yup. what a great read!
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I was on the receiving end of revenge from a deranged vessel/galley assistant named “Richard”. Undeserved revenge I will say.
Richard was like 70, had been sailing forever but never upgraded past os/wiper and food handler. He supposedly sailed like 11 months out of the year and his month off he rented some flophouse room in San Fran’s tenderloin district. He also reportedly never left the ship, and collected fridge magnets, but would give other crew going ashore a few bucks to get them.
Richard guarded the self bus line in the galley. You’d put plates and bowls in one tray, then forks and such in another, cups and glasses in another…
I was a cadet aboard but spent most of my day with the deck gang so I was thick as thieves with a dude named Delroy, I think he was from Jamaica or something. One day, I was behind Delroy in the bus line, he deliberately put his fork and knife in the plates tray. Just then Richard turned his head and saw me standing in front of it. He turned bright red, and began to shout… Richard had a weird NYC/New England/marble mouth/lisp so his high pitch caterwauling drew attention rapidly, I say “don’t worry Richard, no big deal” and pick up the silverware and relocate it to its proper respite.
I thought nothing else of it.
Til we were northbound in the Suez, early a.m., and I wake up gagging from a strong flowery chemical smell. Somehow, floor stripper had been dumped under my cabin door, even thought there was like a two inch raised portion in the door frame at the bottom.
Coincidentally Richard had been stripping the deck the night previously. I opened my portal, causing the whole house to decompress (and all the AC came venting rapidly into my cabin it seemed) it made this horrible whooshing sound for the 15 minutes it took to get the cabin habitable.
Immediately I wanted to seek revenge. But I thought better.
Next port visit I bought like 10 fridge magnets, which wasn’t easy, but apparently besides spices and replica scimitars they’re a cottage industry everywhere, including in Agadir, Morrocco.
I gave him the magnets. I figure it was easier than worrying about being poisoned by a guy with access to cleaning chemicals AND the galley.
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No revenge but Sailor’s Society is 200 years old this year and has published a book with 200 Sea stories:
Any Beatles fans here??
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I was spending my first year as captain on one of the small, expedition cruise boats operating in SE Alaska. I worked opposite the owner/operator and he could be a royal pain… Built the business from the ground up and didn’t really trust anyone else with much authority, which didnt work so well when he was home in Florida and I was running the boat, especially considering that he loved to hire from Craigslist and had a real soft spot for the hard luck cases. Anyway, suffice it to say that staffing was not his strong suit and then hey refused to move the bad apples when they eventually proved to be such.
Now, I was going off hitch, and had become good friends with the engineer who had taught me just enough about circuits to be dangerous. I was pretty fed up with the drama, but not really enough to quit over… So I thought a passive agressive method was more suiting of the prevailing mood. Aftet a quick stop at a hardware store in Sitka, and picking up a few feet of wire and a momentary switch, a deckhand and I wired the switch from underneath the captains chair and to the fog horn solenoid. We then bled down the service air to make sure that we didn’t “blow” our prank until the boat was full of passengers and departure eminent.
I left before the boat took off, but I was told it was a total success. And while it didnt really accomplish much, it gave everyone a good laugh which is often sorely needed as the mid season blues begin to creep in.
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I’m copy and pasting this into a word document this shit gold. It could be a good book
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I got a rubber soul rerelease on vinyl
Interesting song and picture show there Mas. Indeed.
Think of those poor boys whose Mom survived and hastily remarried
to some rake and continued to the second phase of his hellish life?
Angela’s Ashes is a book detailing this story by Frank McCourt.
The follow up book “Tis” recounts his getting started in life as a school teacher. But sooner or later we will all be involved with someone who comes from such a background. I’ve known several
from both circumstances. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was my first awareness.
There is an old saying that Living Well is the Best Revenge.
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I was the target of a practical joke years ago that exhibited originality. In the town I was living in, I got mailed notice that the special ordered album CD had arrived for me at the local book and music store: Vanilla Ice’s ice ice baby.
I figure it can’t hurt to bump this glorious thread one last time. This isn’t a story of shipboard revenge so much as shipyard revenge, but it’s all in the same spirit.
We had this fiberglass guy who was a bit weird, like most people who spend their lives working with solvents, but not in a nice way. Always sullen and impolite, he mostly kept to himself, limiting his interaction with the rest of the yard crew to scowling at people passing by. I made the mistake of asking him to take a bit of care with spreading dust around when working inside the workshop, because it got pretty bad at times, and we’d have to spend lots of time cleaning everything off. He only responded with his trademark malevolent sneer. Things didn’t improve one bit, but little dabs of fiberglass dust started turning up on my clothes and equipment, obviously applied with a fingertip. Something had to be done.
A few days later, he was busy with a particularly unpleasant grinding job, repairing the stringers on a motor yacht that had grounded at speed. As lunch was drawing near, I disconnected the air hose to his job site, poured in a bottle of fart spray, re-connected the hose and waited for things to unfold. I didn’t have to wait long. As the lunch siren went off, he crawled out of the boat and dusted himself off with the air like he always did, starting with his face. It was immediately apparent that using a whole bottle was just the kind of overkill that almost takes the fun out of a practical joke. An ounce of concentrated malodorant dispersed with a blast of compressed air is a hell of a thing, even outdoors, especially if it’s shot right into someone’s beard.
If I’d known then what I do now about hydraulic injection injuries (google at your own peril), I wouldn’t have done it, but he was physically OK. People refused to let him into the lunch barrack, and kept cracking jokes about his personal hygiene from then on. It was obvious to everyone who had done it, but nothing came of it. He only grew more sullen, and took to eathing his lunch out in the yard. I heard he quit soon after I went to sea.
I probably should feel worse about it than I do, but the guy was the worst kind of asshole.
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Brings back memories of two incidents I remember. Was sailing with a bosun who served also as the ship’s rat which is how he got promoted so quickly. He tattled on the 3rd engineer over a trivial matter between Panama and Norfolk. The morning after our arrival in Norfolk we were drinking coffee on deck and the bosun noticed clothes floating in the water. He raced back to his cabin and then back to the rail and said, “Those are my clothes!” The 3rd engineer said,“Well, I guess you are lucky you are not in them, this time.” Bosun tranferred.
Next incident was another unsavory character in Mexico who happened to be 2nd engineer. He was lazy and loved spending time in the CM’s office. I attempted to fire him but the Captain and CM intervened. The first engineer took it upon himself to encourage the fellow to leave the ship. Threats didn’t work but the guy knew he wasn’t thought highly of so when we were shuttled to shore for crew change he would always jump off and start running suitcase in hand. One evening crew change he did his running off while the rest of us got in the agents van to go to the hotel. As we turned onto the main road there was a guy laying on the ground with his suitcase beside him. He was a bit bloody and the agent said “That looks like Jaxxxier, I’ll stop.” The first engineer said no keep driving. The agent just shook his head as high 5’s went around once we got to the hotel.
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Visine eye drops - same result. . . maybe not as explosive though.
In the early 90’s a master of a USNS TAGS vessel was quite a prick. . . so he received many catastrophic events. The shoe-polish on HIS [these are mine-nobody touches them] binocular’s eye cups, a ball bearing in his over-head, the nut on a piece of mono-filament outside his port-hole. But the best was putting ospho on his toilet seat, and letting it dry. . .before the visine application.
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Years ago we had a Bos’n from Guyana who was hated throughout the fleet. He was brutal to his deckhands. One of them somehow got ahold of a live adult pelican and had the 1AE use his master key to open the Bos’ns stateroom. I charged the AB 20.00 just to open that door… I would have done it for free but he and I were laughing like schoolgirls when he paid me.
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Putting Vinisne in someones drink could potentially be classes as attempted murder.
It is just as bad, if not worse, as putting bleach into someones drink.
We had an AB who was as good as two men missing and unpopular with the rest of the ABs. One crew member on seeing a lottery ticket on the guys desk copied down the numbers down and substituted them for those of the radio officers numbers on the ship’s notice board.
I had to suddenly find an object to look at from the bridge wing as the crewman demanded a helicopter to the ship from the bemused old man who knew nothing about it.
I couldn’t see anything through tears and trying suppress explosive laughter.
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I know a guy who said he was working on a ship that was in port somewhere in Africa, he would put a bottle of his water down and local stevedores on the ship kept stealing the bottles when he wasn’t paying attention, he said that he got a full bottle emptied out about 1/5 and topped the bottle up with his urine, then he went and left it on deck, sometime later he went to check where it was and it had been stolen…
It was an interesting read, but have some questions about the accuracy of the article.
With the caveat that I have a healthy disregard for the media because they feed us shit, the first thing that struck me after I read it was the comment about bleach in drinks.
When I was backpacking a lot in the 70s and 80s, I had a little vial of bleach that I could put into the drinking water so it was safe. To this day, my emergency drinking water for hurricanes has a touch of bleach in it. Chlorinated water is quite common. So the deal is, it’s a question of ratio; how much bleach to how much water. The article never mentioned the quantity of Visine the suspect fed her husband.
So I suspect it is with the Visine. A drop or two and a cup of coffee did not kill the man, nor do I think it would kill anybody. A whole bottle? Or two or three drops every time you give somebody a drink? Hell yes that’s a problem.
As far as attempted murder? I’m not a legal beagle, but I think we would get into the question of intent. At best, I suspect it might be a manslaughter charge.
However the good news is, I’m reasonably certain that captain is now dead from old age, and that I am well beyond the age of such pranks.
Oh, please don’t use Visine, it is very toxic and can kill. In fact, these days it’s probably not a good idea to put anything in anyone’s coffee. Anyway, there’s at least one murder case on the books where the weapon was Visine. Tetrahydrozoline is not the same as Phenolphthalein.
When I was a yardbird one of my work partners filled a Formula 409 bottle with his pee and put the squirt nozzle back on, casually leaving it sitting on top of a generator because he knew the guy working on the generator, someone he detested, would use it to degrease his hands and tools. Yardbirds are utter psychos.
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Phenolphthalein has been used for over a century as a laxative), but is now being removed because of concerns over carcinogenicity
Not sure that would thrill me to be the victim of either.