MARKETING / POSITIONING REPORT
“Men’s Lives: An Oily Memoir” –
An Expose By A Maritime Lawyer Imbedded in a Tanker Fleet in Southeast Asia During the 90s Boom.
By: Capt. Eric Troels Wiberg, Esq.
Email: ericwiberg@sbcglobal.net
Address: 12 Merrill Road, Norwalk, CT 06851 USA
Cell: 1 (203) 856 9677 (US)
Bahamas Cell: 1 (242) 439 6501
Date: Sun. 13 Sept. 2009
BOOK PROPOSAL:
With the volatility of the oil market and the impact of its high retail cost on consumers around the world, the market is ideal right now for a behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage is made. To some extent this is an expose a-la “The Dirty Bits” about how a publicly-listed, NASDAQ certified firm bought old tankers wholesale, sent them out to the Far East, told them “don’t come back” (as in excluded them from trade in the US or Europe), and ran them until they blew up, sank, or were scrapped. The philosophy of ‘buy ‘em cheap, trade ‘em hard, and if there is anything left, sell it’, prevailed.
During the author’s three years of tanker safety vetting and operations, 3 of the nine tankers on his watch didn’t even make it to the scrap yard – one sank and was towed up a river in China, another blew up off India and was towed to an Arabian repair yard, and a third was pushed so far aground in India that it was still there – with a lonely captain standing watch – months later.
This is a fast-paced, first-hand narrative by the author of nearly a dozen books about the dizzying, exciting years trying to keep up with the mishaps, the international fund wires, the various dubious third parties – in Indonesia, the Koreas, Bermuda, India and Indonesia that we funded to grease the machinery. It is one man’s view of how oil reaches consumer’s oil tanks, scented, artificially colored, and priced to the maximum. This narrative sheds some light on only one aspect – the seaborne transportation link – of an extraordinary story of oil going from mud to market.
That story - of how rotting twigs, leaves and bird-bones are found and extracted from miles beneath the earth’s surface, pumped into daylight as crude hydrocarbons, processed into petroleum product, sold multiples times and finally chartered aboard tired, third-world-flagged tankers (possibly supporting a few internecine wars in the process), and ultimately delivered half a world away to the same terminal, where it is dispersed, sold again, processed again, and retailed under multiple brands for less than it costs for an equivalent bottle of water – is too big for this narrative, but is part of the larger web in which I toiled in a dark corner. The title derives from a Dickens novel in which a middle-aged English woman complains to the fish-monger about the price of his goods. The old codger retorts “them’s not fish you’re buying ma’m, them’s men’s lives.”
When the overworked salesperson, the hectic housewife, the college student or the civil service staff goes to fill up their car with a liquid they rarely even see any more (unless they fill their law mower or outboard engine themselves), they might do well to remember that those gallons of gasoline they are pouring represents men’s lives as well. During my short tenure we lost three men in less than two years. This is their story – that of tens of thousands of faceless Filipinos and other denizens of the developing world who devote most of their working lives to bring you what evaporates through your engine cylinders in less than the time it took you to read this introduction. It’s their lives that I found myself indirectly involved with – sharing on voyages and directing around the globe.
DRAFT: (Begun on Blackberry while camping, August 2008, resumed Sept. 2009)
When I boarded the plane from New York to Singapore to run ships for three years, I still didn't know exactly where it was. I knew it was a country, but all I could find was a city by that name, founded by a Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819. I learned later that Paul Revere's brother was the first American Consul – that at least made a link to New England, where I had been holing up for months, trying to secure the job.
In the years to come, young Singaporeans would politely and earnestly ask, in the lingua franca which is nicknamed Singlish,
“How did you find Singapore?” Of course they meant merely to ask how I was enjoying myself - do I like their country? Fatigued by Singapore's fastidious self consciousness, I would answer
“It was easy, I boarded a big jet in New York, and it took me right here!”
In the confusion about what I meant by my reply (was I making fun of them?) I normally got off having to answer any further. If a girl I didn’t like asked me the standard questions about my career (they got pretty specific: how many reported to me, what was my salary?), I would say I worked in the Water & Sewerage Department, though sometimes this effort to shake them off my trail didn’t work.
I was told that the ultimate brush off, if you found yourself living with an Asian woman, was to say “I’ve decided to quit my job in order to find myself and live a more meaningful life – though I know we won’t have an income, I know that you’ll support me all the way in my quest…” I’m told that before your first sentence was over they would be packing to go.
In my case, ironically, I was ultimately to quite my job – a good one – to find a better quality of life. But then 7-day work days from 9 to midnight on one meal a day and tons of alcohol can do that to you.
I arrived a few months after Nick Leeson the "rogue trader" who worked deep inside Barings, the old-school bank, broke that bank. The month before I left Newport Rhode Island that summer, one of the Barings family grandsons chartered a historic 12-Meter sailing yacht for a tour of Narragansett Bay. In a playful tussle on a mooring in nearby Bristol one of the 20-something heirs lost a Breitling designer watch which I was told was worth $6,000 and didn't even bother to go in and get it. I have been scheming about how to find that watch ever since.
The other newsworthy event involving Singapore in 1995 was a young American high school student who got caught red handed painting Swastikas on and ‘keying’ the most expensive cars in the world. He and a Singaporean further defaced the Mercedes with eggs and paint. When he was sentenced to receive the local punishment of rattan lashes on the buttocks and legs no less a personage than Bill Clinton (who had made a
career of getting off the hook while getting off) intervened to reduce the boys punishment. It worked.
The kid, Michael something, had a reduced sentence went on to a career in petty crime, getting caught dealing pot and beating up girlfriends in the US. His Singaporean cohort was caught and caned within a few days. Within a few years Clinton who didn’t inhale but who got my absentee vote from Singapore, survived an impeachment proceeding.
I had just turned 25 when I arrived in Singapore on 18 September 1995. On my birthday that August I had become a licensed yacht captain. Aside from school and two attempts and sailing across the Atlantic (one successful), I had been tested at 23 by command of a 70-footer from Galapagos to New Zealand. I was thrilled with my first real job and an exciting role in an exotic overseas posting.
I guess I was a bit cocky since when people asked how I got the job I would reply
“The usual way - through the country club." The truth like so many other simplified stories is a bit more complicated than that. A few things stand out about my time and my job helping to run a fleet of nearly a dozen tankers there.
We lost two ships to casualties and four men manning our ships died or were killed in four different incidents.
Our ships masters and men survived incidents that I had considered no longer part of the modern business world’s vocabulary: mutiny, barratry, stowaways, rocket attacks, piracy, arrest by foreign navies and Middle Eastern despots who grabbed the wrong ship…
We broke and worked around well-meaning global embargoes and sanctions
Including those restricting trade between Taiwan to China and Vietnam by lightering larger ships offshore. We brought cargoes into Sudan and South Africa and even North Korea, Vladivostok and the Russian fishing fleet in the remote Sea of Okhotsk.
We were fired on and hit by Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and I saw the hole in the side of the tank with sun streaming in.
We tramped from up the rivers of Argentina and Paraguay to the inland waters of China, from Australia to the Bahamas and most corners of the Indonesian archipelago at our door-step, in at least once case peopling a village with Filipino half-breeds.
The only places we never went were the US and Europe, ironically where the investors mostly lived, and founders of our US-listed public company were from - Norway and Rhode Island. That didn’t stop us naming our tankers after picturesque Native American tribes, and becoming active supporters of ‘Save the Bay’ and other anti-pollution groups.
Though we were public we never received any interference from the thousands of investors and co-owners who paid our salaries - probably because they didn't know where to find us.
During a visit by our founder and CEO a letter did reach us from the daughter of an elderly woman, telling us that she had christened
the tanker FORT COLOUGNE in Canada decades before and as it was now our ship the M/T (motor tanker) ULAN. (we simply shortened longer names when we bought ships, to save money re-painting and re-documenting them).
“Could we please tell her how the ship was doing before she dies?” her daughter politely pleaded? I drafted a response and the CEO approved it, as it mostly repeated stuff she already knew with a bit of trading history for color. I closed with the fact that the ship was laying in dry dock at Singapore, and I had just visited her earlier that day.
It seemed the letter would go out in the next mail, but when the skeptical Pakistani technical director read the woman’s polite and restrained letter, he let out an exultant whoop and pointed to her name.
“See it is by a woman - I told you it was a fake to get information and this proves it!”
“What do you mean sir?” I asked, naively, the product of a liberal arts education and the lifelong acquiescence to the woman’s-lib movement and survivor of radical feminism in college.
“You see,” he said triumphantly – “it is an intelligent and well written letter. Since a woman could not possibly have written it, it is obviously a fabrication and you don't need to reply, so don't send the letter. It is obviously a trick.”
I followed his order and waited a few months before countermanding it and mailing my letter, I received a reply from Canada where the ULAN had been part of Canada Pacific’s tanker fleet telling me that Mrs. Clerihue-Carter had, as predicted, died in the interim without getting their feedback but thanking me all the same. Welcome to the east I had ignored a woman who could easily have been either of my grand-mother's dying requests.
We could be good to the blue-haired investor crowd, too, though, when we needed to be – or when we needed their money. At one point, while executives high-rolled around the US on a privately chartered jet selling the ‘taxi company of the ocean’ concept to retired investors in the Mid-West and pension fund managers, one of the tankers was spilling oil across a remote bay in rural Thailand. The captain made the mistake of mentioning his mistake while discharging (he took too much cargo off the front of the ship, causing the other tanks to overflow further astern), but before the issue could be dealt with all written references were deleted and destroyed and the terminal folks paid off, lest news of the pollution reach investors.
I was to learn a litany of new jargon about clearing boiler tubes engine governors and turbo chargers escape hatches steering platforms requisitions for the oddest things fabrication of parts on the fly
I learned the many ways ships and men can die: Aground, stranded, stuck, holed, sinking, losing a valve, tossed by a tidal wave, fire, engine room fire, sump, tank explosion, hull plating rupture, anchors dragging, bunker contamination, overwhelmed by seas, drifting, hull plating cracks, bottom growth, tank scaling, pump-room fire, collision and alision (when a ship hits something that isn’t another ship, but, say, a dock or rock) and, of course, the less dangerous but far more damaging oil spill.
Being that my employer had owned the mega tanker BRAER which sank on the coast of the Shetland Islands in New Years 1993-1994 and that we lost some 80,000 tons of crude oil as compared to the mere 24,000 or so tons from the EXXON VALDEZ I should not have been surprised.
