I remember the time a deckhand dropped a sledgehammer over the side by mistake. Of course, he did what any self respecting deckhand would to to cover his ass. He found a sledgehammer on the dock, took it aboard, slapped a coat of paint on it and put it in the hammer rack like he was supposed to.
Any mechanic that's been in the business more than a week and returns to a job to find a sledgehammer missing knows exactly what happened and he returns to the tool room and simply grabs another one. He tells his port engineer who simply orders another one. Case closed. No headaches, reprimand, paperwork or other stupidity and a simple closure of a non-event.
Except this time the mechanic that got a sledgehammer cumshawed from him was fresh out of school and had only been there for three days and hadn't figured out all the rules yet. He complained to a certain port captain that happened to be walking by.
Immediately after I had met this particular port captain I asked someone else that knew him what he was like. "He rattles steel balls and looks for strawberries," he replied.
The steel balls and strawberries comment proved to be spot on when he came up to me and started grilling me about the dopey missing sledge hammer. Of course I knew nothing.
I was questioned several times over the following two days and decided that enough. I went into the office and told him in front of my port captain that he'd never get to the bottom of it and the best thing he could do was to let it sit a while and let me keep my ears open. I pointed out that every single seagoing person was probably going to keep mum about it.
He took the bait and I saw MY port captain roll his eyes and supress a smirk because he knew I was up to something.
STRAIGHT back to the boat I went and grabbed a pad of paper and a 19 cent Bic pen and wrote the Honolulu Police dapartment. In the letter I explained the case of the missing sledge hammer and asked how I could get in touch with the famous Hawaiian detective Charlie Chan. When I was done I instantly sent it out with the office's outgoing mail. The next day my relief showed and I went home.
Just before I got back Honolulu gave me an answer. My guess is that a pair of pissed off robbery detectives were on someone's $hitlist and were given my letter and told to send me an answer.
The letter said that the Honolulu Police Department had been looking for Charlie since 1958 for back child support after he skipped town and left that poor, tiny little woman with all of those children. They explained it is thought he was in Rio but could not be extradited.
I burned off several copies of the letter and when I returned to work left one on a couple of port captan's desks and went to work.
About a week later my port captain boarded us with a big grin on his face and said that the angry new port captain tried to get me in trouble and sent a copy of it up the chain.
The problem with that was that the higher it went the funnier it got. He caught hell for wasting so much time over a $10 sledge hammer. When it was over and done with the new port captain steered well clear of me for quite a while.
Later I ran into one of the big bosses and he asked me if I had been able to locate Charlie and we laughed.
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