Running Against the Tide

by Captain Lee

  “Lee, I want you to show my friend Fredrick a great time. Whatever he wants, he gets,” Doug said.

  “Can do,” I said.

  Doug was willing to let them have the crème de la crème, and that was fine with me, since I expected it to be a fairly easygoing sail. Sure, it was two weeks, and the twelve guests would stretch us to full capacity. But Fredrick and his bride, Deborah, were around fifty years old, so I wasn’t anticipating twenty-four-hour party people.

  Guess you’re only as old as you feel.

  Fredrick and Deborah married in a traditional Scottish ceremony, with kilts and everything. He seemed a perfectly good sort, the kind of guy who liked to have a good time, but I severely underestimated how much a man in his fifties might like to party. When we got to Boston, I would find out just how much I underestimated the situation.

  It was all action all the time. From the moment Doug passed the command to Fredrick, it was nonstop boogie. We took a tour of New England, every day a new city. I had to assume that Fredrick must have been a hell of a financial advisor, because if his vacationing was anything like his work, he did not take days off.

  And such was his right. He had command of the boat, could do with it as he pleased. But it would have made life a little easier for me and the crew if he were to take a couple of days at Cape Cod (or Portland or Block Island or Newport or Martha’s Vineyard), then the crew could take a little bit of a breather. But when every day meant striking out for a new town, it required sixteen-hour days for everyone on board.

  At least everyone was eating well. Restaurants often have the “family meal” they offer as a perk to the staff, a time before the main dining times when the chefs use (often) leftover or unused ingredients to make a meal everyone can enjoy. For that kind of meal, it’s typically not the best-of-the-best in terms of what’s available. But on this boat? Everyone ate like kings. If Fredrick and Deborah were getting surf and turf, then the crew got surf and turf. If Fredrick and his guests got black truffle risotto, then so did the rest of us.

  In part, this was because Doug was a good owner who liked to treat his people well. And in part, this was because it was just logistically impractical to keep two separate menus—one for the guests and one for the crew.

  It was delicious, and Chris did a good job. But I have to confess, living high on the hog can get old. Don’t get me wrong—I love steak and lobster, but after a dozen meals or so, I find myself longing for some comfort food: some mac and cheese, some chili, some burgers and dogs. Variety is the spice of life.

  Fredrick, however, didn’t have the same appetites that I did. His tastes ran to the more indulgent, and he never seemed to get tired of it. This was not limited to lobster and filet mignon. He also showed a great love of Cristal champagne. The way Fredrick and his guests were downing that bubbly, you’d have thought he was an investor in the company. And that stuff isn’t cheap. Sure, Doug made it clear that Fredrick was to get anything he wanted, but I’d check in with him pretty regularly, just to let him know how the trip was going. As the honeymoon continued, and proceeded at the same breakneck pace, he started getting a little concerned.

  A bottle of Cristal usually goes for at least a couple hundred per, and we were getting the good stuff, tipping the scales at about $1,200 per bottle. We’d buy it by the case, and each case would be six bottles, so every case was over $7,000 in champagne. When Doug saw how much of it was getting consumed, he started feeling a little less hospitable.

  “You sure Freddy’s drinking all that champagne? Any chance someone is just billing me for the Cristal and blowing the money on personalized Patriots jerseys or something? Or does Freddy really have a problem?”

  I didn’t think Doug was serious. Though, for some people on a boat, even one with internet and a gym and a SatPhone, liquor could be a tempting way to entertain and escape. Sometimes, a chef would buy something for himself and try to pass it off as ship’s stores. If you found a bottle of vodka behind the corn flakes, you knew you had a problem.

  Those kinds of problems could really spiral out of control. I was once going on a quick run to pick up a boat, called the Sea Ghost, a nice 135-foot Fed ship. This particular vessel had been owned by Nicolas Cage, but Nic had run afoul of the IRS, and in order to pay the taxman’s bill, he’d been forced to liquidate some islands and castles and boats. Motivated seller. It was my job to report to Connecticut and captain the boat over to Florida, where I’d deliver it to the new owner.

  We were just operating on a skeleton crew since we didn’t plan on doing any fancy sightseeing or chartering. Just pick up the boat, move it from A to B, drop off the keys, and mission accomplished. Unfortunately, even though it was a skeleton crew, one of the bones on that skeleton had at least a few fractures in it.

  One of the engineers, Dick, was a drunk. And I don’t mean that he liked to have a few too many glasses of wine with dinner, I mean that he’d pour himself a tumbler full of vodka and then pass out with the drink still in his hand. Just because vodka looks clear as water doesn’t mean I didn’t figure out his little game. My first clue, of course, was that he was unconscious during the day. Always a red flag. Another red flag was his eyeballs, almost literally. His eyes looked like a road map of the Chicago business Loop. He really saw the world through rose-colored eyeballs.

  He wasn’t my hire, and I couldn’t fire him. It wasn’t my job to staff the boat, just to get it where the owner wanted it. The problem was, I couldn’t have Dick stand watches, so everyone just had to take on more work and more responsibility. Instead of him standing a four-hour watch, everyone else would just have to add an hour to his own watch.

  I tried to make some kind of dent in the damage that Dick could do by policing up his cabin. The room looked like a recycling plant. Just bottles everywhere. I don’t think the guy even had any clothes, just the ones he was wearing on his back, because all the available space he lived in was devoted to vodka bottles in various stages of emptiness. The guy didn’t have a drinking problem—the only problem he had was when he couldn’t find a drink.

  The only job that I’d allow him to perform was to top off the oil and swap over the generators. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it was still important, because if he screwed up, he could overfill the tanks, and then we’d end up trailing oil and have to deal with the Coast Guard on our ass. As a safeguard against him confusing the oil tanks with his mouth and the oil canisters with vodka and just dumping it all in, I always ordered the first mate to accompany him and make sure he was doing it properly. That’s why I usually had a drinking rule on the boat: eight hours from bottle to throttle.

  At first, I tried to talk to Dick, explain to him that he was endangering the boat and the crew and that he was destroying his own life, but he just wouldn’t have it. He was one of those drunks that would just talk over everyone. He was a man immune to logic, impervious to argument, blind to reason.

  “Dick, you have to get a hold of—”

  “I do my job, and my job is to be an engineer, and not to be the head of the damn Women’s Christian Temperance Movement.”

  “I’m not saying that you need to have some kind of religious—”

  “You can’t tell me how to live my life! I can eat what I want and drink what I want and read what I want and watch whatever shows I want! Because this is America! In case you forgot!”

  “I know what country we’re—”

  “It’s not Russia! You can’t be Big Brother! When I was . . .”

  And so it went. I couldn’t get him to stop drinking, so I put a babysitter on him and reduced the scope of the damage he could do. Four days later, we slipped into the docks, and I handed over the keys.

  The manager and broker took possession of the boat, and I took the opportunity to tell them about Dick.

  “I know, I know,” the broker said. “He’s always like that.”

  They knew?! They knew and they hadn’t fired him? It was like they were begging for a catastrophic accident or a catastrophic la
wsuit. But hey—not my circus, not my monkeys. We went from point A to point B, everyone lived, and it was a good crossing, so I just had to chalk it up as a W.

  This is a long way of saying that hitting the bottle could be a big problem, either from the perspective of having someone on a boat you couldn’t trust or from the perspective of keeping someone as your financial consultant that you couldn’t trust. But from what I saw, our bridegroom Freddy wasn’t a drunk—just a guy who liked to party.

  “I guess Freddy just really takes his leisure time seriously,” I said.

  “Maybe see if you can taper things down a bit,” Doug suggested. Doug wasn’t cheap, but there are limits to how far you can push a host’s generosity before you have to reclassify that as taking advantage of someone.

  Maybe that was just the kind of guy that Freddy was. That’s what I’d started calling him. Because Fredrick is a cultured, sophisticated professional, and Freddy is an aging adolescent mooch. Maybe that’s how he became a successful financial guy in the first place—he was never going to set limits for himself if no one was going to impose them on him. He certainly seemed comfortable asking for the moon.

  After we’d cruised around New England a bit, Freddy decided he didn’t want to miss fireworks on the Fourth of July. That sounded reasonable, so I asked him where he might want to check things out.

  “Let’s motor back into Boston Harbor. They put on a good show.”

  There’s no denying that. Still, it was kind of a big ask. Thousands of boats flood those harbors to watch the fireworks show, and it was a real bitch to navigate through it. Boats weren’t allowed to drop an anchor, so we would have to be constantly running the engine and trying to maneuver so we didn’t drift too far or run into any of the other ten thousand boats.

  But what really held me back was that we just displaced too much water, and it was too shallow right up close to the fireworks. We couldn’t get to where he wanted us to be, and Freddy didn’t like that too much. But I wasn’t going to beach the boat just so he could get a better view of the fireworks. It pissed him off, but it probably saved us a lot of ill will from the rest of the boating world. We were a big boat at 120 feet, and I was glad that I wouldn’t have to suffer with the guilt of dozens of other smaller boats hating our guts because we were this huge yacht blocking their view. We were able to snuggle up right next to the docks at Yacht Haven Grande, and Freddy still got a great show, so he had nothing to complain about, even if he sure gave it the ol’ college try.

  Finally, we’d made it through the honeymoon. We’d visited four states, consumed a vineyard’s worth of champagne, a cove’s worth of lobster, and shown the newlyweds a pretty good time. And how did they thank us for our hospitality and our sixteen-hour days?

  They stiffed us.

  As Freddy was headed off the boat, he said, “Let me just go get the car and pull it around.” Well, maybe there was something magic about that particular gangplank, because Freddy must have fallen into the same twilight zone that Luke had also disappeared into. Never saw either of those guys ever again. He got his car, Deborah ran to catch up, and then he was gone.

  This was a first for me. While I’d received some shitty tips in my time, I’d never been given the total bagel before. Now, a trip like this would normally cost a client, as a high-end charter, about 250K. And while Doug wasn’t billing Freddy for the trip, I’d assumed that he understood that tipping was customary. If someone provides an open bar at a party, you still tip the bartenders. If you use a gift certificate at a restaurant, you still tip the servers. And even if you didn’t pay for the charter, we were still hoping for a standard gratuity, which in the yachting game was somewhere between 10 percent to 20 percent. But we didn’t get the $50,000 at the high end, or even the $25,000 bare minimum. And that 10 percent tip is something you’d get even if you really screwed up, serving PB&Js for dinner, not knowing how to get to certain ports, that kind of thing. And this guy was getting first-class everything! Turns out that bare minimum can be a lot more bare than 10 percent, and we got the total shaft. Thanks for the cruise—now you can all go fuck yourselves.

  Some might argue that Freddy shouldn’t have had to pay the gratuity because he was gifted the cruise in the first place and, therefore, shouldn’t have to pay anything. But if you can’t tip seven people who busted their asses 24/7 without a single day off for two weeks, then you just have to say “no” to that cruise. It’s a gift you can’t afford.

  It made me want to run down that road to try to warn Freddy’s new bride that she might want to rethink this partnership. If he was going to show as much generosity to her as he did to my crew, it might end up being a short marriage. But, hey—he did wear a kilt to the wedding, so maybe she had some inkling of what she might be getting into.

  That was a pretty bracing splash of cold water.

  Maybe we weren’t the only beneficiaries of Freddy’s lack of social skills, because Doug stopped working with him not too long after that. At least he got a nice cruise as his severance.

  Still, all’s well that ends well. And once we finished the honeymoon charter, we finally got confirmation on what happened to our missing chef. I got a call from Matty, the guy who had referred him in the first place.

  “I found your boy,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Luke. The disappearing chef.”

  “Aliens get him?” I asked.

  “He said he had to run away. Said everyone was making life miserable for him and he couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “Couldn’t take it? He was only on the boat for less than a day! And half of that was sleeping.”

  “Yeah, it’s obviously bullshit, but a man needs to protect his reputation. He ended up taking another job for more dough.”

  “If his reputation was what he was worried about,” I said, “then he shouldn’t have walked off my boat without a word of explanation. Guy gets a wild hair up his butt crossways, not much I can do about that. Total lack of integrity. He definitely let his mouth write a check his ass couldn’t cash. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll never work with him again,” I said. And I’m not shy about telling the truth about someone like that when I’m asked.

  “You and me both,” Matty said.

  Not the best cruise I ever had. A chef disappeared, the clients stiffed us on the tip, and my boss saw all his Cristal go down the toilet. But sometimes, that was just the way of things in the glamorous world of yachting. You can have sunny days that still kill you. You can work alongside talented people who still make you want to throw them through the window. It may be an interesting line of work, but a lot of the time, it’s still work.

  And thank God for it.

  Chapter 8

  You Have One Shot at Integrity

  There’s a lot of money in the yachting world, and with that money comes a lot of opportunities for abuse. Sometimes, that’s just how the rules are made, and you have to live by them, even if you don’t agree with them. Sometimes, you make a stand against it because that’s your code. That’s how I live my life. You only have one shot at integrity, and you can’t blow it all just to make a couple of dollars. Some do, as is their right, but those aren’t the kind of guys I choose to work with. Just because someone’s not going to miss a dollar bill, or a stack of them, doesn’t mean it’s okay to steal. The line is clear to me, but I can see how some people find it, to their eye, a bit more fuzzy.

  I didn’t come from a lot of money. My first car was a 1955 Chevy Bel Air that I bought for $50 when it was twelve years old. You could see through the floorboards because the body was all rusted out, and it belched smoke like it was on fire, but it got me to my job at the bakery where I was glad to earn 75 cents an hour. A four-hour shift would get me a shirt soaked with sweat and a nice $3 for the day. So that car, even though it was a piece of shit, still cost me seventeen days of scrubbing caramelized sugar off some seriously pre-Teflon pans. In the most basic and honest definition of the word, I earned the money for that car. Ba
ck in the good old days, when things weren’t always good.

  It’s with that perspective that I would marvel at what some people might label the excessive, or opulent, or pampered lives of some of the people in the yachting world. To afford a yacht in the first place, you had to have some deep pockets. With pockets that deep, some people are just never going to fish around in them for a lost quarter.

  One time in Baltimore, I got a call from an owner who wanted a suckling pig for his dinner on New Year’s Eve. No problem—it was a specialty request, but not tremendously exotic. But wait—there’s more. It couldn’t just be any suckling pig, it had to be the same kind that they’d had for the first time visiting New Zealand. Only a New Zealand suckling pig would do. And this request came down the pike on December 30.

  “Can do,” I said.

  I’d have to find a way to make it happen, but who’s got that number in their Rolodex? The contact for acquiring delicious pigs in New Zealand? That’s just the nature of the beast. I’d figure it out, but it was going to cost. Specialty requests cost money. Rush requests cost extra. And guarantees for all the above just add to the tally. But it was important for the man to get what he wanted, and it was my job to do exactly that. My thinking generally is that very difficult jobs I do immediately, and the impossible jobs just take a little extra thought. Especially when working for people that live by the motto “No is never a word I want to hear.”

  Now, if you buy a suckling pig from a butcher or specialty purveyor, you could probably get one on the low end for about $150. If you go for something a bit higher in quality, the price jumps to maybe $400. But if you want something of high quality, and you want it from the other side of the world, and you want it fast, the costs are going to go up. How much did we end up paying to get what the owner wanted?