Chartrock. I did 8 1/2 years , loving every bit that my legal-substance addled brain can remember, but age has taught me that nostalgia is a very selective concept and I know there were some lousy times, but it was largely a great life but I wasted a lot of it horizontally in various bars and other establishments on several continents whilst making a major Pratt of myself on many an occasion due to over indulgence in the local brews.
Paid travel for one so young broadens the outlook on life and like a sponge you end up soaking up a mishmash of cultures, languages and experiences and literally throwing your money around like a drunken sailor. Just Like Paul Kelly sagely sings "I can order sandwiches in seven different languages" It reminds me of my first phrase in Spanish that I picked up. " I have lost my wallet in room 314". This was embarrassingly largely due to the fact that I had. This would have been all well and good if I had been in a Spanish speaking country, but I was in Rio De Janeiro and they speak Portuguese. The drunken American I had befriended temporarily who helpfully gave me this phrase, didn't speak that language and assured me using logic that only comes with a bellyful of beer, that they were close enough to being Hispanic types anyway and would know what I meant. They didn't,and some years later I learned that the word he had given me for wallet was actually "bag", so the hotel Staff were looking for a suitcase and I had lost my wallet stuffed with all of my docking money of Brasilian Cruzeiros. No surprise that I never got it back. I would only have spent it on more beer anyway, so hopefully the person who lifted my wallet fed a family of 10 or more in the favelas for a few weeks.
I only left the "Merch" as us salty old sea dogs refer to it, in order to get married and come to Oz.(Perhaps two of the best things I have ever done , but that is a whole other story). The MN makes you grow up fast and being in sole charge of a ship's engine room for 8 hours out of every 24 should have been a very daunting task at the tender age of 21. I would like to say that I fully knew what I was doing, but that would be a bare faced lie, yet the exuberance of youth allows you to blithely take huge big bites out of life, chew like buggery and hope to hell that you don't choke when you try to swallow. I never choked, but I gagged on more occasions than I care to recall. I guess I am proof positive of the jack of all trades but master of none genre. Due to my training in " fix it by any means" I can come up with a hundred temporary repairs to anything using not much else than what I can find in the kitchen bottom drawer, a bit of sticky tape and a bent fork. Then when that repair fails, will only come up with another temporary repair until the cycle starts again. It is what we did. Get the old girl to the next port,by any means possible, and get the experts in. Maybe I took the concept quite literally and now is a metaphor or my life.
Now here I am on the slippery slopes to dotage cruising down to early retirement wondering where all those years went. Lots of good times, way too many headaches, dislocated elbows, cut fingers and more than a bit of industrial deafness. i have joined the ranks of the old buggers who start conversations with young people along the lines of "when I was a lad.....". My Ma was right. It's all downhill after 21.You should always listen to your mother.........
