Modern mariner phones home to Maine schoolhouse

Castine, Maine

Bess MacArthur’s father was calling from work. So Bess and her first- and second-grade classmates – all six of them – walked down the hall to the laptop computer to say hello. Dad is on the screen, wearing headphones and his bright orange coveralls in his office: the chart room of the Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit West Taurus. Location: 18º 57.6’ S 58º 55.4’ E. and steaming west to Mauritius.

His words had a slight time delay; the picture was grainy, and the satellite dropped the call once. But it wasn’t a bad connection given the distance: Gordon “Mac” MacArthur was calling from the southern Indian Ocean.

Bess and her classmates were at the 60-student Adams School here, where it was noon. On the West Taurus it was 10 p.m. Maine: cold. Southern Indian Ocean: balmy.

Castine is on Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine, the granite-shored region at the heart of shipbuilding and seafaring in the Age of Sail during the 1800s, when sea captains from nearby Searsport and Belfast spent years away from their families moving cargo across the world’s oceans.

At any given time, there are half a dozen Adams School parents on ships the world over. Two dads are on their research vessel in the Bahamas. Morgan’s dad is chief mate on a grain carrier; Liam and Amelia’s dad is on a product tanker between California and Alaska; Drake and India’s dad works on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Others work at the Maine Maritime Academy (MMA) in town, teaching another generation of captains and engineers. And a dozen of Mac’s crewmates on the West Taurus are MMA graduates who call Downeast Maine home.

A Vermont native, Mac attended the MMA hoping to be a naval aviator, then fell in love with ships. He spent eight years in the Coast Guard – “between my sophomore and junior years” – and worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil for the past eight. He’s a licensed Second Mate. On the West Taurus, he is the dynamic positioning officer.

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This region had an industrial heartbeat 150 years ago. Bangor, Maine, The Lumber Capital of the World in the age of sail, is 15 miles up the Penobscot River from Castine. Down the bay, Stonington quarries and numerous coastal brickyards supplied Eastern cities with brownstone homes and granite statehouses. Fish canneries, ropewalks, and boatyards flourished.

Over several generations, the age of steam took the wind out of sailing ships; steel replaced granite and brick; fisheries collapsed or went far offshore to factory vessels. Maine still has lobster – selling now at 1970s prices. And it still has sea captains and marine engineers who can live in tiny coastal towns and earn a living on drilling rigs sailing from Singapore to Brazil, blogging to the kids at the local school.

Mac writes to the kids about fuel consumption, navigation, distance/speed calculations, voltage, watts and megawatts, cranes, pipes, anchors, latitude and longitude, and hydro-acoustic positioning while drilling exploratory oil wells off of Brazil. The kids ask questions about lifeboats, laundry, time zone changes, weather and currents, pirates in the notorious Straits of Malacca, water spouts, crew quarters, and onboard food. Oil is the whole point of moving West Taurus – a huge floating factory – from its shipyard birthplace in Singapore to the southern Atlantic via the Indian Ocean and around the Horn of Africa. Distance traveled from Singapore: 3,259 nautical miles. Average speed: 5.9 knots. Distance left to Brazil: 6,555 nautical miles. Are we there yet?

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