ARE WE HAVING FUN YET

Friday was another day of more painting. For that matter so was Saturday. This boat needs a lot of paint and a lot of work. Anyway, nothing to unusual happened on Friday.

In addition to the painting I also helped load more crap into a trailer so they can bring all this stuff back when the coast guard leaves. In addition, I helped throw out tons of trash. The new carpet is almost done and we trashed all of the little extra pieces and scraps. I saved a piece so I can carpet my room if I ever find time. Now that I think about it, I should be able to do that today (Sunday) since I'm currently on watch again. Its about 4:15 am and they let me go back to bed for a couple of hours after my shift ends at 7 am.

We learnd a little (very little) about MARSEC today. That's the marine equivelant of the homeland securty stuff for land based security. We also had a meeting on the various emergency procedures such as fires, man overboard and abandon ship. Since I'm not STCW certified, I only listened and didn't participate. Later today we are suppose to go out to sea and practice some of this stuff some more.

I signd all of the employment papers today and they are really strange. There were about 20 or more pages most of them saying you have no rights, no benefits and lots of extra costs that you are responsible for. (STCW certification and your own gear for which they take no responsibility regardless it its stolen or lost) They take no responsibility for anything except the mandatory workers compensation. They pay you $6 a day if you get hurt. WOW!

This situation has got to get a lot better if I'm going to stay. They claim it will be fun once we get passengers so I"m hoping that's the case. I think I can survive long enough to give that a try. I did read one thing however that really bugs me. The old crew actually takes a vote after your first week working with passengers to determine if you get to stay or not. The customers don't matter, your work doesn't matter, and the captain doesn't matter. This is really strange and I don't like it very much. If they are worried that you might be more popular with guests and get some private tips, they could vote you off. That makes no sense to me.