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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Doorstopsanddynamite on 2024-10-04 01:25:42+00:00.
Everyone who works at sea knows there are some things you just don’t talk about with shore people. Like the magic pipe, or where the extra money came from for the crew welfare fund after passing through the Suez Canal, or just quite how close you came to crushing that little wooden fishing boat off the coast of Vietnam. Things they wouldn’t get, that would tarnish the image of the gentleman captain and his well oiled crew; standing to attention in their crisp white shirts and shiny golden threaded epaulettes. But beyond that, deeper than things they wouldn’t understand are things they shouldn’t understand. Things that people who haven’t spent time out there, thousands of miles from civilization, where the lines between reality and what lies beyond get thin, and blurry, and sometimes vanish altogether should never know. Things that would make your skin crawl and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Things that would leave the average landsman barely clinging onto the edge of sanity by the thinnest of margins. Things I’m going to share with you.
What you need to understand, before I begin in earnest, is that so far out at sea things get…fuzzy. My pet theory is that the collective consciousness of humanity gets thin out there, so far from everyone else. The barrier of logic and faith and the knowledge of what is and can be and what isn’t and can’t simply doesn’t extend so far out as to cover the open ocean, days or weeks from anywhere that could even generously be described as inhabited. Other sailors have their own theories, ghosts and aliens and ancient slumbering gods. All at least somewhat true but I don’t think any of us quite have everything right. I don’t think any of us could get everything right, at least not without slipping too far beyond rationality to ever come back. Some just accept it for what it is and give it no thought whatsoever, I envy them. But what’s important is the fuzziness of it all. The moment that reality crosses into unreality is rarely noticeable until you’re already knee deep in impossibility.
So that’s the context. That’s what you need to understand for you to truly comprehend the things I’ve seen, and heard, and felt, and become. This is your last chance to back out. If you’re still reading, I would commend your bravery if I weren’t so certain it was ignorance rather than courage that propelled you.
My first experience with that slow fade into what lies beyond rational thought is the one that sticks with me the most. That’s the way for most seamen I’ve spoken to, you never forget the moment you realise you’ve crossed the line into unreality, the feeling of something in your mind warping as all the logic you’ve built your life on twists to the point it snaps, and you accept the impossible to be true.
If there is one thing that defines a life working at sea it’s rust. It drives almost every action you take when working on deck. Finding rust, removing rust, preventing rust. Chipping and painting: the deck cadet’s bread and butter.
The process is actually a rather satisfying one. When I first started as a cadet it was almost therapeutic. You start out with a jet chisel, a collection of long blunt ended needles connected to a handle, powered by pressurised air. When you squeeze the trigger the needles fire back and forth at high speed, shattering the paintwork below them in a satisfying burst, revealing the corrosion underneath. It appears quite violent at first but in actuality the needles aren’t moving fast enough to cause you any harm. That’s the key you see, where the metal has rusted the paint layered above it loses adhesion, and weakens. The force required to break it is minimal, which means the chisel itself doesn’t need much power. It’s how you know you’ve reached the edge of a patch of rust: the metal beneath begins to turn from a tarnished black to a more reflective silver, and the paint becomes much harder to remove.
From there comes the wire brushing. Removing the rust and sanding down the edges of the remaining paint using a high speed rotating brush, with bristles made of coarse steel. Not quite as satisfying as the chipping, but arguably more important. What’s the point in knowing where the rust is if you just let it spread? Whilst this looks less violent than the process of chipping it’s actually far more likely to cause you harm than using a jet chisel ever would. The wire bristles are likely to fly off at speed, and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve almost had one embed itself into my throat, stopped only by the neck gaiter I wear for exactly these situations. And of course that’s assuming you don’t need to use Metalbrite. A horrific corrosive concoction with the stench of synthetic chemicals that burns at your nose hairs and sticks in the back of your throat. Truly awful stuff, but fantastic at removing rust; within minutes it can have even the most stubborn patches looking almost new, but god help you if you got any of it on your hands. But hey, that’s why we wear PPE. Boiler suits, gloves, goggles, dust masks. All designed to keep us safe from errant bristles, corrosive chemicals and lungfuls of iron oxide as it’s stripped from the metal it once called home.
There was something so satisfying about revealing a large patch of rust, starting from the centre and following it as it grew, reaching out to spread further and further throughout the steel until you find its maximum extent. It was strangely beautiful to see the different shades and colours in a particularly big section. The blacks and browns of old long rusted portions, pockmarked with the vibrant, almost unnatural orange of fresh spots where the rust had only just begun to take hold. It always fascinated me, the way it would spread. It was almost like a living organism, a parasite, but instead of feeding on its host it incorporated it into itself. Taking the iron from within the steel structure and converting it into Iron Oxide. Millimeter by millimeter, each atom converted becoming another vector from which it can transmit.
Occasionally I would find a spot underneath the paint that looked as though it had bubbled up from within. These spots were so soft you could fracture the paint simply by pressing it with you finger, the paint slowly giving way beneath the pressure before suddenly collapsing with a satisfying snapping feeling beneath your finger tip. And once the paint broke the cause of the bubble became clear, as the salt water trapped beneath the paint trickled out through the cracks, leaving behind a trail of orange-brown streaks as it went.
That’s how my first two months at sea went. For four hours every morning, nothing but chipping alongside the deck ratings. Ratings are really the ones who keep the ship running. Officers may know how the Gas Combustion Unit functions or be able to tell you every rule under the Collision Avoidance Regulations, but if you need anything fixed, replaced, painted or polished, the ratings are who you go to. And that’s who I spent my first month with. When I wasn’t on the bridge learning how to keep watch with the Chief Officer, a stern Scottish man who had a look in his eye that he was always expecting trouble to bubble up out of nowhere, I was with the deck guys chipping away at the rust.
I usually worked with an AB called Max. He was a fair bit older than me, mid forties I’d have guessed but I never bothered to ask. He’d served for years as an Able Bodied Seaman in the company, and absolutely adored his job. We’d often talk about why we’d come to sea, and what we’d done before making the leap, and he’d say “Matt, every day here is an adventure. You’ll see things you never even dreamed of. Just stick with me and I’ll see you through!” And so I did. For the first two months everything Max did, I did. Admittedly most of that was limited to chipping and wire brushing but he kept me right.
We were sailing back to the Suez Canal from the West Coast of India when Max took ill. He’d forgotten to roll down his sleeves when brushing down a particularly stubborn patch of rust on the underside of a mooring winch and taken a needle to the arm. It hadn’t been enough to stop him at the time, barely even breaking the skin, but when he complained of an itching sensation the Chief Mate told him to take some rash cream from the medical locker and take the day off.
The day he returned to work, Max initially seemed fine, working as usual, but he seemed almost hesitant to use the wire brush. It seemed a natural enough reaction at first glance, worrying about the accident, it could potentially have been far worse than a scratch to the arm if he’d been unlucky so of course he’d want to take his time. And that’s what all the guys assumed. “Oh Max is just being overly careful, he’ll get over it” I heard one of them, a man named Frederico say to the other guys over coffee. But I had spent the whole morning with him and it seemed more than that. He still scratched ferociously at his forearm where he’d been struck by the needle when he thought no one was looking, and recoiled visibly from the sound of a wire brush whirring. But he still worked fine, and otherwise seems his normal self, so I chalked it up to fright from the accident and left him to it.
Cadets tend to get weekends off whilst at sea, and I didn’t see much of Max until Monday. Usually he could be found after work watching a film in the crew lounge or playing basketball out on the poo…
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