fisherman or the rods in the morning. Hundreds of miles away, a mammoth saltwater trout would spit out his shoes and then add his rod to the undersea hundred mile dragline.
Jibber Jabberin | By jb | 06:16 AM
Comments
Very Hemingway-esque.
I too live in a port town and am always amazed that some of the ships, as big as small cities, only carry 20-30 employees.
Posted by: Brittanie at October 17, 2006 01:03 AM