Ask Bob

BY BRIAN PETRE

Sorry I�ve missed a couple of installments of the latest tragedy infested part of my tug boat story. This past week has just plain sucked. I hit myself in the head with a crowbar while setting up the circus, which in turn I had to deal with the city of Columbus� finest EMT�s, who don�t know how to transfer records to follow-up clinics, etc. I suppose all of that is irrelevant when you�re the one who clocked yourself with a crowbar.

So, where the fuck was I? I believe I left off where the leak in the engine room of the tug had driven me to insanity. Well, I had plenty of time to recover from that, 4 hours of sleep later and it was time to move on. The tug was �fixed� by the two �engineer� nut case fuckheads from the Carolinas, and it was time to officially steal this rusted piece of shit and head to Panama.

We were hired to tow two barges from L.A., California to Jacksonville, FL. One of the barges was in the movie �Barbed Wire�, which we noticed because we only had 5 movies on board to watch, and drove ourselves crazy watching each of them 20 times. To get this shit from the West Coast to the lovely cesspools of Florida we had to cross the Panama Canal. This is much harder than it seems.

The run to Panama took a lot longer than expected. Starting our second day we were actually going backwards 5 miles per day due to the current, at full fucking throttle! This is when the fun began.

If some of you may recall, I referenced a �water maker� which the two Carolina rednecks �fixed� before I got on board. Well, the mother fucker broke. At this point if you�re wondering �Gosh, well what did they have to drink?�, then you�re missing a slight alternative reason to having pure water on the boat. The water is also needed in the engines, aside from the Diesel, to keep them running. Getting the picture yet? Here are two rednecks, a psychotic captain, and me, floating around the middle of the Pacific Ocean, knowing that we can�t drink the water or else we can�t get to land. If we drink the water we�re screwed. If there�s not enough left in the tank for the engines to get back to land, we�re screwed. If we want to water the plants in the windowsills, we�re screwed. I�m kidding, we didn�t have windows.

So, there we are, 200 miles from land, no water, the engines are slowly meeting their death, and there�s 4 guys aboard this floating piece of shit that haven�t been able to take a shower in 2 weeks. We had to wash the dishes and brush our teeth with ocean water, shit and piss off the side of the boat, and if you wanted some water it was rationed, well below the amount a body need to function properly. What else could possibly go wrong?

We ran out of cigarettes. We all smoked. If any of you have had that moment, I mean the real �moment�, when you don�t care about life at all, then you understand the situation. Not to mention the food rations were running low as well. The time lost with the current was never calculated into the food factor. In fact, nothing was calculated at all. There we were, grown men, starving and thirsty, crawling on our hands and knees collecting cigarette butts and loose tobacco off the deck to roll a smoke for four. It was like prison, without the perks. No need to worry about dropping the soap. Even if we had any it�s not like you were able to take a shower.

We made it to Panama, barely, with literally one gallon of water left on the tug. Cabin Fever stricken and near death we crawled onto the pier, then to the pier bar.