Boredom at Sea

Boredom causes people to make bad decisions or get careless. This is to be avoided at sea.

I identified two distinct types of boredom while aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Jarvis. Benign and Malignant.

Either can be fatal, but malignant boredom is an insidious beast that causes people to deliberately do things no sane person would. For instance, we had a non-rate (non-skilled labor) assigned to laundry detail for a month. This wasn't punishment. Non-rates rotated through a variety of jobs for a month at a time. He wasn't happy doing laundry and to get out of it, he stuck his hand in the pants press, slammed it shut and hit the steam.

The results looked like boiled chicken with some skin missing and you could see his tendons moving as he wiggled his fingers. He did get out of laundry detail. In fact, it got him off the ship and into the psych ward. I never did find out what happened to his hand.

Benign boredom causes people to get careless and make mistakes. As an example, we were due to put into a Canadian port and the Captain decided the lifelines should be cleaned up. These are three heavy cables strung along the edges of the deck to keep people from falling over the side. The man assigned the job gave it some thought and decided to use a pneumatic wire wheel to clean the lines. The air hose wouldn’t reach the whole length of the deck, so he took all three lines down and coiled them on the deck. Wearing the approved eye and ear protection, he was mostly deaf and blind as he worked.

Along comes Mean Dean the Weather Machine (Marine Science Technician Dean Grieman). Dean was pretty popular among the crew even though he really was in a one man department. His daily weather reports which we all hailed as “Yesterday’s Weather Tomorrow.” Which made him about as accurate as any weather forecaster.

When not forecasting the weather, he periodically recorded the water temperatures at various depths using a disposable sensor with a coil of wire that would unwind as the probe sank. Dean could pretty well do this in his sleep and perhaps that’s why on this fateful day, he popped open the door to his office, walked over to the side of the ship and heaved the sensor over the side.

He must have been surprised when he followed the probe over the side rather than being restrained by the anticipated safety lines. Dean just managed to grab the lip of the deck on his way over.

This lip is in place to keep running rust from staining the white hull and we call it the knife edge for good reason. Dean was left hanging on for dear life yelling at the back of the sailor cleaning the lines. The pain had to be fierce as he clung there calling for help.

Only a couple of feet away, the deck hand had his back to Dean who would have been left swimming for the four minutes or so it would take the waters of the Bearing Sea to shut his conscious mind down. Dean finally managed to pull himself back up on deck and lay there completely spent for a moment.

While Dean was still laying there when the sailor cleaning the lifelines eventually paused and removed the scratched and fogged safety goggles to find the scuffed and bleeding technician laying behind him.

The evening after watching my shipmate deliberately burn his hand, I realized that I had found it entertaining. This changed my way of thinking about life as I could not have been more horrified than that moment of realization. Whatever the cause, boredom at sea can kill and I was determined to be more sympathetic to what others are going through. Perhaps more importantly, I was determined to never be bored at sea. This is why I tend to be a class clown.