one of my friends whom I sailed with about seven years back on M/T Corinth wrote on his facebook wall recently; 'there are men and there are seamen'.
six years at sea!! well ofcourse not at a stretch but for a whole eleven months on the first ship followed by six or five on and two and half off.
money was the main factor that made me join merchant navy, and a desire to see in real the big machinaries that we learnt about , rather than wasting four years of mechanical engineering in software companies and ofcourse to see the world!!!
the journeys were awesome . the heavy workload was compensated with the excitement of a mind eager to see new places. M/T Emerald Sky,my first ship took me almost through a full round of the globe in eleven months;from Singapore to Dubai!!!
but as the days turned into weeks and weeks into months, and the ports started to look similar, the loneliness started creeping!! Internet wasnt that popular and the ships agent was eagerly waited for any probable letters from home. if nothing came it would be another fifteen days easily before the next port. we were slowly starting to feel the negatives of the career.
there were two of us as engine cadets,both of us from the same place ,from the same college and the croatian first engineer could never pronounce our names correctly and so we became Bruce Lee; I was Bruce ,Vineeth was Lee!!! And so bruce and Lee lived together in a small cabin, on bunk beds; lee on top and I took the bottom one; for eleven long months!!
Rekhi is right, there are men and there are seamen!
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