Ieuan Dolby

Moving the Career from Ship to Shore



Posted: Sunday, November 09, 2008

by
The Mariners Articles

Seafarers are sometimes required to move ashore, maybe to take their skills into a shipping company's office, to give up the roaming life due to poor and deteriorating health, to appease the nagging wife or to simply climb to the next rung of the ladder. Whatever the reason that provokes the move it is hard to do none-the-less thus the reason why many talk about it but never actually get around to doing anything.

I gave up seafaring after twenty-five years of ploughing the ocean waves, a mixture of "appeasing the nagging wife", a climb up the next rung of the ladder and because I was royally fed up of not being there when my young son had a birthday, when he uttered his first words and managed to pee into the toilet without spraying the carpet first! All these things provoked me to make a subtle change in my lifestyle and career and without looking back I applied for jobs ashore, got a job ashore and moved ashore thus closing the door on a long, excitable and an extremely enjoyable career at sea.

Bit like giving up smoking; the urge never actually goes away however many years pass!

Is smoking really that bad for the health?

And so here I am after nearly two years ashore wandering what it would be like to return to the ocean waves! Did I really make the right decision after twenty-five years of utter enjoyment?

Moving ashore was great! I get to see my son when anything important happens in his life (he still sprays the carpet and the wife says I do to) and the wife has stopped nagging in fact I think she is having second thoughts as well but she can't say anything now after ten years of constant harping for it! Moving into the office was not so great either as office politics is a horrendous things to witness and sadly to be dragged into! I found myself ripping apart some manager that I hardly knew just to kick start off some conversation with some pasty faced supervisor simply because I wanted a desk beside the window! Aaaar, is this really me? My health has gone down hill, a paunch has appeared and I was shocked to see it till the Doctor told me it was normal for people living a degenerate office-desk-manacled lifestyle.

But there is no turning back now. It is too l ate for that! I have set-up the subscriptions to receive a weekly copy of Man Health', I am a member of the local photography club, I socialise regularly on the last Sunday of every month with the senior management who nearly throw tomatoes at each other after one drink and I go to all the parent-teachers meetings at my son's school. And anyway, I have had a lobotomy done so that I think the same way that all offices think towards ships, I now automatically assume that all Captains and Chief Engineers are ignorant and have no idea about financial matters or for that matter how to navigate or maintain a ship in suitable condition.

The state lobotomy automatically given to those seafarers moving ashore is irreversible, it doesn't work the other way and can only be done once.

So that is my life and like giving up smoking I often hanker for a trip to sea, I frequently day-dream over a slice of freedom on the ocean waves but like it or not I just have to buckle down and accept my manacled fate graciously for I am the Captain of a desk now.

I have two screens on my office computer though that must count for something.

Ieuan Dolby is the Author and Webmaster of The Scribbling Mariners. As a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy he has sailed the world for twenty years on a variety of rust buckets and state of the art vessels. Now living in Edinburgh, Scotland with his wife and son he writes about cultures across the globe and life as he sees it; a seafarers escapades with a few tall tales thrown in for good measure! Further articles and photographs of his travels can be found at his blog The Seadolby Articles and Tall Tales.

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