All Aboard

If in your youth you read stories about the sea, the idea of sailing on a freighter might appeal to you. You might think that, in the prolonged intimacy of the confines of the ship, your fellow travellers will confide stories which will bring you fame and fortune as a writer yourself.

What you soon discover when you ask the Passenger Shipping Association for freighter sailing dates, is that a cabin on a cargo ship is more expensive than one on the QE2, and your voyage could last a couple of months or more.

So «you'll probably find a cabin Ml of experienced voyagers, despising package travel and liable to suggest suddenly that everybody should have no dinner on board the first evening of entering port, rather than go ashore.

Then there are the people who join the crew.

When I was a teenager, I was so short of ready cash that I decided to work my passage from Buenos Aires to London on an old ship. In the huge Atlantic waves, she sometimes pointed her bow at the moon, as if she were a rocket about to take off! One of my jobs was to lug food from the ship's kitchen to the crew's quarters, along slippery decks, while incoming waves threatened to deliver the cans of stew straight into the sea below. As long as 1 didn't spill any, the crew were understanding!

The trip took six weeks, partly because freighters have changes of plan and partly because we made an unscheduled stop in a Brazilian port so that we could have the ship's engine repaired. Despite the fact that two members of the crew failed to return to the ship before we sailed, we were not delayed further, as our numbers were made up by two stowaways wanting to go and work in Portugal, which was not on our route!

This experience may have soured my view of entering the freighter business, although I was tempted after I'd spent a day with a dynamic Dane, who owned those ships in which tourists travel along the shores of Barbados. He-expounded on his sideline: buying freighters from bankrupt stock. But he insisted that he would never carry cargo, nor sell the ships for scrap. He explained enthusiastically that he would redesign the super-structure, do them up and anchor them where they would make him a fortune, all around the Gulf of Mexico as floating fun palaces! Though the project intrigued me, it remained a pipe dream!

Answer the following questions:

1. Why did the idea of sailing on a freighter appeal to the author?

2. What did he discover at the Passenger Shipping Association?

3. What was the author's fist working experience on board the ship?

4. What experience made the author change his mind to enter the freighter business?

5. What project intrigued the author?

6. Why did it remain a pipe dream? Express your supposition.