I joined my first ship in Antwerp on a wet Tuesday in November, carrying a suitcase, a sextant I had been told I would need and never once used, and a training record book with four hundred tasks in it that all had to be signed by somebody.
The gangway
A taxi drops you at a container terminal gate at half past nine at night. There is no welcome. A security guard checks your name against a list, and then you walk — about fifteen minutes, in the dark, alongside a hull that keeps not ending.
At the top of the gangway the duty AB looks at your passport, calls somebody, and points at a lift. Somewhere on deck a crane is working and the noise is enormous. This is the moment most cadets describe identically: standing at the top of the gangway with a suitcase, realising you have signed a contract for eight months.
Sign-on
The Master signs you on in his office. Passport, discharge book, certificates, contract, next of kin. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the most consequential paperwork of your life so far, because from that signature you are crew, subject to the Master’s authority, and legally part of the ship’s complement.
Then the Chief Officer gives you the safety familiarisation, which is mandatory before the ship sails and which you will not remember. Muster station, lifeboat number, escape routes, alarm signals, where your immersion suit is. He says all of it twice and tells you to walk the routes yourself in daylight tomorrow. That is good advice and I did not take it for three days.
Day one
My first job as a professional seafarer was chipping rust off a mooring bitt on the forecastle. Four hours, with a needle gun, in the rain. I had spent three years at a maritime academy learning stability calculations and celestial navigation.
This is not hazing, though it feels like it. The Bosun is finding out two things: whether you turn up, and whether you complain. Both answers travel round the ship by dinner. Get them right and by week three you are on the bridge learning to plot a fix. Get them wrong and you will chip rust for eight months.
What nobody tells you
That the ship is loud, permanently. There is a background vibration through every deck that you stop hearing after a week and then cannot sleep without.
That you will be the youngest person on board by fifteen years. That everyone knows exactly how new you are. And that the correct response to not knowing something is to say so immediately, because the alternative — guessing, on a ship — is how people get hurt.
WHAT THE BOSUN SAIDNobody expects a cadet to know anything. They expect a cadet to ask, to write it down, and to not have to be told the same thing three times.
The training record book
Your Certificate of Competency depends on this book. Four hundred tasks, each needing a signature from a certificated officer who watched you do it. Fill it steadily and the last month is calm. Leave it and you spend your final weeks chasing a Chief Officer who is busy with cargo and does not remember whether you rigged that pilot ladder in March.
The cadets who struggle are not the ones who find the work hard. They are the ones who treat the book as paperwork instead of the actual point of the contract.