Home By The Sea

    Have you ever sold a house?  Have you driven by the home where you grew up and mourned at the loss of the trees you climbed as a kid?  Or have you further looked up the old homestead on Google Maps and dropped yourself on “street view” to have a look at the new siding, the dual-pane windows, or the swing-set peeking over the backyard fence that the new owners installed?  Sure, probably.  But I bet you’ve never found out that a former home had been given to another country, and that that country repainted it, and moved it 7,700 miles away?

                My “home” from July 1981 to May 1983 was in Honolulu Harbor but it wasn’t a building.  It was a ship.  I spent the majority of my hours, both awake and asleep, on the cutter Jarvis.  And when it wasn’t in Hawaii, say in Alaska or the middle of the Pacific, I spent pretty much every hour there.  My bed, my meals, my work; it all took place in a metal box 378 feet long and 50 feet wide. 

                The Jarvis was named after David Jarvis of the Revenue Cutter Service, a forerunner of the Coast Guard.  Lieutenant Jarvis became a hero when he led an overland expedition 1,500 miles to deliver food, in the form of 382 reindeer, to stranded whalers in Point Barrow Alaska in 1898.  Why they weren’t eating whale remains a mystery.

                I’ve never returned to Hawaii to revisit her although I’ve thought that it would be pretty cool to show my two sons where I stood bridge watch and how we lowered boats over the side to take boarding parties to foreign fishing vessels.  Google Maps will not allow me to “stand” on the wharf where the Jarvis is usually moored.  I am restricted to the road outside the gate where trees and buildings block my view.  The terrorists win again.  But neither of those issues matter now because if I do return to the Aloha State or even if the Google car is allowed to drive on to military bases, I’ll never see my Hawaiian home again.

    Because…

                earlier this year the Jarvis was decommissioned and then “given” to the Bangladesh Navy.  Gone is the bright red stripe on the bow; which was actually international orange, the same color as the Golden Gate Bridge.  It’s been painted over white.  Gone are the large black COAST GUARD letters painted along her hull; like a black Hollywoodland sign.  A plain F28, which has some meaning to her new crew, has replaced it.  Gone are the American flags, the Coast Guard flags, and the Coast Guard personnel.  Replaced I suppose by Bangladeshi flags and people.  Gone is the “Jarvis” painted on her stern, replaced by the name Somundra Joy.

                I tried to find what Somundra Joy means but was unsuccessful.  I guess there are some questions even The Google can’t answer.

                There are basically two ways a ship ends her life; she is either cut up for scrap or finds the sea floor.  The Somudra Joy, now the largest ship in the Bangladesh Navy, will patrol the Bay of Bengal.  In fact she arrived in her new home port of Chittagong two weeks ago today.  She will live to fight another day (another decade?).

Maybe it’s a good thing.  While not a living thing, she is still “alive” and she is still doing what she did 30-plus years ago when a young man from Fresno who had never spent one minute at sea came aboard her.  On the way to Chittagong the Somudra Joy delivered 40 tons of relief supplies to Manila for the Philippine typhoon disaster victims, although I doubt any of it was reindeer. 

In other news; Bangladesh has a navy.

*The picture above is the former Jarvis leaving San Francisco Bay on a foggy morning.