Everybody Has a Story: Surviving rough ride in a smelly ship – The Columbian

We had been out for about three days, almost all of it fighting seas bigger than our 115-foot boat, the MIECO (Marshall Islands Import-Export Company) Queen. The storm hit a few hours after we left Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands.

It was spring 1973. I had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands from 1968 to 70. I returned in 1971, got a teaching job, and was now on a field trip for the Marshall Islands Department of Education to give entrance examinations to eighth-grade students who wanted to go to the only public high school in this easternmost part of what was then a trust territory of the United States. I was going to visit schools on four atolls Mili, Ebon, Namdrik and Jaluit and one island, Kili, where the people of Bikini had been moved prior to the nuclear bomb tests of 1946-1958.

The MIECO Queen was legendary and not in a good way. Built in 1956, she was poorly equipped and indifferently maintained. Her main purpose was buying and selling in the remote outer islands buying copra (dried coconut) in 100-pound burlap bags, and selling kerosene, TP, rice, flour, canned meat, matches, fabric and so forth. The people on these islands made and sold copra to make money to supplement the fish and fruits provided by nature. The Japanese and American influences of the past 50-plus years had added some new things to their diet and general daily existence.

Why the owners of the MIECO Queen and its Fijian captain, Moses, didnt know about the storm remains a mystery to me. Maybe they did know and thought it wouldnt be that bad. After all, they had a job to do, a mission to complete. Regardless, we were barely on our way when that storm hit. Making landfall at Mili, the closest atoll, was secondary. Surviving became paramount.

When confronted by big waves, accepted nautical practice is to point the bow of the boat into the waves. Big waves that hit a smallish boat broadside or from the stern put the boat in danger of capsizing. Were the MIECO Queen to sink out of sight of land in a storm in the Pacific Ocean, all of us would drown.

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Everybody Has a Story: Surviving rough ride in a smelly ship - The Columbian