When I was 18 and right out of high school I was a house painter. I made a grand total of $1.25 an hour, "1973 dollars." It really sucked but it put gas in my car and beer in my belly and you got to do what ya got to do. I painted untill Jan 1 1974. A good friend of mine "Marc" was working offshore in the oil patch. So Marc helps me get a job on a crewboat working two weeks on two weeks off making $29.95 a day. Work two weeks and party two weeks, sounds good to me. A crewboat is roughly 110' long and on the inside it has rows of seats kind of looks like a bus or airplane. We would carry crews to the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Man I was glad to get away from painting. Well guess what? The main job of a deckhand on a crewboat other than mopping up the passengers vomit is painting!! Speaking of vomit I did more than my share of that. Being seasick has got to be the next thing to dying. So after 7 months of deck work I was promoted to engineer. That was good and bad. Good part was more money less painting. Bad part was the only engineer opening was on a standby boat. A standby boat does just that, it stands by the oil rig in case the rig should blow out and the crew has to abandon the rig. So I'm stuck 90 miles offshore for two weeks on this boat and as soon as I get there so does a 7 day storm with constant 12' seas. Kind of like the Shrimpboat storm scene in Forest Gump. I lived on kool-aid for a week. After a week of this I was cured of being seasick. Hurrah!! I guess it was quit puking or die! I worked offshore for the next 8 years and never got seasick again. After two years of being an engineer I had enough sea time to take my captains test and dam I passed. YEE HAW!!! As years went by I upgraded from a 100 ton to 300 then 500 ton license. Went from crewboats to supplyboats to tugboats. We would usually end up towing something to Mexico. We wouldn't go to tourist places in Mexico, we would go to these rat hole oilfield ports. You would think you went back in time 50 years. I guess you've heard of "Don't drink the water." Well I accidentally got a belly full of it and I had killer cramps and the screaming shits for a week. I said earlier being seasick was next to dying, No this is!!! Anyway it was pretty cool most of the time and scary as hell sometimes too. When your 100 miles from land and the shit starts hitting the fan it's not very fun! A few years after I got off the boat "Jeanne Candies" the cook stabbed the engineer and killed him! Then a few years later the boat was sold to another company, shortly afterwards it was hit by another boat and sank and two guys drowned! I got away with only a FREAKING BROKE NECK!!! Lucky me.
Pic of Boat