Maybe This Week, Maybe Next Week

Robert Gumpert 15/10/2025 Robert Gumpert 15/10/2025

Mid October 2025

From the MMP Hiring Hall

Carlton Bartlett

I really enjoy it [being on a ship]. I got my start, I worked in a shipyard when I was at school - it really wasn’t for me. I kind a liked the look of being at sea more. There’s something about it that’s a lot more, I don’t know, freeing. At times it can feel like you’re in prison, like there’s no escape, but other times you look out at the horizon, and it’s just you, and there’s no one else.

But I like being at sea. It nice, it’s clean, there’s not as many people. It’s not like crowded with masses of traffic. When you’re actually at sea there’s no traffic. It’s not like being in port where you have to wait. Or, on shore where everyone’s rushing, like in L.A., to get from A to B. Your commute is from your room, up a few flights stairs, to where you’re working.

As I have progressed sailing wise, from as a kid and now doing it as a professional, you get a lot more feel for how the sea is. You can do the calculations, and see the tides, and what the weather forecasts will say. But [with time] you get more of if you look at the barometer you can see the mercury dropping, [then] you know a storm is coming because that’s going towards the low. There’s a lot more feel for it. I don’t want to say spiritual, but you do like an intuitive sense of how it’s going to be. You can look at the moon and could do the calculations, or you can say the moon’s large, it’s going to be a big tide swing. There’s a lot you get the feel of, how things are. It’s a lot more close to nature.

I worked in an office job and it was god awful. I don’t know how people go into an office 8 hours a day. I was really sad doing that for the first month, and then I was OK with it, which terrified me.

The more I sail, the more my vernacular switches over to sailing terms. The longest I’ve been on a ship is 7 months, and when you come home there’s a period where you have to reintroduce yourself into society.

On the ships today, depending on what your watch schedule is, you might only talk to 2 people that day. So you go from really a very solo kind of existence on a ship to going ashore, and it’s like people everywhere, talking a lot - it’s a weird transition time.

The language of the sea is English, at least underway and over the radio, but when you hit port it’s no longer required.

Going to some of the foreign ports, you expect the same thing in every port you go to, there’s not like a lot of variation: the container needs to be taken off the ship, but on a truck, and then carted away. So you kind of know what to expect. But, you go to a foreign port and they won’t speak English, and you don’t speak the language. You have to do a job, and they have to do a job, but you can’t communicate. You can mime things out, it can be fun at times, but it can also be frustrating. [For instance], on container ships you have lashing bars that keep the containers in place, and once in China I was checking the lashing bar behind the guy lashing it. He didn’t like that because I was telling him to go tighten it before we headed underway, and he chased me across a lashing bridge with a lashing turnbuckle. That was a learning experience, not to go up there when lashers are lashing. You go up, you check it, you tell them it’s too loose, then you go back down, talk to their boss. They’ll go back up, tighten it, you go back up, check it, [and repeat as necessary].

Everything’s clean when you get to Yokohama. There’s a schedule, the schedule is followed to the tee. They’ll do whatever they can to make sure you’ll get out of there on time, and you arrive on time. I’ve been to Shanghai, [there] you have an arrival date, you get there, and then you’re told to “standby to standby”. So, you drop anchor with the rest of the 100 to 200 ships that are sitting out of the port, and then you wait.

[In Shanghai eventually] the pilot will scramble up. Usually you have to, I don’t know if they’re doing it still, [but] we used to give them a carton of US cigarettes and that would like grease the wheels a little bit. It was the same going through the Mediterranean, every pilot, you gave a carton of cigarettes to, that was how everything was done.

In China there are so many pilots, they actually have a pilot boat that sits outside the river in Shanghai where all the pilots live on. I don’t know what the rotation looks like, but they get off of your ship, take another ship down the river, back to their pilot hotel boat, and then sleep on there until the next job.

[Most import job on a ship] I’d probably say, honestly, galley crew. The Chief Cook because if you have a bad Chief Cook that makes the entire experiences dreadful. When you’re on a ship meals are what you have to look forward to. It’s the time you will see other people, the other members of the crew, the other officers. If it’s piss poor food then no one sticks around in there. You can go on a cruise and loose substantial weight from not wanting to eat the food, just because it’s gross.

During COVID I a job that was supposed to pickup in Korea, but instead [due to delays] ended up taking the ship in Hawaii. They put me up in a hotel. I was probably 210ish pounds, and they had us sit in the hotel for 2 weeks for quarantine. The food they decided to bring us for those 2 weeks was so borderline, at least to me, uneditable - I’m a single dude so I’ll eat pretty much anything - that I lost 20 something pounds in 2 weeks.

When I got to the ship the food wasn’t good, but it was so much better than what I’d eaten at the hotel. Then you get to like month two, when you’re used to it, and you realize this is actually like garbage food. I think that Chief Steward got fired.

On the APL ships you do the “loop”, which is Japan, Japan, Korea, China, China, Korea, back to the US. So, when you’re doing a “loop” over in Asia it’s go, go, go, all the time.

One of the Captains I sailed with, he would pickup in Japan fresh fish and bring it to the ship, and the crew would all get sushi for the next 2 or 3 days.

It was a really nice thing to look forward to. You’d get off a long stressful watch, and you’d go to the meal and there’d be fresh sushi. It made it nice.

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