A different world

Our navigator points out how the world of the sailor has become entirely disconnected from that of the rest of us.

The present Atlantic hurricane season has been fairly active, as was predicted.  There have been several tropical storms hitting the Gulf Coast, and you may have heard of one that passed the US offshore but came ashore at Newfoundland.  You probably did not see that these were accompanied by others that stayed out to sea, and so did not make the news; plus more that formed southwest of Mexico and traveled west without threatening Hawaii.  At one point the number of active tropical storms at sea caused our navigator some serious worry; he has friends out there.

Luckily for mariners, weather prediction has become a fairly reliable process, at least in the short term.  Almost always ships get enough warning of the approach of a storm that they can avoid it, or at least avoid the worst parts of it.  It may be more expensive in terms of time and fuel, but far preferable to facing Mother Nature in a bad mood.

Another type of “storm” has been much harder to deal with.  Of course I refer to the pandemic that presently affects almost everyone.  In some ways it has hit sailors particularly hard.

Naively, one would hardly expect it.  Merchant sailors are among the most socially distanced workers in the world, spending months at a time isolated among a group of maybe two dozen people.  Surely a crewman could take a properly disinfected taxi ride from his home in the port to his ship, make the voyage, and return?  (Naval ships are quite another matter, with crews of hundreds to thousands, and a much more irregular schedule.)

But deep-sea sailors no longer live in the ports their ships sail from.  A ship will change crew at, say, Singapore or Hong Kong or Houston, swapping out a Filipino deck gang and a Ukrainian Chief Mate for a new set.  It turns out to be cheaper to pay the international air fare for a lower-paid crew than to use sailors from the countries where the ships normally call.

There are, however, regulations about the citizenship of a ship’s crew.  In order for a ship to fly the US flag, all the officers and most of the rest must be US citizens.  And there are cargoes and tasks that, by law, must be hauled by US-flag ships.

But not many.  If you live in a port city and look closely at the flags and declared home ports of the ships coming in, you’ll find that few are American.  Indeed, many will be registered in places that they’ve never visited and will never see: flags of convenience.

Hence the impact of the virus on seamen.  Port cities have imposed drastic regulations on travel, or shut it down entirely; crew changes that were scheduled for months ago still haven’t happened; we’ve seen estimates of mariners stranded aboard after their contracts ended that run into the hundreds of thousands.  Some people haven’t been able to go to work since the pandemic started; these people haven’t been able to go home.

And these are the people who bring you almost everything you have.