Starting out, you take the work you can get. There’s no peaches and cream on day one. You’ve got to earn your spot. I wanted to be among the elite, and the only way to be elite at anything, whether it be as a starting quarterback or a Hollywood actor or a sailor, is to begin at the bottom. And at the bottom, some people could be cheap, some could be crazy, and if you were really lucky, you could get both.
Earl was a good guy, owned a nice 40-foot, single-engine, custom-built sport fish. It was a good little boat, though having just a single engine provided some problems for sport fishing. If you had a two-engine boat, then you could steer with the engines. Usually, you fish by trailing your bait and lines out the stern and hope you get a strike. If you just have one engine, then the only way to go after the fish was to put her in reverse, which would drain water into the cockpit and then back out the scuppers. But if you had two engines, you could take one of the engines out of gear and let the other engine steer the boat in reverse. But having two engines would have cost more money, and if there was one thing Earl was good at, it was finding a way not to spend money.
I’d heard about the job from an ad. Earl said he needed a captain, and I needed the hours. The more hours you work, the bigger the craft you can work. A 40-footer wasn’t an enormous boat, so it was within my area of expertise. I just wasn’t sure why he needed me in the first place.
“Out there, you’re the captain,” Earl said.
“All right,” I said.
“But it’s my boat, and I like to drive it,” he added.
I thought to ask why he wanted to hire someone, at $100 a day, when he was planning on doing a lot of the work himself. And then I remembered that I liked money and wanted the job.
“You’re the boss,” I said. Hell, if he wanted to hire me to watch him steer the boat, shop for groceries, and make himself martinis, I’d allow that, too.
That’s just how Earl liked things. He liked being in control. And, for the most part, it worked out fine. He hired me as the captain, another crewman as a mate, and we helped operate the boat when he’d go on fishing trips. Even if he did things differently than I would have.
We fished in the Gulf of Mexico. We’d take his boat out, fuel up in Key West, and then head to Isla Mujeres (the Island of Women), an island in the Caribbean about ten miles off the coast of Cancun. On one trip, Earl had three friends with him and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
“Not too bad out here,” Earl said.
“These guys are sure getting their money’s worth,” he said.
I chuckled. After all, this wasn’t a charter, this was a boat full of Earl’s buddies. But even though I thought it had to have been a joke, he wasn’t laughing.
“You’re serious? You’re charging your friends for this trip?”
“Hey, just a little something to pay for the beer and gas,” he replied.
That was Earl—one of the cheapest guys I ever met. Earl could squeeze a nickel until the buffalo shit. Who made their own friends pay for a fishing vacation? Earl had made his money from storage facilities he owned, but being good with dollars and cents didn’t make him good with common sense.
His friends weren’t the only ones who had to suffer because of his cheapness. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t drive out of a parking space if there was still time left on the meter. He’d rather waste fifteen minutes sitting in that parked car if it meant that he’d get what he paid for. His tightness with the dollar almost stranded us in the middle of the ocean.
We’d been motoring down south, when all of the sudden, the engine (an 892 Detroit) died. Then the generator died. Was it because we’d ventured into the Bermuda Triangle, where the rules of time and space ceased to function? No, it was because Earl wouldn’t replace the $12 fuel filters until they were so clogged with gunk that they’d trigger an automatic shutdown. And this wasn’t something that, by any means, had to happen. Earl knew from the moment we started the engines that the pressure on the fuel gauges was in the red. But, to his mind, why change them in port, just because they were redlining? The only way to know for sure if he’d gotten full use out of those filters was if he pushed them past the point of failure. Then he’d know that he’d gotten his money’s worth.
The problem was, that’s a pretty dangerous way to live your life. If you start the engines in port and see that the fuel filters are almost completely blocked, then you can kill power, change the filters, and restart. Now, if you still have a problem, like if the new filters are defective, or if there’s some other problem that’s causing the redlining, then you have all the resources of the port to fix it. But if it happens out in the middle of nowhere? Then you are, potentially, screwed, drifting aimlessly miles away from civilization with no way to get back save for getting out and pushing. And for what? To ensure another two hours of life on a $12 filter?
“Filter’s gone,” Earl said.
“Yep,” I replied. “You saw that it was redlining on the pressure gauges since we left the dock.”
“You want to change it?”
“I wanted to change the filters before we left. You’re the one said we had to keep it going. Why don’t you change the filters?”
When our engine died, we were between Cuba and the Yucatán Peninsula. That was a little too close to Castro’s backyard for my comfort. A couple of friendly Cuban sailors come up on us, and the next thing you know, our boat is part of Fidel’s fishing fleet. No thank you.
Earl could tell I was in no mood to screw around, so he changed his own filters.
And it wasn’t just the cheapness. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the cheapness was part of some bigger problem with Earl, part of a pattern where the most seemingly insignificant things would set him off. He just had a sensitivity for stuff that wouldn’t even register for most people. The man had a temper.
One day, we were doing our usual, fishing for sailfish, which are similar to swordfish, and can look really nice above your mantel, clocking in at about 10 feet long and maybe 200 pounds. But the thing is, the sailfish didn’t like to come out early in the day. In the early morning, the only fish in the water were bonito, or boneheads as we’d call them. Now, bonito are a perfectly good fish and taste kind of like skipjack tuna. But we’d come for sailfish, and maybe some mahi-mahi, and not bonito.
And that would have been fine if we just fished for the sailfish when we knew that they’d be out biting, around ten in the morning or later. They wouldn’t come out until the boneheads left. But Earl, he had it in his mind that the early bird gets the worm, so he wanted to start fishing for them just after the sun came up, at about seven in the morning. In his mind, time was money, and waiting around until ten was just wasting both. So, we got our hooks out, and we were getting a lot of boneheads. And it was just driving Earl crazy. After pulling up his sixth bonehead, Earl just lost it and took out his knife and hacked that thing to pieces, right in front of everyone. I was on the fly bridge, looking down on him as he did it, and it was pretty horrible to behold. The bonehead weighed in at 10 to 12 pounds, and Earl just attacked it like Jack the Ripper, hacking it maybe fifteen times until there wasn’t anything left of it but a handful of gristle and a boat covered in blood.
He’s sharp, I said to myself. Reminds me of an old joke: what’s the difference between God and a captain? God doesn’t think he’s a captain. And Earl may have just been an owner, but the way he was hacking at that fish, you had to wonder if he thought he was Poseidon himself.
It wasn’t like that one fish was the reason we weren’t catching any sailfish. And it wasn’t personal, like that fish had set out to ruin Earl’s day. It wasn’t even a big deal! All we had to do was wait a few hours until the boneheads were gone, and we’d start catching the sailfish. But that just wasn’t acceptable for Earl, who seemed to think that every hour we waited was some kind of personal loss he could never get back. The man just didn’t understand how to optimize his time.
This isn’t to say it was all bad. One of the most amazing experiences of my life happened while I was working on Earl’s boat near Isla Mujeres. I was able to witness an event called a green flash. Sometimes, when the atmospheric conditions are perfect, and the sun goes down below the horizon, you’ll see a bright explosion of green light. It only lasts for a second or two, and is so rare, that some people think it’s a myth, but it’s an actual optical phenomenon that has been witnessed and recorded and happens when the atmosphere causes the sun’s light to separate out into different colors.
I was right there on Earl’s boat when it happened, standing next to the mate looking out toward the horizon to watch the sun set. And then it was like an enormous firework erupted, splashing the world in green. Both the mate and I saw it, though at first we couldn’t believe it. It happened that day, it happened the next day, and I’ve never seen it since, though I’m grateful to have been able to see it at all.
It was beautiful, but it didn’t last very long, and that’s a pretty good way to sum up my time working with Earl. We had a good run, and I worked with him doing fishing trips for about a year, but then we ran into an explosion of cheapness and ego.
We had just come back from a monthlong fishing trip. For a variety of reasons, the trip ended a bit earlier than trips like that usually do, at about noon. We were cleaning things up and squaring things away on the boat, and I was mentally preparing to go home and get a little rest. That’s when Earl came up to me and made his wishes known.
He looked at his watch, then looked at me, kind of shrugged, and said, “You can finish out the day by doing some yardwork.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. I was paid $100 a day, but I wasn’t the one who decided to pack it in at noon. If Earl and his buddies wanted to call it a day and have lunch at the pier, that was their business, but my day was done.
“I’m paying you by the day. A standard day is eight hours. We’ve only been working for four hours. If you want to get paid in full, then come over to my house and pull some weeds and rip out some stumps.”
“Earl, I’m a captain. I’m an expert at operating a boat, and that’s what you’re paying me for. You want a landscaper, you hire a landscaper.”
“That ain’t right. I pay you for the day, I expect a day’s work.”
“You think the barber gives discounts for guys going bald? A haircut’s a haircut. And when you tie this boat to the pier, the haircut’s over. Pay the barber.”
“I expect a full day of work.”
“You want to do some more fishing, we can do that. You want a spin around the harbor, that’s fine. But I’m not going to cut your grass or wash your truck or do your laundry or paint your damn house. I’m a captain, and you pay me to do a captain’s job. You want a foot massage, that’s not the business I’m in.”
“If you’re not going to work, then I don’t have to pay you.”
“Fine. You pay me for what I’ve done, and I’m out of here.”
A month of sailing with the guy, and we stop working together because he insisted on giving me $3,050 instead of $3,100. But you don’t get to stick your tongue down a girl’s throat just because you bought her a drink at the bar, and I don’t have to wash your damn windows just because you hired me to captain your boat.
There was other work out there.
The work wasn’t always glamorous. When you’re trying to get every job you can to get more hours, to get more experience, to get more money, those jobs will never be glamorous. Those jobs were work. A means to an end. If you want to be captain of a mega-yacht eventually, and the only job you will take is the captain of a mega-yacht, then you’ll never be captain of anything. You’ve got to pay your dues.
Part of that meant a lot of day sails, working on these 70-foot head boats, with forty-five to fifty tourists fishing cheek-to-jowl. I’d hand every man, woman, and child a fishing rod, and once we started to drift, I’d spend the rest of the day cutting bait for chum and baiting people’s rods, and then taking fish off the hook and cleaning what they caught. It was a bit monotonous, but at the same time, I was out on the water on a nice day, catching fish, and what’s not to like? It wasn’t particularly challenging as a feat of seamanship, or as a feat of angling, but it was a job. It was mostly working for tips, and it paid enough to get me to the next job.
Sometimes, things sounded a bit more alluring than they turned out to be. For a time, I did work on a casino boat. At that point, I had a captain’s license, but I was only hired as the first officer. To increase the size of my license, I had to work bigger boats. When lots of people hear “casino,” they get visions of James Bond or Ocean’s Eleven and imagine that it’s all tuxedos and beautiful people and international intrigue, but the reality is something significantly less glamorous.
These were 200-foot boats, converted mud boats from oil rigs, that carried a crew of twelve. It was a geographical and financial cruise to nowhere.
Our mission was to load up the boat with as many gamers as we could possibly carry, then head out into international waters, where it was no longer illegal to gamble. So, if you were in a city that didn’t permit games of chance, you’d just have to go nine miles out to be beyond the boundary of state legal jurisdictions. That’s in the Gulf of Mexico. On the Atlantic side, it’s only three miles. Not sure why. Once past that line, the fun began.
Though it wasn’t actually that exciting, from a sailor’s perspective. There’s nothing difficult about heading out to sea, reaching the nine-mile limit, and then doing long, lazy circles for four hours. You just try to keep the boat comfortable and let the players have their fun.
And there was fun to be had. The boat had multiple decks, and in addition to craps, blackjack, roulette, and slot machines, there was a restaurant (good but not great—about the same quality as a Golden Corral, with prime rib thinner than the soles of my shoes) and a theater where the non-gamers could catch a live band or a stand-up comic or vaudeville act or a magic act. The good news was the show was included in the $40 price of admission. The bad news was that the crème de la crème of entertainers don’t gravitate toward working casinos (water-based or otherwise). The people who were on that boat were there to gamble, and the only reason they’d be visiting the theater was because they’d busted, they’d come as the date for someone who was still on the gaming floor, or they needed someplace to try to recover from motion sickness. It was not the most receptive crowd for warmed-over jokes about airline peanuts or ventriloquists getting into arguments with their puppets. The entertainment was basically a way for people who had lost $500 at the tables to convince themselves that they were getting their money’s worth.
Some people think that such excursions might risk the threat of a bad element, the temptation for thieves or heist artists to try to make a quick score. But being on a boat really cuts into the incentive for any kind of crazy action. There was security all over the ship, dozens of uniformed guards in addition to tons of video cameras, and if someone wanted to try to steal from a player, where were they going to run to? They couldn’t just grab a rack of chips and race out the front door. They couldn’t raid the counting room and catch a taxi to the airport. No, high-stakes thievery wasn’t something that plagued the casino ships. The biggest threat was seasickness.
The general rule for the captain of a casino ship was: take your time so you can make some money. The odds always favored the house, and with nowhere to really go, the players were forced to grapple with the pure statistics of most casino games until they’d bust. No casino boat was built off the backs of winning players. As a captain, the safety of your passengers and crew is paramount, but at the same time, there’s a lot of incentive to stay out as long as possible. For a lot of casino boats, the captain is paid a flat salary plus some percentage of the profits for the night. So even if it’s a gale-force hurricane, a captain’s going to want to stay out as long as possible.
Inevitably, people got sick. The ship could carry about four hundred people comfortably, but once we left the dock, a lot of them started feeling pretty uncomfortable. There were times when half the passengers would be throwing up. I’d hand out pillows and blankets to people, watch them curl up miserable in a corner and try not to think about the waves.
Part of the reason that passengers felt so lousy was because the boat itself wasn’t the best vessel for the job. The owners who bought it wanted something cheap that could carry a lot of people, and they outfitted the interior nicely, but it was old, it didn’t ride well, and it belched smoke all over the place. Designed to carry mud for the oil rigs, it had a flat bottom with a shallow draft that didn’t take waves particularly well. It didn’t have stabilizers, so it would rock and roll from one side to the other pretty easily. Nobody thought to upgrade the ride, because it was the kind of business where you didn’t make money by spending money. It wasn’t unsafe, but it wasn’t a pleasure cruise. No one was taking pictures of the boat so they could proudly declare, “Look what I went out on, Mom!” I thought it was hilarious, but few people shared my sick sense of humor.
One of the enduring images I had of working those casino boats was one woman so obsessed with the one-arm bandits, the slot machines, that, despite the fact that the motion of the ship was clearly making her nauseated, she just wouldn’t give up. She had a couple of coin buckets with her, like a lot of the veteran players tended to do, with one earmarked for coins that would go into the machine, and another, empty bucket, to catch all the winnings she was anticipating. One arm cradled around the bucket of change, the other, slightly more developed and muscular arm, pulling down the lever. But this woman added a third bucket—for puking into. She was so sick that she kept retching, but she was so determined that she wouldn’t go lie down. Quarter in, pull the lever, puke, wipe mouth, quarter in, pull the lever, etc.
We eventually had to intercede. In part, this was because she was clearly having a rough time with motion sickness and needed a break. But it was also because it was pretty disruptive to the rest of the guests, this woman holding a bucket of sick and waving it around. It created a perimeter of empty machines around her, and part of our job was to ensure that there were as few unmanned slot machines on board as possible. We finally had a word with her about taking a break, but she didn’t go quietly into that good night. She put up a bit of a stink before finally agreeing to lie down. After a pretty short interval, she’d sneak away and be right at it again.
On the one hand, it seemed a little sad, that she was clearly miserable from seasickness and still unwilling to call it quits. On the other hand, she must have gotten some thrill out of it, a thrill that was at least a little greater than the misery of her body, because she kept plugging away. Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, I suppose. It certainly wasn’t the captain’s job to legislate morality. And, looking at it dispassionately, this was a casino cruise. Gambling was specifically what most of them had come for in the first place, so who was I to say, “Lady, maybe gambling isn’t in your best interests.” On that boat, gambling was in everyone’s best interests.
If you interrupted those diehards, you were taking your life into your own hands. I’d seen those veteran slot-pullers leave their seat for a quick bathroom break only to discover their machine—their machine—had been commandeered by some clueless interloper. He didn’t understand that that particular slot machine was temporarily the private property of an eighty-year-old blue tip from Boca Raton. That newbie didn’t realize that this woman had plugged $18 worth of quarters into that machine, and it was therefore on the verge of paying out. The money in that machine was her money. If that man didn’t quit the premises and do so quick, he was in for a bigger hurt than any cat-o-nine-tails could dole out.
My job was in the wheelhouse, driving the boat. The captain would often oversee leaving the dock and bringing it back to the pier, but he’d rarely drive once we were under way. It was a voyage to nowhere, so there wasn’t a ton of cutting-edge navigation and seamanship one would have to display. The biggest challenge at sea was making sure that we didn’t run into a fishing boat or a shrimping boat, which were lit up like Christmas trees anyway, so we’d watch our radars and scopes and make sure we didn’t plow through someone’s gunwale.
It was reliable work, but I was looking for something more interesting. Dodging shrimp boats for six hours a day is like dying a slow, painful, agonizing death, one six-hour shift at a time. That, compounded with the fact that the captain and I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye, made me think my future might be elsewhere.
He was a necessary evil, as far as I was concerned. He did his job, and I did mine, but we weren’t Butch and Sundance. He needed me because I was dependable, I showed up on time, and I did my job well in an area where the labor pool was severely challenged. I needed him to hire me in the first place. But there were some personality problems between us, most notably that he was having an affair with the chief stewardess. Not smart as a boss, and not smart as a married man. And not something I approved of. But hey, I didn’t have to like him, and we didn’t hang out together—his business, not mine. But especially in a small town where everyone knew each other, taking a dump where you eat is probably not the brightest move you could make.
It was bad enough that he was doing it, but he made it worse by trying to pull me into his shit sandwich. His wife had suspicions, and it didn’t take a genius for those suspicions to take root. Hell, when the boat’s supposed to dock at midnight, and the captain doesn’t come home until four in the morning smelling like the chief stew’s perfume, you can’t always try to blame it on paperwork and traffic. Eventually, he could see that wasn’t working anymore, so he tried to get me to cover for him in front of his wife.
“Lee, do me a favor. When my wife comes on board, just tell her you were with me when we had to work late last week.”
“Which day?”
“Every day.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, angry.
“Hey, just because you’ve compromised your morals doesn’t mean I have to compromise mine. Hell, you stand a better chance of seeing God twice than that happening. I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag, but I’m sure as hell not going to lie for you.”
“You’re really putting me in a tough position here.”
“You put yourself there. If you don’t want to worry about the lie, then don’t do the deed. But if she asks when we pull into the dock, I’m going to tell her.”
That’s what put an end to my chances of becoming captain on that boat. The man in the chair wasn’t going to recommend me, and I wasn’t going to stick around getting bored out of my gourd with no future. Time to look for something new. I lost track of that guy the moment my feet left the gangplank.
We had decided to move to Fort Lauderdale, where there was more opportunity for me and my newfound career. Fort Lauderdale, the yachting capital of the world. That’s where I found a great owner. Though, when looking for something interesting, you have to beware what you wish for.
There are lots of things that can make a great owner, but it’s not really rocket science. Being a good owner is like being any kind of good boss. You pay your staff on time. You understand that you’re paying for someone’s time, you’re not renting a person. You don’t have to treat people like dogs in order for them to understand that you’re an authority figure. You pay people for their skills and expertise, and don’t second-guess them when they utilize those skills and expertise. If you possess those basic qualities, then you stand to make a good owner.
Pauly was a good owner. He was a real estate guy, a deal maker from Atlanta who owned a lot of property and a few bars and restaurants. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would leave any stone unturned. Even when he owned a building and had every square foot of livable or workable space rented out or sold, he’d find ways to make a dollar or two on top of that. Literally, he would rent out space on his rooftops to cell towers. He owned a couple of private planes, and he made his home in Atlanta, where he lived in a huge mansion. Despite his money, he’d treat people like family.
This isn’t to say that Pauly was a pushover. I worked hard when I was the captain of his boat, the Pauly D. No matter what model or size of boat he’d get, or what he’d upgrade to, it always remained the Pauly D. The man knew his brand, I suppose. That first boat was a 55-foot Sea Ray. Pretty well-built boat for what it was. I went into it with a bit of a negative bias against that particular model, since I’d seen a lot of Sea Rays cruising up and down the intercoastal, throwing a wall of water that would just rock the hell out of anybody nearby. Those boats were typically owner operated, which meant idiots were out there driving big boats when they had no business doing it. I used to say, “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother that owned a Sea Ray.” It just seemed like kind of a douche magnet. But there I was—running one.
When Pauly first hired me, I was a bit worried that it was going to be a job with a very limited longevity. In those early days, he loved to party. When I started working for him on that Sea Ray (before he upgraded to a 65-foot Intermarine, a nice fast boat, pretty roomy, though not particularly attractive), I wondered if I should be getting hazard pay. Pauly was just the kind of guy who didn’t spend a lot of time idling in neutral.
Pauly really liked to get a head start on the weekend. He’d come in on a Thursday—that was ladies’ night. He’d pick up some friends, sometimes up to forty people, which included more than a few beautiful women, and he’d be up until four in the morning, traveling from Fort Lauderdale to their docks. He’d bring on a bunch of his friends, then motor over to the Diplomat Hotel, dock the boat, and invite a ton of people from the hotel over to come join the party. Once, he’d brought in so many people that the boat literally started listing to one side at the dock. I had to kick some people off, just so the boat would level out. That would be a tough one to put on the résumé—being the captain of a boat that sunk while tied to the dock!
Then we’d go out for a cruise, and it would be a challenge. The music would be blaring, there’d be tons of people milling around, and parties were something that worked better at night, so I’d be driving blind, moving around in pitch black, running the boat entirely by instruments, just trying to get everyone from point A to point B safely.
On more than one occasion, I’d be there with Pauly, watching the sun come up. Four hours later, he’d have some rest while I took the boat back to our docks in Lauderdale, and then he’d be raring to do it all over again. So, we’d head down to Miami Beach and party on South Beach until the wee small hours of the morning. Pauly would head to his cabin to recharge, and I’d take the boat back to our dock. Saturday night, we’d head over to Riverwalk, have some fun. Sunday was a recovery day. We’d just take a nice easy cruise, since everyone was pretty spent from burning the candle at both ends.
Come Monday, Pauly would jump on his jet and head back to Atlanta. You might think that this would be my time to finally recover a bit myself. That would be my weekend, right? But there just wasn’t any time, because I only had basically Tuesday and Wednesday to get the boat cleaned up and our stores replenished before Pauly came back down on Thursday to start it up again. Week after week, like clockwork! For months on end. Finally, after about three months of this, of nonstop partying followed by nonstop prep followed by more partying, I had to have a come-to-Jesus talk.
“Pauly, I have to talk to you about something.”
“What’s up?”
“We can’t keep running this hard. We go like madmen for four days straight, then I take two days to clean and fix everything that gets pulled apart, then we start it all over again.”
“But everyone seems to be having a good time,” he said.
“No one’s saying they’re not. But the crew just can’t take it. You’re burning them out. Pretty soon, we’re going to start losing people. Good people. They’ll sign on somewhere else for better hours and the same pay.”
“So, what do you think I should do? Pay them more?”
“It’s not about the money. But it’s like lifting. You can’t move a quarter ton of iron every day and do the same thing the next day. You need to put a rest day in there. And the same goes for the crew. We can do this, but it needs to be every other week, at the most.”
“It’s my boat.”
“And I’m just trying to tell you how to make your boat work the best way.”
He agreed. He didn’t fire me or tell me, “My way or the highway.” He knew I wasn’t soft, knew I wasn’t asking him just to make a power play. He treated me like a professional, and we scaled things back.
This isn’t to say that he couldn’t fly off the handle every now and then.
Once, we were in the middle of one of our recovery cycles. Me and the stew were loading up supplies, and Pauly arrived early and wanted to take a shower on the boat. But we hadn’t finished replenishing our stores, and one of the things we were low on was fresh water for the showers and the taps. We were close to being dry as a bone, which was one of the reasons we’d brought the party to a close.
He rang me up on my cell. “Lee, I’m in the middle of my shower, but there’s no more water!”
“Relax, Pauly. Nothing’s broken. We just need to refill the water tanks. I’ll be back to the docks in five minutes and get everything squared away. Just relax.”
Relaxing just wasn’t the way Pauly liked to have fun. He had to be in constant motion, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing.
Filling up the boat’s water supplies wasn’t a complicated operation. You just had to go to the dock, grab the hose, stick it in the fill tank, and fill it up. But since Pauly had showed up early, and unannounced, I had no idea that I’d need to have the boat ready for him. He didn’t want to wait for me to finish the supply run and figured that he’d be able to fill those water tanks by himself. He was right that he knew where the hose was to the fresh water, and he knew the water tanks were in the back of the boat. But he wasn’t quite so on-the-mark about where to fill it. He found an opening about the right size for a hose, opened it up, the hose fit in pretty well, and he started filling it. But the thing is, there’s lots of things that go into a boat using a hose.
He stuck the hose in and filled the not-quite-empty fuel tanks full of water.
Not a good move.
The boat wasn’t made with some kind of automatic shutoff when water gets pumped into the fuel tanks. So, when he started pumping, the water just filled up and eventually overflowed.
When I came back, I knew immediately that something was wrong.
“What’s that fuel smell?” I asked the stew. She shook her head. It didn’t take long to find the answer.
There was fuel all over the decks, just a huge mess. I found Pauly pretty quick, and we diagnosed the problem in two seconds.
“When can we head out?” he asked.
“Pauly, this boat ain’t going anywhere. I got to get the deck cleaned up, I got to pump out all the fuel tanks and get them polished. Then we have to get it refueled.”
“How long’s that going to take? An hour?”
“Pauly, your lack of patience just killed the entire weekend. Don’t stay here. Get a hotel room in town. It’s going to take a while to clean up this mess.”
Pauly had fucked up. But he knew that he had fucked up. The lost fuel and the cleanup ended up costing him about $8,000. And that’s not $8,000 he was spending on a nice watch or a couple of slick suits or a first-class flight to Rome. This was an $8,000 fuckup that didn’t buy any fun.
But the thing was, he didn’t fly off the handle. He didn’t blame me for not anticipating that he’d arrive early or blow his stack that I hadn’t taught him how to fill up the water tanks properly. He didn’t fire me because he’d cost himself 8K on my watch. He knew he’d screwed up, he didn’t blame anybody else, and he moved on. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but he was a stand-up guy. Sure, he made some extra work for all of us, but that’s the nature of the beast. Everyone makes mistakes, but very few will own them. Got to give credit where it’s due.
Later, Pauly added a 90-foot Johnson to his fleet. Guys who buy yachts only move up in size. They almost never make a lateral move or downsize. If they’re going to make a change, it’s going to be bigger. We had the boat shipped over to California. I had to go out and pick it up, then we had to break it in after we had it shipped to Florida from Ensenada, Mexico. People think that getting something new is the best way to get something, but there’s a lot of advantage in acquiring something used. If a boat, or a house, or anything of value, has been used for a few years, you know it’s not going to crap out on you. If you get something new, there’s a host of problems that could come up right out of the gate. For a boat, you have to break in the engine, you have to make sure you don’t have any leaks, you have to check that all the electrical components work, all the plumbing works. Hell, you have to make sure the humidity doesn’t make wooden doors swell so they don’t close right. Lots can go wrong during that break-in period.
And it did.
The manufacturer had installed the wrong-sized O-rings on the oil plugs for the mains. The O-rings are pretty small, but on a boat that size, for the amount of money it cost, it was an important little detail. We were coming back from Key West, and it just blew the O-ring out, the thing just went, and we lost all the oil in the port main with the starboard one probably right behind it. The engine room was just covered in oil. The engine room, which had been brand new, pristine, spotless, so clean they should have offered it as a color at True Value, New Engine Room White, was just coated in black, nasty-ass diesel oil from top to bottom.
When something like that happens on a boat, you don’t just say, “Shit, something’s wrong, let’s hope it works itself out.” As soon as we lost the port main, the computers shut down the engine in under a second. Alarms started blaring, making it sound like World War III had been declared. I saw that the port engine was dead, so I went to the engine room to get an assessment, saw the whole area was totally wasted. Each main took 55 gallons of oil. Imagine 55 gallons of oil exploding in a 20-by-20-foot room.
I knew how much oil had escaped the portside main, so the first thing I did was shut down our bilges so we didn’t pump all the oil overboard. Then I had to satisfy the Coast Guard that we didn’t create an ecological disaster.
The Coast Guard is pretty concerned about any potential oil spills around the Keys. Damage those reefs, and they’ll put you so far away, they’ll have to pipe sunshine to your ass. And even though it’s never a picnic when you have to call the Coast Guard, things go a lot smoother when you call as soon as a problem happens, rather than wait for them to find you. Then they’re in a bad mood, and you’re the reason for it.
There’s a lot you have to ascertain. What killed our engine? We had to make sure we didn’t hit anything, didn’t have any hull breaches, weren’t taking on any water, that we weren’t pumping any oil out, that everything was good on the starboard engine. Then I had to give the bad news to the owner.
“Pauly, we may have just puked the main.”
“Shit,” he said. It was just one word, but it was entirely on the money. Those mains were about 250K a piece. And that’s plucking one off the factory floor. Doesn’t count parts, labor, and installation. And installation of those things was a bitch. You had to cut a hole into the side of the ship just to get one of those in there. Then you had to patch the hole, which meant ripping out all the piping, all the plumbing, all the electrical, and then putting it all back in there. Even if the manufacturer was going to have to eat that cost for their fuckup, it was going to be a hefty bill, and it was going to require a hell of a lot of work to un-fuck.
One main was down, though the generators were still running, so we had A/C and lights. The port engine was just dead, so we had to try to make way on the starboard engine, getting us maybe 7 or 8 knots. You couldn’t even go into the engine room, with all the oil still dripping down from the ceiling.
“How long will it take to get back?” Pauly asked.
“At this speed? You might want to get a sandwich from the galley, since it’s going to be a while.”
“But it doesn’t have to.”
Pauly, like most of us, didn’t want to hang around while we limped into port for repairs. But, unlike most of us, he has a big checkbook and a lot of pull. I called a friend to come pick him and his guests up, and he got to zip out of there and back home.
That left me alone with the crew, going upriver on one main, which wasn’t easy. The river was very narrow, with a lot of intricate passageways, the kind of place you really want to have all your power and maneuverability. Anything over a hundred feet I’d prefer to get towed up with tugs. Under a hundred, I’d drive it myself. It wasn’t as though you couldn’t drive the larger yachts up the river, it was out of concern for the recreational boaters if they didn’t have their radios on, or weren’t paying attention, they’d miss the fact that you were bringing a monster up the river and they had better stay clear. With tugs, they have more control over your boat and they also assume responsibility for it. If I screw up, the owner pays; if the tugs make a mistake, they pay. On big boats, it just makes sense to have that cheap insurance against the what-ifs. At any rate we made it in, eventually.
We arrived late, about nine hours after we’d been expected. It was pitch black, and I had to dock the boat with just one engine and a bow thruster, and there were a lot of moving parts with that operation, but we managed to put her where she needed to go.
It took about three months in the yard to get everything cleaned and fixed. They actually tried to blame the engine failure on me. When the manufacturer’s rep showed up, he went right to the starboard engine and pulled the dipstick out. He looked at it and then over to me and said, “Were both mains carrying the same amount of oil?” I said sure, within a couple of quarts I suppose. He then asked me why I would overfill the engines with oil and that was probably what caused the oil pressure to rise and blow the plug out of the port engine. Therefore, they were under no obligation to pay for anything. I told him the starboard engine wasn’t overfull. Bullshit it’s not, just look on the dipstick, it’s way over the full mark, he says. Which it was, but you need to take a closer look, I told him. Wipe the oil off the stick and tell me what you see. He did, and then he got this sheepish look on his face because he knew he opened his mouth before he put his brain in gear. Clearly stamped on the dipstick were the instructions to only check the oil when the engine was running and hot. That was his “oh shit” moment. I fired it up, let it get warm, and had him pull the stick again. Whaddya know, right on the money.
When they found out it was the O-ring that was defective and the wrong size, they did a recall on the engine. We were the first ones to have this happen. The manufacturer did a recall of the motors, replacing the O-rings on them all. They also checked our port main for damage, found none, and totally cleaned and repainted the engine room, just like new.
It was an adventure, and a trial, but we made it back. There are good owners and bad owners, good captains and bad ones. I learned something from each of them, no matter their experience or temperament. That’s what I was there for. I took those jobs so I could get the hours to move on to bigger and better boats, but I also took them to learn a thing or two. And whether it was storming outside or smooth as glass, dealing with owners that were drunk or sober as a Mormon in church on Christmas Day, there was always something new to learn.
And then, if you’re at it long enough, and you work your ass off, pay attention, sprinkle in some luck, soon you could be the one that’s dispensing the lessons. That doesn’t mean you stop learning, though. That never stops. Unless you’re one of those captains who thinks he’s God.