The Pain don’t hurt!

The VHS player has broken down. No more crappy movies. No more Seagal. My theory as for the cause of the malfunction is this: the grease from Steven Seagals back-slick somehow excreted from the tape and slimed the magnetic reader thingy inside the VHS player. It’s perfectly plausible, the man’s head is a veritable petroleum refinery. Before the unfortunate fouling of the reader, we managed to watch the last Seagal movie in the collection, “The Glimmer Man”:
“We used to send him out in the jungle, right……First, there’d be calm. Then a glimmer……then you’d be dead.” 
The man has such range. 
Now we have to get used to the fact that there will be no more shitty old movies. We were planning to watch “Road House”, Patrick Swayze’s only movie as far as I’m concerned, to try to fill the void left by ol’ Steven. That will never happen now. It’s a great movie too, I love it when the sexy doctor offers him anesthetic before the stitches and he’s all like “naaah, pain don’t hurt!”. Solid!

The FLIR camera, Forward Looking Infra Red, was setup for the Gulf of Aden. It’s operated by a small joystick and there are friendly buttons to push to switch between the different modes. Apart from the standard black-and-white view there are 3 different “Predator”-modes. The thing is completely silent however, so the sound effects I had to do myself. There is also a small problem with the camera. It doesn’t work. You can see pirates on it, sure, but only if they come really close. So that kind of defeats the whole purpose slightly. Other than that, pirate watch is totally sweet. In the daytime I stand watch at the stern ramp in my underwear and work on my tan. At night I stand watch at the stern ramp in my underwear and work on my ideas for pirate counter measures. In theory, Molotov cocktails should work nicely.

After the gulf of Aden we passed through Babel Mandeb, “The Gate of Tears”, into the Red Sea. It felt very lord-of-the-ring-sy. I asked why it’s called the red sea but no one seems to know. There were theories about the African sand blowing in the wind making everything red, or the sunset being particularly red. Who knows? Our first stop was Port Sudan where I witnessed a more traditional ship loading method. Manpower. At least 100 men took part in the discharging of the vessel astern of us. White bags of stuff from a ship that looked like it already sunk twice, loaded onto trucks that looked like they’ve already been scrapped. It was 35 degrees in the sun today and 37 in the holds. How do you carry heavy bags for a whole day under those conditions? It gives perspective on hard work.

At the top of the red sea there’s a fork in the road. The right rabbit ear takes you into the gulf of Aqaba. We’re going there next to deliver some more pieces of shit. After that we’re taking the left rabbit ear that leads up to Suez. Now, I need a shower. I smell like a pile of cod.