January 22, All Over Again, Late Afternoon East of the International Date Line
THE HOUSE OF THE OTTAWA is as comfortable as a hotel, albeit a floating hotel with big red axes bracketed to the beige Formica walls. But when you can't get off, any ship can feel like a prison ship. Back when he was still a seasick deckhand, Captain Jaku­bowski thought that someday he'd like to be the master of his own freighter, but the container put an end to that dream. "And so," he told me this morning during coffee break, "I have always been an employee."

"Who aint a slave?" Ishmael famously asks in Moby-Dick. Every night the Filipino oilers and deckhands gather in the crew's lounge to kick back on sofas and banish the tedium with boxed wine and Filipino television, many hours of which were downloaded onto a digital recorder while the ship was at port. The only decoration in the crew's lounge is a poster-size pinup calendar on which a golden-haired bathing beauty can be seen lifting her halter top, offering a charitable peek at her shiny, suntanned, wondrously orbicular hooters. Unlike the officers' lounge, the crew's lounge is often full.

Last night, after taking my walk, I spent an hour there drinking cheap red with Joel Nipales and another oiler, Marco Aaron. On his last trip, Aaron's ship, one even larger than the Ottawa, failed to escape a hurricane. "You know the distance from one wave to another wave?" he said. "It's 400 meters. Our ship's 400 meters also. It was rolling, pitching, everything." Belowdecks in a storm like that, "every time you walk you have to carry your empty glass or empty bucket. So that you not throw up anywhere. As long as the engine's running, nothing can happen to you. But once the engine stops, you have to pray. You have to call all the saints."

Seasick as he was, the homesickness may be worse. Every day at sea, Aaron misses his wife and baby daughter. He's not sure he'll last as long as Nipales, who, at 42, is 11 years older. But at sea, an oiler can make a decent living. "For one month we get $1,300 U.S.," Aaron said. "But in the Philippines, if you're going to work there, the maximum for the beginners, you'll only earn $200." Unlike the officers, the oilers and deckhands are not employees of NSB but temp workers subcontracted by an agency in Cyprus. The officers do four months on, three months off, whereas the oilers and deckhands ship out for seven months at a time; at the end of those seven months many sign on for seven more, and in some ports of call there's not even time for shore leave. "It's very hard. Seven months is too much," Aaron said. "Almost 70 percent of your life you spend on a ship." Nipales once spent 26 consecutive months at sea. Even more than the China disaster, that's something I have difficulty imagining.