Walking on Water...From the deck of an oil tanker

As the only woman among twenty men, I sailed on board a 35,000-ton U.S. Flag oil tanker that traveled to twenty-four countries, fueled the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, sailed the Malacca Straits under the threat of pirates, and visited communist Romania during Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Walking on Water is a completed 91,000-word memoir of my high-sea adventures on the M.V. Patriot over a period of four years.

I was privileged to sail with my husband, captain of the M.V. Patriot, to remote oil ports. Listed as a crew member “supernumerary”, I tried to keep out of the way, but with my eyes and ears open. I started a journal from day one to record this rare experience that began in 1978 and ended in 1987, with time off in between.

I initially discovered the sea at the age of ten on the French shores of the English Channel. In fascination, I watched the limitless horizon where the water merged with the sky at low tide. It so happened, by a trick of destiny, that I married a man of the sea, a Belgian I met in New York. As soon as our two teen-aged sons became relatively self sufficient, or so I hoped, I seized the opportunity and ran away to join my husband. With the green light from the Texas shipping company and the union and the wonder of relatives and friends, I left our tropical island in Florida for the bone-chilling North Sea mid-January 1978.

Very few male authors have written realistically about merchant mariners. Women’s perspectives are particularly uncommon since women are seldom crewmembers and wives rarely travel with their sea=faring husbands. Therefore, my memoir provides a unique perspective of life aboard a ship with twenty men…and an occasional prostitute.

Walking on Water is broken into seven chapters, or “voyages”. My first voyage spans the months of January-March in 1978, beginning in Hamburg, Germany and ending is the Caribbean two months later via Holland and Sicily. This initial voyage is when I become acquainted with the routines and customs of a merchant fleet and face my first storm, a true initiation into life at sea. During the second voyage, spanning October-November 1979, I crossed the Panama Canal for the first time. From the Caribbean, we sail up to the Artic Circle. In the third voyage, the M.V. Patriot is chartered to the U.S. government. I return aboard with the captain in Italy, March 1984. We travel east through the Mediterranean, loading and discharging cargo, and then head west to the Atlantic to Brittany in France, up to England and down to Spain. From Italy, we sail to Romania, through the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. Along the Mediterranean, we cross the Atlantic to New York Harbor, then sail down to Venezuela, through the Gulf of Mexico to Texas, ending up in Florida, Port Everglades the second half of July. The fourth voyage begins in December in Corpus Christi, Texas, where we embark for the Panama Canal o Ecuador. I cross the Equator for the first time before we return through the Canal to Texas, New Orleans, and Yorktown, Virginia. On the fifth voyage, we make several trips over the Atlantic and Mediterranean, visiting Algeria several times. We sail east to Part Said, Egypt through the Suez Canal and the Read Sea leaving January 1986.

The last two voyages take us to the Far East, through the South China Sea, the Philippines Sea, and the Malacca Straits, rife with pirates. We sail west over the Indian Ocean to Arabia during the Iran-Iraq War. On my sixth voyage, we return to the Persian Gulf and the war ships in Bahrain; I witness the captain fight another kind of battle inside the ship, inevitable between crewmembers during stressful events. On the seventh and final voyage, we face the difficulty of providing fuel for the U.S. Navy during a dangerous conflict. We are constantly under the threat of being bombed and must travel through the Persian Gulf under Navy escort. We leave the ship for the last time Singapore, September 1987.