After Balboa hacked his way across the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 he
encountered an ocean that he named the South Sea (Mar del Sur). Sailing around
Cape Horn a few years later Ferdinand Magellan found himself in the same body of
water. He named it Pacific, meaning peaceful. Balboa was perhaps confused and
Magellan was flat out wrong, but the name stuck.During the fall of 1964 the Pacific anything but peaceful. We had periods of pretty heavy weather. Old Michelson's bow would rise up on the swells then crash downward as the stern came up. The ship shuddered as the propeller rose out of its normal element, turning in the air. This pitching, rather than rolling, continued as we were headed into the swells. Michelson used to roll a lot in the Atlantic but I had never experienced these long period swells of the Pacific. The old ship groaned, shook and shuddered its way toward Japan.
A
map of steamship distances between cities shows that San Francisco is (or was)
4536 great circle nautical miles from Yokohama. In 1964 Michelson was headed for
the Yokosuka naval base, close enough. Steaming along at a leisurely 15 knots
(we could do 17) this should have been about a 12 1/2 day trip, but I seem to
recall that it took two full weeks, non stop. The weather probably slowed us
down. Michelson had taken on a west coast merchant marine operating crew. The Norwegians from Brooklyn were gone, replaced by Filipinos from California. The cuisine changed. The canned Norge fiskeboller wound up in a Brooklyn dumpster. Instead, pork adobo, chicken afritada and pancit turned up on the menu at least twice a week.
Our new Philippine galley crew could cook quite well but were lousy sailors. Heavy weather meant seasick, out of action cooks. They tied their pots down to the range top to keep them in place. The chief steward's daily menu changed from the customary three entree choices to soup and sandwiches only for both lunch and dinner.
As a form of self prescribed mental therapy, and to keep off the booze, I learned the various seaman's knots and how to splice line. A length of line with an eye splice could be used to secure a trash can in rough weather. The eye was sized to go around the can's circumfrence. Chairs and the oceanographer's stool needed to be secured as well as stuff in my stateroom. Thus, all movable objects came to have pigtails, ready to be secured as needed.
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| An Eye Splice |
A roommate carried his mental therapy to a higher level. He acquired a big roll of nylon line and two hardwood spreader bars, which he turned into a large, marvelous hammock. This turned out be be much too big for our stateroom so he had to rig it on deck, weather permitting, or perhaps down in number four hold.
