There are three combinations of navigation officers and helmsmen in our ship. Each pair works for two four hour shifts every day. All of them are Romanians. Both Ismael and Dragoslav, the navigation officer accompanying him, are from the coastal city of Constanta. Ismael is of Turkish origin. He is a man in his fifties, thin, short and bald, with scruffy white beard. We ask him if we are disturbing. That opens a verbal deluge. “It’s ok. You are like the police. Just like everyone runs away once the police arrives, after you came, all the boats disappeared. So we don’t need to do any work now.”

He continues, “We get very busy only when the seas are rough, say between Africa and Brazil, when this ship becomes a submarine, going under the big waves that keep coming and coming. Sometimes, we can’t eat anything other than sandwiches because the cook can’t cook in the tumble. Once I was stuck in a small ship between Le Havre and Southampton for eight days, holding a sandwich and steering.”

Rough seas can cause enormous damage. In 1975, ‘the three sisters’, a series of three giant waves that form in Lake Superior, probably brought the doom of SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a giant cargo ship, hitting the ship one after another, before it could recover from the earlier one. Even when the ship doesn’t suffer, rough weather can bring about toppling of containers, more than ten thousand of which are lost every yearⁱⁱ. Container ship casualties from weather related incidents have become rarer as ships take the cue from weather forecasts to avoid treacherous stretches. Yet, sailors still worry about nature. Marius had told us before, “Only twice in my life, I have been really scared. At both times, there were tsunami alerts, somewhere near Chile. There is nothing one can do on-board then.”

Ismael shows us around the bridge with all the radar monitors, maps, steering wheels, steering joystick, binoculars, coffee machines, monitors for humidity, navigation manuals, communication flags, and a few potted plants. The two helmsman’s chair overlooking the dashboards looks very similar to a barber’s chair.

“This is my Ferrari,” says Ismael. “So much technology, you see. Nowadays everything is automatic unless you are approaching a port or some emergency when you switch to manual. There are too many monitors, too many forecasts. But I have been a helmsman for thirty years; I don’t need to look into any of these.”

“On land too, I am the helmsman. I drive taxi. All my life, I learnt to do only one thing, steering. My taxi company has two cars, the other one is driven by my son. Maybe, one day, we will have the money for a third car and hire a driver. So I have to keep working in the ship. My son doesn’t want to be a sailor like me. He wants to be close to his family.” Ismael’s idea of time at home is different from that of the master who had told me earlier, “I have two lives, one on the sea and one on land. Once I go back home after a long time on the sea, I just collapse. I don’t feel like doing any work. I play guitar. I go out for long walks. As seaman, your eyes crave for some green, some vegetation. And if I still miss the sea, I go sailing with my family.”

Dragoslav, the officer, teases Ismael, “Don’t get him started on his home. He is anyway talking about Turkish food back home all the time.”

“Yes,” says Ismael, “Think of kebabs, baklava, ayran. Here, it’s French food every day. They think so highly of it but does it compare with Turkish food? So, whenever I am going back home, I call my wife a few days in advance over skype and ask her to make baklava. Baklava is good because it can last for one month. So even if my ship is delayed, it is fine.”

Ismael indeed can’t stop talking, a trait we soon begin to associate with all seamen, “Baklava is hard work. It takes two days to make baklava, did you know that, Dragoslav? But my family also puts a lot of demands on me. Every time I am on skype, my one and half year old grandson will say, ‘bring me chocolates, bonbon, don’t bring me clothes, only chocolates.’ But I have to buy clothes also because otherwise his parents will say, ‘What, you bring only chocolates?’ I have to buy something for everyone, parents, wives, son, daughter-in-law. The son will say, where are you, in Brazil, let me see on internet what is good there, then you can get it for me, may be the soccer t-shirt; where are you in Korea, maybe electronics?’”

It never gets lonely along this route, one of the busiest in the world; ships always keep appearing. Dragoslav says, “It is different in the South Atlantic, from South Africa to Brazil, there you crave to see a ship for days.”

The clouds and the sun spilt the sky into halves. The sea below follows the hint and splits into two as well, one half, a viscous blue paint, and the other half, a massive silver foil.

Two fishing boats appear. Ismael says, “They always work as a couple, holding the net in between. Then they share the catch equally; I hope they do.” But these could be pirate ships too. We are in the waters near the Anambas archipelago, crowned recently as one the most beautiful islands in South East Asia. But these waters also happen to be the most affected by piracy. But the master had been relaxed about it when we had mentioned it to him, “The pirates here are not like Somalis who kidnap the crew, torture them, and ask for ransom. Here, they only steal cargo and that too mostly oil or scrap metal, usually from smaller ships.” Nonetheless, Vasilescu, another cadet had warned us, “If you go out today, remember to close all the doors when you come back in. And don’t go out after six PM.” The next day, not too far away from where we are, an oil tanker from Singapore is attacked by pirates who stole all the oil and disappeared.