Many brave hearts are stuck on board their merchant ships

Q. How often do I think about the merchant marine biz?

A.  Unless a container ship gets stuck sideways in the Suez canal, or I spot a cargo ship in Boston harbor, like, NEVER.

And while I haven't been thinking about them, a lot of them have, thanks to the pandemic, been having a pretty awful time of it.

Roughly 400,000 seafarers were stranded on ships around the globe at the peak of the “crew-change crisis” in late 2020, according to the International Maritime Organization; now, about 200,000 are stuck. Some have been at sea for as long as 20 months, though 11 months is the maximum time allowed by the ILO Maritime Labour Convention.

 The situation threatens to grow more dire in the coming months, industry experts say, as mariners desperately try to access coronavirus vaccines, their situation complicated by a web of complex logistics and workplaces often situated thousands of miles offshore.

World leaders have called the crew-change crisis a humanitarian emergency. It is also a cautionary tale about essential but oft-ignored global supply chains. Industry officials told The Washington Post there’s been an increase in severe injuries and mental health concerns — including suicide at sea — as mariners have yearned to leave their ships and return home. (Source: Washington Post)

Working on a cargo ship is a tough, demanding, sometimes dangerous and almost always thankless (as in invisible) task.

Yet they're the ones making sure that the sneakers, gizmos, electronics, and COVID masks that we're ordering on Amazon - with the expectation that they'll arrive the next day - get to the ports from where they're hauled around the country to Amazon warehouses. And then ferried last mile by delivery van to our doorsteps.

And lest we forget. It's not just consumer end-products that make up the maritime cargo. It's raw materials, parts, partially-finished goods. Everything that makes up the supply chain.

There aren't a ton of Americans plying the merchant marine trade. Out of 1.7 million worldwide merchant mariners, as far as I can find, there are only about 70,000 Americans. Still, it's a reasonably okay job. The pay's better than burger-flipping - or working in an Amazon warehouse.

But we're talking rough conditions, and, with the pandemic, conditions that are potentially sky-high dangerous. We know how viruses super-spread around cruise ships. Same goes for merchant ships. The wrong employee walks up the gangplank, and it can be covid city. Thus the caution when it comes to keeping them on their ships and not working around on shore leave. 

For the life of me, I can't see why the government isn't doing everything they can to vaccinate anyone and everyone stuck on a ship in an American port. 

It's not just physical, mental, and financial (many mariners can't join their ships, so are going without pay) health that's being impacted.

Maintaining licenses and certifications is essential in the maritime industry, and this hinges on in-person instruction and hands-on experience with equipment. But the International Maritime Organization has been offering waivers during the pandemic as maritime academies have halted classroom instruction and workers have not been able to leave their ships. Without proper certification, workers are unable to get new jobs.

Poor bastards!

At least there's not a war on. During World War II, the U.S. Merchant Marine suffered higher casualty rates than any of the uniformed services. U-Boats were after those convoys crossing the Atlantic, and they managed to sink an awful lot of vessels. Meaning that there were many brave hearts asleep in the deep.  

That was then. This is now. And some of the shipping companies are trying to make things a little better for the men (and women) at sea: bonus pay, goodies on board, improved Internet access so families can zoom. But it's all starting to wear pretty thin.

Honestly, after reading this piece it's amazing to me that our supply chains (not to mention our consumer, Amazon-ordering citizens with their vast, wide-open maws) haven't suffered all that greatly during the pandemic. So caps off to the seafarers out there.

Meanwhile, I couldn't help smiling at an anecdote in the article about one ship captain. Brian Mossman claims that he's read Moby Dick nearly 200 times. 

...he revisits the Melville classic nearly every voyage, because each time reveals something new about the people who take to the sea: people like him and the two dozen merchant mariners on his crew.

I guess this makes up for the fact that I wasn't able to make my way through it even once. (I have seen the 1950's movie version starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. And I did read the Classic Comic. Twice. Once in grammar school for fun. Once in college when I couldn't make it through the book. I might have read the Cliff Notes, too.) Call me Ishmael, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have made it as a seafaring woman. I can't even stand the thought of a cruise during which I could eat and drink to my not-so-brave heart's content, and lounge around my cabin reading novels other than Moby Dick. Imagine having to work, and not being allowed off the ship for fear of covid. Sheesh...