Coming Ashore

Life at sea has a rhythm – its regular. There’s the night shift and day shift – midnight to noon, noon to midnight. The chiefs work six to six. Breakfast 5:30-6:30, lunch 11:30-12:30, dinner 5:30-6:30. Deck hockey at 10am M, W, F, and at 1pm on T, Th, Sat. For 35 days life keeps ticking.

Until, after I had been working at sea in Angola for 14 months, my boat had to go to dry dock. We came to port in Walvis Bay, Namibia. Then all regularity stopped. Suddenly everyone worked 7-7, except those who had to stand watch on the gangway through the night. Suddenly our family of 53 expanded daily with electricians, plumbers, engine guys, welders, flooring guys. The dock side was always full and active with crates and pallets coming on and off. Crew putting strops on, taking them off. Our normal seismic routine was turned upside down. No day seemed the same. Sometimes I was dockside recovering and preparing craned shipments, sometimes I was boxing up our gear, sometimes spooling sections, sometimes preparing paperwork for offgoing shipments, sometimes installing a new computer in the rack room. Then at 7 things stopped, usually. Sometimes we had to crane on a few last shipments. From 7pm until 7 the next morning we were free. We could go on land – how strange. We were no longer confined to 73 meters of space. At 8pm usually we gathered. Everyone freshly showered and wearing crew change clothes – a changed from their orange. Often we would head to the seaman’s mission. This made me feel like a real sailor. The first night I was the only woman there besides the old woman at the door making sure you signed in and the one behind the bar. We also explored Walvis Bay – it was the cleanest, safest, most functional place I have ever been in Africa – I can’t explain how amazing it is when things work – the port is clean, the sidewalks are clean(even the fact that there are sidewalks), there’s a nice beach and I saw people running along the beach, immigration was not an ordeal Even sailing in – it was a speck nestled into an endless coast of golden sand dunes. Sadly we crew changed before dry dock, so I didn’t get to see Pride out of the water. And surprisingly, the trip had gone so smoothly and was so much fun, that crew change rolled around and I was not even itching to get off!