Prejudice and Myth

You see the whole world as a sailor

I wish I got to see more. The world is a busy place and you only have few hours in each port. In Algeciras, Spain I went to Gibraltar, but only had around 6 hours… In china we also only had  a few hours in every port. New ships sail really fast, and stays only short time in the harbor.

Its almost an officejob to sail.

Great misunderstanding…

Earlier there were companies that had rerouting material that claimed that it were an office job. – Ships are anyway controlled by a computer… NO! Not even close. An containership that is 400 meters long have a extremely big engine department. – Big engines have to be checked often, and big engines takes long time to fix…

Sailors are macho…

If you by macho mean fat and lazy. I guess that back when the ships were made out of wood, we were cool and macho… But now? – Hell no…

Girl in every country.

I don’t know if this ever has happened… But the stories are great. :-D

Earlier sailors were out sailing for years. Now it is only about 9-12 weeks… To be honest after 3 months I really, really miss my girlfriend… We stay in a habour max 24 hours… And we comes to a harbor no more often that once a month… No girl, today would accept that…

Prostitution

Dangerous topic...

From what we hear in the stories it were used a lot, back then… - I know several people that has been at a hooker, but luckily none of them had a girlfriend or a wife back home. - In most harbors you can still find a sailors club. And some of these sell more than cheep DVDs and beers… Thank god its not as common as earlier.

 

You get rich as a sailor

In Denmark we have something we call "DIS" (Danish registered ship register). This means that you as an Danish officer on board a Danish vessel don't pay taxes.

The reason we have this DIS thing, is to make more people sail.

So do we get rich? Well... We get a good salary when we become a senior officer.