Welcoming hand extended to seafarers far from home
Sailor’s lifestyle: “I say that I am a parent, but I see my sons for only three months out of the year.”
OAKLAND >> In his first voyage as a deck cadet, 25-year-old Manual Morales has yet to step on U.S. soil.
The crewman on the MSC Athos, a Greek container vessel, doesn’t have a visa that allows him shore leave, so he’s spent the majority of his time at ports up and down the West Coast on board his ship. Not that there is much time to leave, even if he could. Cargo vessels typically stop for a day or less, and crew members usually have only a few hours to spare.
As automation grows in the maritime industry, crews are getting smaller, even as the vessels are getting larger, and ships are spending less time at port — a trend that tends to increase the social isolation of their crews, who may go months without
ever leaving the confines of their vessel, said Chaplain Jamieson Prevoznak with the Seafarers Ministry of the Golden Gate, which offers spiritual and emotional counsel to seafarers far from home.
On this particular day, Prevoznak found Morales in the mess hall, working his way through the small plates of dolmas and vinegar-infused octopus, chickpea salad and sausages prepared for the Greek officers and Filipino crew who man the Athos. He sat across the mess hall table from Morales and started with a gentle opener: “How are you?” and “Where are you from?”
The icebreakers quickly led to a conversation about Morales’ family back in the Philippines, his aspirations to one day become a captain and the euphoric feeling that only the sight of land can bring after 11 days of nothing but a watery blue expanse. Prevoznak asked how he is adjusting to his new career.
“It can be really lonely sometimes,” Morales said with little hesitation. “I’m still getting used to it.”
For more than 70 years, Prevoznak’s little-known charity has operated a seafarers welfare center, which offers internet access and telephones, phone cards for sale, a small concession stand, a piano and guitar, a nondenominational prayer room and free rides into town for sailors stopped at port. Originally based in San Francisco, the ministry has operated the International Maritime Center at the Port of Oakland for the past 25 years.
Now, Prevoznak said he and other volunteers are redoubling their efforts to meet sailors on their ships and offer what care they can. Life at sea has always been solitary, several sailors said. Members of the crew who are not officers work every day of the week. There’s no phone service and limited internet access while the ship is sailing through open waters, though even the limited use of email is an improvement from a decade ago, when there was no contact at all, they said. They sometimes miss their children’s births and parents’ deaths.
Even though they’re used to it, the distance away from family and friends doesn’t get easier over time, said MSC Athos Captain Athanasios Kafkopoulos. He’s been in the maritime industry for 23 years, he said. When he goes home to his family in Greece, he feels like a stranger, just stopping to visit.
“We have wives, but for what? Only to show them on Facebook,” he said. “I say that I am a parent, but I see my sons for only three months out of the year.”
It’s too late for him to change careers, he said. And for many of the crew members, who frequently hail from the Philippines, India, China or Ukraine, the work at sea pays much better than they can earn on land. But still, former merchant marine and Oakland resident Chester Chan said he’s seen four suicides during his 14 years as a volunteer at the maritime center.
“We don’t know why; they never leave a note,” Chan said. “But I know it’s a tough life. They’re separated from their families for nine months.”
Conditions on container vessels have improved markedly over the years, and instances of crew abandonment are now rare, said Jason Zuidema, the executive director of the North American Maritime Ministry Association. Prevoznak and other volunteers still check to make sure crew members are getting paid and are allowed shore leave when their visas permit it.
But it’s a far cry from the early days of seafarers welfare centers in San Francisco, which got their start in 1870 with a mission established by the Seamen’s Church Institute, said Stephen Canright, the curator of maritime history at the San Francisco Maritime Museum.
At that time, desertion was common among crew members, shipping companies were unscrupulous, and predatory boarding houses often tried to lure sailors from their ships “with promises of whiskey and women,” he said.
“Guys would be charged two months pay (at the boarding houses) for their time ashore, so it was kind of a racket,” Canright said. “The Seamen’s Church Institute was trying to do everything it could to get in the way of that process.”
With ports front and center in the economy of San Francisco’s early years, there were several centers that catered to shipping crews. The Rev. Thorbjorn Olsen founded the Seafarers Ministry of the Golden Gate in San Francisco in 1946; at the time, it was called the Scandinavian Seamen’s Mission, which offered lodging to crew members while their ships were docked for weeks at a time, Prevoznak said.
That all changed with the use of containers, he said. The center moved from San Francisco to Oakland, and since then, cargo shipping has only accelerated with no signs of slowing down. Kafkopoulos predicted that in 10 or 15 years, instead of 20 to 25 crew members on board a container vessel, there will be just five or six.
And that means the mission of the Seafarers Ministry is becoming more critical than ever, said Zuidema.
“(Crews) are spending so much more time at sea alone,” he said. “It’s increasingly important work.”