Running Against the Tide

by Captain Lee

  “Maybe a bit too colorful. I’m thinking of making a change.”

  “But you can’t fire Duane! He’s a genius in the galley! Just one of the most talented people I’ve ever met.”

  “He sure as hell isn’t the smartest.”

  “Please, just give him a chance to show you what he can do. He’s an artist. Like Michelangelo!”

  “Well, if Michelangelo had given the same kind of lip to the Pope, he would have been looking for a new gig.”

  “I know he’s an acquired taste, but trust me, he’s worth it. You’ve got to keep him on.”

  “He’ll have to be reprimanded if he gets out of line.”

  “Of course! Absolutely! Just a genius! Like Picasso with food!”

  I hung up and shook my head. New owners. Maybe this chef got Harry laid back in the day. I would have really enjoyed giving Duane his walking papers, but I was willing to give him another chance. That said, he was sure as hell going to be on a short leash.

  It relieved me a bit to see him standing at the gangway, as I’d instructed. He was dressed in a uniform, a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “What do you think, Cap?” he asked, giving me a twirl. “Does this uniform make me look beautiful?”

  “It makes you look slightly professional, which is a big upgrade,” I said.

  “What do you want me to do? Press the flesh? Network with some billionaires?”

  “See that patch of dock?” I asked, pointing to the area directly in front of the gangway.

  “Yep.”

  “Stand on it. Make sure it doesn’t fly up out of here.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Make sure nobody gets on the boat unless they’re with a broker.” Superyachts are cool. They’re big, luxurious, opulent, and people want to see them. But if we permitted every Tom, Dick, and Harry onto the boat that wanted to take a gander but couldn’t possibly pony up the 200K needed to book a charter, the crew would be busy all day showing off the boat to gawkers. Giving interested tourists a chance to look around was like giving a Ferrari test drive to any curious Joe with a driver’s license. It was a good way to tie up the salesman and to risk damage to the asset. So, all I needed Duane to do was stand there and turn away the looky-loos.

  “Uh, okay. How long’s that going to be? It’s pretty hot,” he said, looking up at the sun, shading his hungover eyeballs with his hand, even with the shades there for protection. It was October, but October in Fort Lauderdale feels like July on Venus. It must have been 93 degrees with 95 percent humidity.

  I turned my back on him and marched to the bridge. “Until I get tired,” I said. Maybe I couldn’t fire him, but I could work his hungover ass until he bled to death through those bloodshot eyeballs of his. Hey, he had his chance to make a good first impression, but I guess there’s no dumbass vaccine.

  After a couple hours, I went down to check on him.

  “That section of dock fly off yet?” I asked.

  “Right where you left it,” Duane replied.

  “Then you’re doing a great job.”

  “Skipper, what do you think about giving me a breather? I’ve been here all day, and I’m melting out here.”

  It was true—the uniform shirt he was wearing was absolutely sweated through.

  “That shirt looks pretty much done in,” I said.

  “That’s for shit sure,” Duane replied. “Glad you finally noticed.”

  Not the attitude adjustment that I’d been hoping for.

  “Why don’t you go find Jeff, the guy who loaned you the uniform.”

  “Got it. You want him to take the next shift?”

  “Nope. I want you to get a clean uniform from him. That one’s looking rough, and he’s got a spare.”

  “Shouldn’t this be his job?” he asked.

  “Taking care of this boat is his job. Showing me you actually deserve to be here is your job.”

  Two hours later, he’d sweated through the new shirt, too. I made him stand there all day.

  Unfortunately, I don’t think he received the message I was sending.

  The next big stop on our calendar was the Antigua Charter Yacht Show. It’s one of the crown jewels of the charter world. Everyone who’s anyone goes there. The docks were full of high-end yachts, but none of them was for sale—it was only for owners showing their boats for charter work. We were one of 135 boats in Antigua hoping to do some business.

  And it was big business. A good yacht with a top-flight crew could easily fetch $200,000 for a single week of chartered cruising. If you found a month of steady work, you could make almost a million bucks. Brokers would visit the yachts to see which ones they wanted to promote. They were looking for mint-condition hardware and a crew who understood that “service industry” required a certain amount of service. In addition to competence in your job, those brokers were looking for good attitudes. Pleases and thank-yous. Service with a smile.

  Not really ideal for someone like Duane.

  The guy was aggressively rude. With everybody: captain, crew, clients, anyone he’d interact with. It’s like he thought that there was a finite amount of respect in the world, and any time he gave it to someone, it would mean less for him, so he acted accordingly.

  After our first day in Antigua, I asked our charter broker, Chloe, how things looked for bookings for the season.

  “What’s with your chef?” she asked.

  “His problem is that he’s kind of an asshole,” I said.

  “No kidding.”

  “What did he say to you?” I asked.

  “It’s like he went out of his way to try to turn me off. I asked him what his favorite kind of food to cook was, and he said, ‘Delicious food, obviously.’ I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I’m trying to find ways to keep him away from everyone but the chickens in the walk-in.”

  “Good strategy. It’s going to be tough if he keeps this up. If he puts out that kind of attitude with clients, it’s going to cut into business. Does he realize that charters pay for his salary?”

  “I don’t know if he realizes the earth is round.”

  “Can’t replace him?” she asked.

  “I think he’s secretly married to one of the owners. Or has some kind of incriminating film on him. One of the guys loves him more than sliced bread.”

  “I’ll try to work around him.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  The thing with Duane was, even if you tried to avoid him, he still had a way of making his presence felt.

  Every night, he liked to party. In the mornings, I’d be heading out at six thirty for my run, and that’s when he’d be coming back to the boat, three sheets to the wind. And he wasn’t coming back with the rest of the crew after a night of carousing. He’d be coming back alone after a night of doing something by himself. Nobody wanted to work with the guy, and nobody wanted to party with him, either.

  One night in St. Thomas, Duane must have really redlined it, because he came back from his nightly debauch early for him, before sunrise. He went to his quarters, not too steadily, found his roommate’s bunk, and puked all over it. Not content to confine his repulsiveness to one place, he then dragged his ass to the galley and puked all over that, too. Job well done, he managed to work his way back to his room, ignored the bed full of sick he’d delivered, and passed out on his bunk, which seemed to be the only thing onboard ship he hadn’t vomited on.

  I worried, or maybe even hoped, that his roommate would see what he’d done and kick his ass. God knows he’d be entitled. But his roommate, Nate, was Duane’s polar opposite. He was from Honduras, and what he made on the boat in a month was more than most of his countrymen made in a year, so he was determined to keep the drama to a minimum and just work his ass off to make some bank. He held his nose, cleaned up the room, and somehow managed not to cave in his roommate’s skull with a pipe wrench.

  I wasn’t quite so forgiving.

  While Duane slept and Nate cl
eaned up his mess for him, I got on the horn with Harry, the owner so devoted to Duane’s case, telling him what happened.

  “The guy has got to go. He’s a total disgrace.”

  “I know, I know, he’s got some rough edges, but I’m telling you, he’s worth it.”

  “I could replace him in under a day, and morale would improve dramatically.” And the food might have gotten better, too. It wasn’t like Duane was incompetent in the galley, but he wasn’t extraordinary. He wasn’t making up for his deficits as a human being with equal but opposite contributions at meal service. If he wasn’t a great cook, and he wasn’t a good crewmate, then why bend over backward for him?

  “The guy is irreplaceable,” Harry said. “Trust me.”

  It just made no sense. The only way Harry’s plea was logical was if he was D. B. Cooper and Duane knew his true identity. Duane was like a bad flu that just hung around forever. Made you feel lousy, and just didn’t let up.

  “I think he has to go,” I said.

  “Let me talk to him. I’ll make sure he doesn’t do it again.”

  “You mean when he sobers up enough to be able to talk?” I asked.

  “Yes, absolutely. Let me talk to him, and I’ll explain it in a way that he can understand how important it is that he straighten up and fly right.”

  I gritted my teeth, but there wasn’t much more I could do. The owner didn’t want me to fire the guy, and unless I threatened to walk off the job, I didn’t see how I could apply any additional leverage.

  Owners can be a frisky bunch. When you’ve got enough money to buy a boat that requires a crew to work it, you’ve got more money than most people will ever see in a lifetime. And when you’re that wealthy, there’s a chance that you can lose some perspective.

  Like not knowing how much a gallon of milk costs.

  Or not understanding why people complain about lines and service at the airports, because you have your own Gulfstream jet.

  Or blasting away with a shotgun in the middle of the ocean.

  One time, I was working as the first mate on a delivery of a Huckins motor yacht, a nice 80-footer with an open bridge. It was the owner, the captain, the chef, and me, delivering the boat to Key West. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, except the owner, Porter.

  Porter was the kind of guy who seemed to think the world should cater to his every whim. It was the eighties, and cell phones weren’t particularly common, but I had one. The reception was poor, and the thing was the size of a cinder block, but it connected me to the rest of the world, for a hefty per-minute fee. Porter seemed to think it was a pretty fun little gadget, and after checking on the boat’s systems, I noticed him just sitting there, chatting on my phone, completely oblivious to the $3-a-minute charges he was racking up.

  “Emergency call?” I asked.

  “Just shooting the shit,” he said, returning to his conversation.

  He didn’t seem to take the hint. And I would have loved to have ripped that phone out of his hands. He didn’t ask permission to use it, and he didn’t apologize for taking it without asking. He just talked for about a half hour before I finally suggested he wrap it up.

  He hung up, angrily, and acted totally indignant that I’d want to exert some power over one of the things I’d bought and paid for. Because to Porter, I was bought and paid for. To his way of thinking, it was his money that allowed me to buy that phone in the first place and he had as much right to it as I did.

  “You got calls to make? Because I thought you were supposed to be working,” he said.

  “It’s about two hundred dollars per hour to talk on that phone.”

  “It’s my boat.” He said it like that was the answer to every question, the trump card that won every trick. I’m the owner, I’m the one with the big wallet, I’m entitled to whatever I want. Because he paid my salary it meant I owed him. If that meant he wanted to use my phone whenever he wanted, then that was just the cost of being on his payroll. Rules weren’t big on his priority list.

  Even when it was less about rules, and more about common sense.

  Every day, Porter would sit down and play gin rummy with the chef. I imagine the chef liked playing cards with him about as much as I liked letting him use my phone. But it was hard to say no, even if it meant the chef would be playing cards right through lunch. All the while, Porter would be there, looking at his cards and drinking rum and Cokes. By two in the afternoon, he was totally plastered.

  Maybe that’s a good thing. Not good that he was drunk, but him being drunk was a hell of a lot better explanation for what he did next than him being stone cold sober and just thinking it was a good idea.

  We were in Hawk Channel when we sailed through a school of flying fish. When spooked, those fish can really put on a show. They were only 8 to 10 inches long, but they still really caught the eye when they popped out of the water and glided 150 feet through the air. For me, the chef, and the captain, this was something beautiful and dynamic to appreciate.

  Not Porter. For him, this was something he wanted to destroy.

  He went down below and came up with a long box. Porter reached in that mystery box, pulled out a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, and just started blasting away at that school of flying fish like he was shooting skeet.

  “Damn, like shooting fish in a barrel, right? Right?” He just thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

  What the hell was he thinking? The fish weren’t giving us any trouble, so why start opening up on them with the shotgun? It wasn’t part of some innovative fishing technique, since he’d just let the perforated bodies of the fish sink to the bottom of the ocean.

  That wasn’t the most objectionable part of it. He could have killed us! We were bobbing and weaving with the waves, the wind was blowing, and Porter was drunk as all hell. He could have lost his concentration or his balance or both and put a chest full of shot into one of the three of us. Or he could have missed us and blasted a hole in the boat or ignited some fuel. There was a long list of horrible things he could have done by taking out that shotgun, and none of them was balanced out by any kind of benefit. He just wanted to cause some destruction, and so he did.

  Maybe I should have seen the writing on the wall when I first interviewed for the job. I came in with another captain I knew, both of us talking to the owner about his open positions, and we both got offers. My captain friend had a bit more experience than I did, and he declined the offer. Not sure if it was the money or something Porter said during the interview, or something he didn’t say, or just something that my friend was able to sniff out, but he didn’t want to get on that boat. Usually, the smartest way to live through a catastrophe is just to avoid it altogether.

  I wondered why Porter even had the shotgun on board to begin with. Most places, when you arrived at port, you had to declare if you have any kind of weapons on board. If so, you had to give them up until you left. Or, you could just declare nothing, but if you got caught, then you risked losing the boat to impound or permanent seizure, and you risked getting the captain thrown in jail. It wouldn’t matter if the captain wasn’t the one with the gun or that the owner on board was the one calling the shots. What mattered, in terms of the law, was that if something illegal happened onboard the boat, it was the captain’s responsibility. If the third officer is on watch when an oil tanker runs aground, the captain goes to jail. A mate drags the anchor through a protected coral reef in Belize? The captain goes to jail. So not only could Porter have killed one or all of us, but he could have got the captain some jail time. He just didn’t give a shit.

  That was just something I couldn’t put up with. The guy was angry, drunk, and maybe crazy, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near him when things really went south. I told the captain that I was done with it, and to drop me off at the next port.

  “You serious?” he asked.

  “As a heart attack,” I said.

  “I’d try to talk you out of it, but you’re just making too much sense
.”

  I got off on Islamorada, just southwest of Key Largo. I called my wife and told her she was going to have to drive south pretty much until she ran out of road to pick me up. I was just glad the check they gave me at the start of the cruise still cleared.

  It was the first and only time I’d ever jumped ship. It’s important that a man hold to his promises, but once the shotguns come out, those commitments are null and void. I’m not running the risk of taking a shotgun blast to the face just because the owner thinks it’s hilarious to kill fish with a firearm. An owner who doesn’t know what he’s doing can be one of the most dangerous things on a boat.

  An owner with a shotgun can kill everyone on board. An owner who hires the wrong people and won’t listen to professionals can sure as hell kill morale.

  In some ways, the US Virgin Islands (USVI) isn’t a lot different from Antigua. Beautiful blue water, clear skies, warm weather, umbrellas in the drinks. There were a lot of constants in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, another one of the constants was Duane acting like a complete head case. It was like he thought he was some kind of misunderstood artist, an enfant terrible, like he thought he was to cooking what Pollock was to painting or what Marlon Brando was to acting or what John McEnroe was to tennis, except that this guy’s food would never get through the first round of Wimbledon.

  He just loved rubbing people the wrong way. He’d run into a deckhand in the middle of a passageway, and there was no way he was going to let him go by.

  “Step aside, flunky,” he said.

  “What was that?”

  “You heard me, cupcake. Make way for the big dog.”

  Then he pushed by. The arrogance on the guy was through the roof, even though there was nothing to justify it. How he didn’t get his ass beat on a regular basis when he went out is beyond me. Usually, everyone just avoided him, and he became a pariah. Sometimes, though, there was just no getting out of his way.

  It was the end of a charter, and as is tradition at the end of a voyage, the clients had invited the crew out for dinner and a couple of drinks. Everyone, including Duane, who wasn’t typically all that social, agreed. He may not have been the friendliest crewmate, but he was never going to pass on free drinks, even if “a couple” wasn’t really a quantity of alcohol he had any kind of familiarity with. He was the kind of guy who wouldn’t stop drinking until he saw the bottom of the bottle.