If you think that life at sea is like the movie franchise “Pirates of the Caribbean,” think again. The movies, which feature ambushes, looting and a drunken captain, are far from real life, according to shipping veteran Ralph Juhl.
“That is, of course, a lot of bollocks,” Juhl told CNBC by phone.
For starters, the consumption of alcohol is banned on many ships.
But there is one similarity with the movie, Juhl said: the code of conduct between seafarers. In the franchise, the Pirate’s Code was chronicled in a book kept by character Captain Teague, and loosely followed by some.
For those who sail for a living, there is a similar type of agreement, Juhl said.
“Seafarers, no matter where they come from — India, Ukraine, Denmark, the Philippines — there is this conduct of how you behave on a ship … You can actually endanger both yourself and all of your colleagues if you are not playing that social game, being on board the ship. So, you take responsibility, you follow authority,” Juhl said.
Juhl, an executive vice-president at oil tanker firm Hafnia, has worked in the industry for several decades, starting as an ordinary seaman — the lowest rank of sailor — in 1983.
“When you as a seafarer [go] on board … you are a contribution to the society, and you have to fit in … there is this code of the high seas,” he added.
A captain’s life
“Pirates of the Caribbean” is a seafaring stereotype familiar to Hafnia’s DSA Dixon, who has been a captain for five years. Dixon — who sails vessels known as product tankers, which transport both refined and unrefined petroleum products around the world — had to convince his parents-in-law that his role was nothing like the movie, he told CNBC by phone.
“A lot of people have a very different representation of a seafarer, looking at Pirates of the Caribbean,” he said.
Dixon might be captaining a ship such as the huge Hafnia Rhine, which is about 230 meters long by 33 meters wide, with a capacity of more than 76,000 deadweight tons — a measure that includes the oil cargo, plus fuel, food, water and crew members, but not the weight of the ship itself.
Where the ship goes depends on where the demand for oil is and Dixon has sailed to every continent bar Antarctica, he said.
Dixon aims to keep to a schedule of three months at sea followed by three months at home in Mumbai, India, he said, and he started his most recent voyage on the Mississippi River in the U.S., sailing to Brazil and going on to Saudi Arabia via Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, before returning to Brazil.
Compared to someone working an office job, Dixon said he spends more time with his wife and six-year-old son than when he is at home, he’s “completely” there. “I love this part of my life, because when I go back home, I’m Santa Claus,” he said. “It doesn’t get stagnated at any point – when it’s about to get stagnated, I’m back at sea.”
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Source: CNBC
