What kind of people work on the water

People sometimes ask me about what kind of people go to sea.

Of course, what I give for an answer depends on who is asking because even if I tell the truth there are a lot of peole that do not believe it. Then again, more often than not people do not believe the truth anyway. I suppose that truth is stranger than fiction and people tend not to believe strange things.

Anyway, the people around me are a complete hash. They come from all walks of life and enter this business from all sorts of places.

Educationally, they range from having master's degrees all the way to not even finishing grammar school.

Backgrounds vary to extremes and reasons for working on the water are the same. They vary from individual to individual, too.

The merchant marine is sometimes thought of as being a place that harbors criminals. Years ago that may have had a little truth to it, but these days that really isn't true. For one thing, the mandatory drug testing programs have done a fairly good job of keeping the druggies out of the business and for another the Coast Guard does a pretty good job of investigating backgrounds. In the computer age there really is little chance of hiding out here.

WHile some of us may have criminal backgrounds behind us, and I know of a couple, it generally is not of a very serious nature. Again, the computer age has made it easy for law enforcement types to keep an eye on things.

There is really no rhyme nor reason to why a person would make a career on the water.

One thing about it, though, it's pretty performance oriented and all of the shoreside crap makes little difference out here. I've seen tug skippers that have little or no formal education nestle a 250,000 barrel oil barge alongside a dock so gently it wouldn't break an egg. I've seen King's Pointers do the same thing.

I've also seen the inverse, too where the guy with all the paper credentials in the world can't even seem to anchor a barge and tug rig in a mill pond without a major three ring circus taking pace. Guys like this, no matter what their background, get weeded out pretty fast. There's just plain too much money at stake here to permit a Captain Crunch to tear things up.

One of the things about this job is that even though you may not have a lot of formal education you can still go places in this industry. There are more than one person out here that started as an ordinary seaman mopping decks and cleaning heads that have worked their way up to running the entire boat.

While it is still true today, recent rule changes have begun to make this scenario a little more difficult because the requierments for licensing are changing. Still, though, if a man wants to work at it he can come out here and go as far as his brains and drive will take him.

This business attracts a somewhat odd breed, and the one thing I seem to see out here is that most of the guys simply do not like the idea of living a 9-5 life on the beach.

I guess the truth of the matter as to what kind of person is out here and why is that there are about as many reasons as they are people. Still, we're an odd breed.




my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/