Monday, 16th July 2012
I feel strange today. I don’t know if that’s already the pretaste of saying goodbye soon or the fact that I seem to have only just realized why work life here is so hard.
Until now, I always thought this was my dream life, but somehow that dream burst yesterday. At least, that’s how it feels today.
For some people, it’s hard to be separated from their family and friends for a month or two or three, but for me, the worst thing (I assume) would be that there are no weekends. No matter how you feel, no matter what the weather is like, everyone here is at their workplace at 8 a.m. every day. There’s no sleeping in, no “Oh no, I’ll go to the office later today,” no weekend to look forward to on Monday.
On the contrary: when you arrive at a port, you often have to maneuver, sometimes in the middle of the night, without any compensation. During the day, the normal work still has to be done; after all, the engine has to keep running.
Sunday afternoons are mostly free, but when you have to cope with a six-hour time difference twice in three weeks, as we do, it’s clear how this free time is often spent: sleeping.
Not that this isn’t bad enough, but the general trend toward “faster, bigger, further” naturally doesn’t stop at the naval sector. Just yesterday, I learned that CMG has plans to increase the length of time spent at sea from 2-3 months at a time to 5 months.
In my opinion, this will not increase productivity, but at most increase the number of mistakes, burnout cases and the suicide rate. And the more mistakes are being made, the more work and stress is generated for the whole crew. I can only hope that these plans will not be implemented.
We are already noticing part of this trend today: since we cast off at 11 a.m. yesterday, we had been racing towards Dunkirk because we were expected there at 12 noon. I don’t know exactly how long this route usually takes, but I assume that it could easily take six hours longer.
The arrival in Dunkirk was nevertheless spectacular and one of the highlights of the trip: first, the pilot arrived by helicopter—which was very cool—and then the Fort St. Louis was rotated a full 180° for the docking maneuver, and that in a harbor basin that is not much wider than our ship is long. It was really very impressive.
Luckily, for once my battery wasn’t dead, so I could take lots of photos 🙂
Some of them:
The rest of the day was rather uneventful: I finished reading my book (“Das Erwachen”), went cycling, and played a bit of Spider Solitaire.
In general, I felt a bit silly because we were in the harbor and I had no intention of leaving the ship. However, the weather wasn’t great (cold, windy, wet) and I hadn’t heard that Dunkirk was particularly worth seeing. So there were plenty of reasons to stay away from the wind and weather 😉
At 6:30 p.m., I went down to the crew smoking room and beat Pasquale, Jerome, and Gaél for the second time ever. However, I think the guys are all incredibly tired at the moment.
In the meantime, some new crew members have arrived: a quiet Romanian(?) cadet (?), who is apparently on his last internship – at least he was allowed to take on some task during the complicated maneuvers. So I assume that he knows a thing or two about the business 😉
Oh, and the new chief mechanic, Marie, has also arrived. She was in the crew smoking room and entertained the guys with her stories.
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