STUDENT ENTRY

From March 7^th, Docked in Freeport, Grand Bahamas.

Photo credit: Audrey Sheehan

I’m sitting against a dock line, my feet on the cat rail, staring out across the Freeport Marina. For some reason the moon has been especially beautiful the last couple of nights, and although you can’t actually see very many stars, the tired twinkling of the container cranes beacons is an interesting substitute. If I stood up and turned around, I’d see more machines, industrial and serious looking, so different from our port experiences to date. Freeport is everything we’ve learnt to despise, to condemn. It is a globalized industrial port with oil tankers, free zones, and environmentally unsound practices. China owns it and the Bush brothers run it… Theoretically Freeport should be the epitome of the worst of the worst, but it’s not. For some reason, Freeport has attracted me in a way no other port has, its real. Whether we like it or not container ships and oil tankers are the realities of the modern world. They’re what todays sailors sail. The support & pilot boats, Tugs & barges, even the massive oil transits here, this is all happening, its real work being done professionally and efficiently. There isn’t ethnic history or tourist following filling up the harbor, there is cranes & pipes & huge mechanical monsters working away. Maybe it’s just the realness that impresses me. It’s kind of like watching Grey’s Anatomy or CSI as a kid. You can’t help but want to be a doctor or a crime investigator when you grow up; they just seem so intense and exciting. Except here it’s real. Basically what I heard Ms.Hughes telling Zack sums it up, “Get involved with this business (modern maritime) and you’ll see the world at its most interesting. That’s always what I’ve wanted to do, what better way to do it than from a boat.”

-LIBBY ARFORD
Brunswick, Maine.