For this year’s senior crewmember interview, I sat down with the Chief Engineer of the M/V Martin Explorer. Edward Crowder, born and raised in the Tampa, Florida area, has held the title of Chief Engineer for approximately 25 years of the 39 years he has been working in the maritime industry. Large, covered in tattoos, and sporting long hair and a mustache, Chief is the iconic image of classic rocker or biker. He would often talk about his love of motorcycles and his shop he has back at his house where he builds and repairs them, with a healthy dose of classic rock discussion thrown in for good measure. Chief Crowder was something of a wild child and rebel as a young man, dropping out of high school and going off on his own for a while, even getting his own apartment where he said he loved listening to his favorite Elvis Costello record. At the age of 16 his father came to him and told him he needed to sort his life out and offered young Edward a job working on his uncle’s boat. His father had lied to his uncle, saying Edwards was 17 going on 18, when in reality he was a full year younger. These were different times and it was a lot easier to pull a fast one like this back then, before TWIC cards and Homeland Security and all that expensive bull, according to Chief that is. For perspective, he mentioned that he started off making $20 a day compared to my $156 a day.
When I asked Chief Crowder about what he liked best about the maritime industry he got a bit jaded and joking replied “Nothing…wait, don’t put that. It used to be exciting, now it just pays the bills.” After so long working in the industry and with all the changes that it has gone through in that time, its no wonder how a sailor can get burnt out of the job. Naturally, when I asked him what he liked least, he said he did not like how much the industry has changed and the direction it has gone, that hawsepipers like himself were a dying breed and companies did not want them anymore. He said the companies wanted “educated fools” instead, guys like myself who had a college degree but didn’t know one end of a wrench from the other.
Chief Crowder had mentioned earlier in the summer that he had taken some classes at San Jacinto Maritime. So I asked him if the opportunity came about where he were back at the campus one day and Captain Arrowwood came to him and asked him to speak to the student’s like myself for a moment, what advice would he offer? He thought a moment then said “Learn the boat; get in there and find shit out. Ask questions (he gave me a long look then), but not too many at once.” You see, I shared the same watch with the Chief and he was always nearby, so I had a habit of asking him all the questions I came up with any given day. About halfway through the hitch he told me I only got 3 questions a day, he was only joking a little.
As you would expect of anyone working nearly 40 years in any industry, Chief Crowder was a font of sea stories. It would take him a moment to get started if you asked, but once he got primed up, he would go on and on about the wild times he has had underway. He’s been an offshore tug guy most of that career and in that time he has traveled to ports in South America, Puerto Rico, Honduras, and the Florida Keys, just to mention a few that he rattled off. With a wistful smile, he said he and some guys used to go swimming by jumping off the upper decks of a boat he used to work on. The one that stood out the most, to him at least, was one time when they were underway on a 135 foot tug in the Gulf, pulling an empty tow behind them, and they got caught in a hurricane, the Storm of the Century he said it was called later. It seems two different storms clashed together in the Gulf and they were stuck out in 30 to 35 foot seas, the kind where swells had swells on top of them, and while sitting in the fiddly with his life vest on he could see the tow rise up one moment only to utterly disappear the next. You could tell that one rattled him.
