San Diego to Panama
Harry Bridges may no longer be alive but his influence definitely is. We were scheduled to be in San Diego for one day and stayed three. As mentioned before, our schedule in port is strictly in the hands of the cargo loaders, the Super Cargo and the stevedores. There have long been two major stevedore unions in the US, the east coast was controlled by the mob and the west coast and Hawaii by Harry Bridges and the communists. Loading and unloading was slow on Sunday and on Monday, the stevedores quit at the end of the day to attend a union meeting. The Super Cargo, with the help of Beck's beer from the ship's slop chest, was able to convince them to return early Tuesday morning so we could complete by the end of the day. We were then able to depart on our modified schedule which called for tugs along side at 0600 Wednesday.
We discharged the pilot, cleared the sea buoy by 0700 and set a course for Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. From that waypoint, we shaped our course toward the mainland of Mexico and have continued to follow a course roughly parallel to the coasts of Mexico, Guatamala, El Salvador, Nicauragua and Costa Rica on our way to the Balboa, Panama pilot station, maintaining a distance off the coast of 30 - 40 miles. We have now (on this trip) gone through 25 time zones, having made sufficient easting to put us back in the eastern time zone of North America but will revert to the central time zone we started in; after transiting the Panama Canal and returning to Houston, with one stop in Costa Rica.
The second day out, we cleared Cabo San Lucas and entered tropical waters, below the Tropic of Cancer. It is always comfortable for us to return to tropical waters where so much of our time at sea has been spent. Actually, being south of 30 degrees latitude makes us more comfortable but the balmy breezes associated with the tropics are something special. With a following wind cancelling the wind created by the ship's speed through the water, we enjoyed an idyllic three days on the pilot deck, reading and sunning in our lounge chairs. By the fifth day, we had entered the area of the northeast trades and now have easterly winds added to the ship's speed creating more than thirty knots over the deck but the temperatures, sea and air, are in the high 20's C (low 80's F) and the pool has been filled again for afternoon recreation.
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The east coast longshoremen's union was indeed mobbed up, but the West Coast ILWU longshore workers are not and were not at any time controlled by Harry Bridges and/or the communists. The ILWU has been from its inception a democratic rank-and-file union. That means all decisions are made by the membership, from every dime that is spent to every statement made by an official. Every official at the local level must stand for election every two years then return to the docks for one year before standing for election again. No official can be paid more than the highest paid worker, without overtime. Harry, at the international level, stood for election every two years for forty years. He could have been easily removed from office at any time by 15% of the membership signing a petition. The highest salary he was ever paid was $28,000 a year.
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