by Captain Lee
“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.
“It’s gorgeous,” I agreed.
“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 h
ome 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 ma
chine, 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.
