Calmer Waters

 

...Felt her hog and felt her sag, betted when she'd break;

Wondered every time she raced if she'd stand the shock;

Heard the seas like drunken men pounding at her strake;

Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block...

 Rudyard Kipling: The Ballad of the Bolivar 1892

The Port of Palm Beach, Florida had very little in common with Liverpool Docks or any of the Algerian ports we had recently seen, and on that April morning in 1974 it was surely a long way from the pounding we had received from the North Atlantic gale a week or so earlier during our eighteen-day crossing from Ireland to Virginia. Yet here we were at Riviera Beach, where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream are closer to land than any other part of North America, and life felt pretty good.

If this is your first visit to this site, may I direct you to my earlier episodes which will provide a little more context. I suggest you start with A New Shipmate and then Rough Crossing - or even earlier if you have the time - there is an index on this this page. I hope in time you will read them all!

It had taken us a little more than a couple of days for the 750-mile journey from Newport News, down the James River and into Chesapeake Bay, dropping our pilot somewhere off Norfolk, Virginia before continuing under the impressive Chesapeake Bay Bridge and turning right into a relatively gentle Atlantic Ocean. We made our way down the coast and across the great bight between North Carolina and Florida and into the still waters surrounding Palm Beach.

There had been no time for sight-seeing or shore activities in Newport News. I had a ship's steering-gear to recondition and service among other things - and after the hammering of the last two weeks, it was important to all of us that we catch up on a little sleep.

Now it was different. We were in Florida! The weather was a balmy 27 degrees C (80 deg F), and we had a couple of days at least while cargo was loaded for our charter, and we were going to make the most of it. 

The Port of Palm Beach lies within the well protected Lake Worth Lagoon separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the barrier beaches of Singer Island. With only a few exceptions, the dock area is never the most attractive part of any city's environs, and Palm Beach was no exception. As soon as we had the opportunity, we took a cab across to the ocean-side of the lagoon and were soon acting like wealthy tourists as we baked on the beach in the Florida sunshine and later gorged ourselves on a colossal chateaubriand washed down with a fruity Saint-Émilion neither of which we could afford, but after the discomfort of the past couple of weeks, the outlay for which was swiftly justified. This is what we came to sea for!

And, for the next few months, we shared what I can only describe as some of the most enjoyable and stimulating times of my days as a seafarer. I don’t propose to present a voyage tour of all our travels during what was for us, golden days. It would possibly make interesting historical reading to my immediate family (by no means am I assured of that, by the way) but to anyone else it would be a meaningless indulgence.

Having said that, I must point out that one of the treats of a dry cargo charter (a more formal way of describing tramping) is, nautically speaking, to take the road less travelled.

We had great times in busy ports like Houston, (including an introduction to baseball at the Astrodome, drinking beer, eating hotdogs and rooting for the home team); New Orleans (memories of Pete Fountain’s Bar on Bourbon Street among many others) and not least, Trinidad at Carnival time. But it was out of the way places like Puerto Cabezas in Nicaragua; Vera Cruz in Mexico; and the islands of St Lucia, St Vincent and especially, Barbados where we truly felt this ought to go on for ever.

Our Caribbean and South American experiences without a doubt caused our decided lack of interest in cruise ships many years later. The appeal of a vacation shared with a floating city of boomer superannuants and young partygoers, as tempting as the marketing may appear, is missing for us. It is not going to evoke memories of these times.

There were a couple of milestones which took place during those halcyon days.  At precisely 10 am on Sunday, 19^th May 1974 (which not coincidentally was Pauline’s birthday), we both gave up a disgusting habit of many years as two hundred “international passports to smoking pleasure” were consigned to a watery grave (my apologies in retrospect for the marine littering). Pauline was not much more than a social smoker, but for me, who had consistently puffed my way through a pack Stuyvies every four-hour watch for the past eight years or so, it was a significant achievement, and one for which 50 years later, I continue to regard as a breakthrough.

The other milestone, I’m very pleased to say, was equally as long-lasting and very much more gratifying. On a Monday evening in late July, we boarded a British Airways Boeing 707 at Trinidad’s Piarco International Airport and, after a brief stop at the nearby island of Antigua, we were several hours later, sleep deprived and stiff, in a black cab making our way through the congested Monday morning traffic of a damp and drizzly London, headed for St Pancras station and the train to Nottingham. We had just two weeks to plan, organise and deliver a wedding - ours.  

We had been nearly six months on Hyacinth and with previous accumulated leave we had enough time and money to get married, have a get-together with family and friends and have a short holiday, before heading back to sea and whichever of their fleet, Messrs Rederiet Lindinger A/S decided needed a new First Engineer.

The wedding was a triumph. There were times over the two weeks leading up to it when we thought it was going to be anything but that. The first challenge was finding a church where we could be married. We soon learned that one doesn’t just lob up at the church door and say can you marry us next week. After numerous disappointments, we finally came to a lovely old church built in the 1870s, the Lower Parliament Street Methodist Church where a charming old cleric agreed that he would carry out the service for us on 10^th August. As it turned out, he retired from ill health the following week and it was to be his last wedding service after what we later learned was a long and highly respected career in the Ministry. We both later felt that he surely put as much empathy into the ceremony as he had no doubt done over 40 years of service. It felt very personal.

We were joined by friends and family on both sides. My old school friends from Cairns, Mal and Ian and their wives, Kay and Ellen were there and Pam and my best man, John from my Sydney days. My mother made the trip from Brisbane and there were aunts, uncles and cousins in abundance.

There was a small hiccup when I gave my cousin Donald, the job of filming the event using my recently acquired Kodak cine camera, complete with film cartridge – except that sadly, I had forgotten to include the cartridge, so the entire event was “filmed” with the most important element of the production missing.

The wedding service took place during the middle of the afternoon, giving ample time to recover from the preceding night’s round of Nottingham pubs with the Australian contingent. I’m told that Pauline had a more subdued “hen night” – I am not persuaded to believe this.

The reception was held at the Strathdon Hotel, one of the newer hotels near the city centre and when the speeches and wine eventually dried up, I put another fifty pounds on the bar which remarkably kept everyone lubricated until at least 11 o’clock, such was the buying power in 1974 when the price of beer was about 20 pence per pint. We even had a couple of Rolls Royce limousines which cost us the princely some of twenty pounds.

It was a bloody good shindig, one that we have never forgotten, and we made certain that we were the last to leave.

We had determined that after the wedding we would head off to Australia where Pauline would meet more of my family and see my homeland. Before that however, we decided it would be fun to take the two mothers on a little trip, so for the next week we enjoyed a driving holiday through the southwest of England with Maisie and Eileen. On the surface, it may seem like an ordeal with two mothers with completely different personalities all squeezed into a little rental car driving around historic towns and villages from Ludlow to Lands End. I’m not saying it wasn’t without its moments – and there is no doubt that my extroverted mother could be hard work at times – but we got through it, and no one suffered any long-term effects.

Green Island is a small coral cay some 25 to 30 km off the coast of Cairns right in the heart of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. As a younger person, growing up in Cairns, a casual response to the question of where one might be going for a holiday might be, “Oh, we’re not doing much this year, just going over to the Island for a couple of days.”  In other words, it wasn’t anywhere special, to anyone living in a town like Cairns – and yet, here were Pauline and I, with potentially the world at our feet, opting to fly 12,000 miles from Nottingham to spend a few days on the Island. It was special to us.

In 2024, Green Island has a luxury five-star hotel and is likely to set you back about $4,000 for a week on the island. In 1974, we stayed in cabins which were built 30 years earlier and paid $40 a night. It was the perfect place to honeymoon with little to do other than take a one-hour walk on fine coral sand right around the island, stroll through the interior of the island through the coconut palms and vine-thicket rain forest, wade in the shallows in sparkling clear water amid teeming colourful aquatic life, drink our share of local beer and gorge ourselves everyday on enormous tropical fruit breakfasts and dinners which included huge serves of freshly caught coral trout, red emperor, sweet lip, snapper, Spanish mackerel and prawns the size of crayfish.

Each morning around 10 o’clock a hoard of day-trippers would arrive by launch from the mainland, and the beaches and the resort bar and the glass-bottom boats were soon crowded. To say crowded is probably an exaggeration – it wasn’t like they had arrived on an ocean liner – the Hayles launch carried around 250 or so passengers, and during the peak period when there were two launches running, we might have had 500 or so people on the island. At 3 PM the same boats would carry them all back to Cairns and we were once again a small group of marooned islanders with our own private beaches and private cabins. It was heaven.

I haven’t been back to the island since then – I suspect I would be disappointed.

All good things must end, I had a job to do and needed to return to work – not the least, because we were running out of funds.  We returned to Sydney and stayed for a few days with my old shipmate from Francis Drake, Bob, of whom I have written in previous chapters and his girlfriend, Pauline at a lovely two-storey terrace house in Balmain that they were renting at the time (Bob and Pauline would later be our long-term North Epping neighbours - but that was all 10 or 15 years down the track).  The funds were by now in need of topping up, and since I still had a current taxi-driver licence, I was able to grab a few night shifts with ABC Cabs (maybe I’ll tell you about my brief career as a cab driver in another chapter).

My employers in Copenhagen had originally planned for me to join the newest ship in the fleet, Lindinger Jade on her way to Mombasa, but a lengthy bout of influenza for Pauline meant we weren't going anywhere for a while so I reluctantly turned it down. We didn’t want to wear out our welcome however, and when about ten days later,  Copenhagen wired me saying that the first engineer who had replaced me on Hyacinth had come down with appendicitis, and was I able to return to my old ship, I jumped at the chance. 

On a bright spring morning a few days after my 29^th birthday, we boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles and after a couple of stop overs at airports in Central America, arrived hot and exhausted at Panama City where we were soon welcomed back on board - back in the same cabin that we had left a couple of months earlier. Not much had changed, the frikadeller were as tasty as always, the Pabst Blue Ribbon was cold, the cabin hadn’t got any larger (I had) and the TV reception was still pretty much non-existent most of the time.

Hyacinth was getting ready to leave for Puntarenas on the western coast of Costa Rica and was taking on fuel in Panama ready to depart within hours.

I checked the spare parts inventory with 2^nd engineer Erik, and before long we had cleared customs, cast off and were making our way south across Panama Bay towards Azuero Peninsula where we would turn west and follow the shoreline along the Central American isthmus for the next two or three days to our destination. There was just enough time for Pauline to get seasick and get over it, before we turned around and made the voyage east back to Panama and through the Canal for the homeward trip to US ports in the Gulf of Mexico.     

The next five months seemed to take no time at all. I would almost call it uneventful, but it never was. We were determined not to take any of this for granted, knowing that some day (like now) this would be a distant memory. There were indeed many highlights, too many to mention without stretching this into an overlong running commentary - but here's just a few:

·        A brief bout of illness in Georgetown Guyana where I developed the most painful stomach cramps I’ve ever experienced, exacerbated by a long and painful ambulance ride from our berth up the Demerara River in Guyana to the main Georgetown Hospital where I was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection (OK, not exactly a highlight);

·        A delightful Christmas in St Croix, Virgin Islands followed by an equally enjoyable New Year in San Juan, Puerto Rico;

·        A week in drydock in Willemstad, Curaçao enjoying the delights of Dutch Caribbean cuisine and Amstel beer;

·        Not least – enjoying the pleasures of our own floating hotel. It wasn’t the Queen Mary and certainly not my daddy’s yacht (we never had one), but we had the Monkey Island (the space on top of the bridge) to ourselves most of the time, and this was indeed the Caribbean.

Lest there be any mistake – I was working as well – keeping watch twelve hours per day (six on, six off), ensuring in between watches that those troublesome maintenance tasks and pesky spare parts were always to hand should they ever be needed.

It is also true that Pauline didn’t just laze around recovering from sea sickness, reading Dennis Wheatley, or sending postcards home. She was signed on to the manifest as a “supernumerary” and that meant that if there were jobs to be done whether typing the Captain’s reports or cleaning the heads – sea legs permitting, she was up for it.

Eventually of course, it was time for to go home. So on a stormy evening in late March of 1975, we boarded a National Airlines flight from Miami and after some serious turbulence soon after taking off into the South Atlantic, we headed home to the UK to take some leave and think about what was next in store for us.