First, promotion in the merchant service runs almost entirely on competency. Self-marketing, like a perfect CV, barely helps. Competency, like taking action during man overboard, mattered far more.
Second: on Christmas night, a ship fired a rocket parachute flare. Hundreds of ships saw it. That's a distress signal. Every vessel that sees one is obligated to report it. The radio played Christmas carols instead.
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11pm. I was standing watch when I heard footsteps behind the curtains. A tall, broad-shouldered silhouette came out. Captain T. The sea was empty, and he had come up simply to look at it.
He told me about a competition with his dear friend who, alongside him, took to the sea. Same age, but his friend was the academy's honor student, Captain T. second by 0.02 CGPA. Graduating, they each bet $10,000 on who would first reach Captaincy.
His friend became an oil tanker Captain at 29, commanding some 100,000 GT. Captain T. attained his at 30, on gas tankers of the same capacity. Promotion is slower on larger carriers, and gas tankers carry the most stringent safety laws in the industry.
Still, he admitted, he had lost. His rival had secured recommendation letters from all Masters he sailed with. Praiseworthy, remarked Captain T.
29, and 30. I've sailed with Chief Officers ten years older, still struggling for promotion.
"Seafaring is straightforward work. There's really only one thing that truly mattered in gaining promotion: be as competent as you can be."
I once applied to other shipping companies. I spent weeks tinkering with my CV, optimizing it until it was two pages, structurally readable, credible. No reply.
A colleague had gotten into one of the highest paying companies in the world. I asked for his CV. Surely his was better than mine. Five pages, a grainy face picture, tangled sentences that read like a direct google translation. Poorly written, yet his employment took a month.
One difference: he applied when the company heavily advertised vacancies. They desperately needed people to man their newbuilt ships. Recruiters screened CVs only to short-list. The real judgment happened in the interview.
What mattered was one thing: how well could you perform your work. What's your action during a man overboard? Where do you divert when there's a fatal case for the crew? What's the safest way to board a ship? Seafaring is a vocation where self-marketing serves very little.
Sign-off dates aren't something to be planned. One would try, depending on the reliever's availability, but more often than not things would not go as planned. Christmas is the one you lose most.
Seamen found their own ways of celebrating missed moments. This event, I withhold its whereabouts and its year. What transpired was true.
Midnight 25th December. I was about to go down from the Bridge when I saw fireworks spring forth along the coasts. The VHF, tuned to Channel 16, usually busy with ships calling in positions, now played Christmas carols. It is a violation to use Channel 16 for anything but emergency traffic, but such breaches were untraceable when hundreds of ships cheered at once.
Even more illegal was what ensued minutes after. A bright red smoke shot to the sky. A rocket parachute flare, from one of the anchored ships. Pyrotechnics signal vessels in distress, and every ship seeing it must relay the message to the coast station, and potentially deviate course to rescue her. More than a violation, this broke international maritime law.
Following the flare were cheers on the radio by tens of ships. One voice has stayed with me since:
"This is our Christmas!"
The VHF turned more wildly than ever, the flare fired like an ordinary firecracker.
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