Landfall at Long Beach

I was up at five, on deck by twenty past, and I am glad I was.

California came out of the haze slowly, as if somebody was turning up a dimmer. First a line of low hills, grey on grey. Then, as the light came, gold on the hills and pink in the sky, and a long, flat, brown shoreline, and, very faintly, the shapes of cranes. Hundreds of cranes. The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles together are, I am told, one of the busiest container complexes on earth, and from out at sea at dawn it looks like a forest of metal giraffes.

The pilot

The pilot boat came out to meet us, small and orange, bouncing a little on the swell and throwing up a neat white bow wave. It came alongside, matched our speed, and a man in a lifejacket climbed up a rope ladder on the side of a moving ship as casually as you might climb onto a bus.

A few minutes later he was on the bridge, shaking the Captain's hand. Priya brought him coffee. I was allowed to stand in my corner and watch, and so I did.

Tugs

A ship of four hundred metres does not park itself. Inside the breakwater, four tugs came out to meet us, and for the next hour they pushed and pulled and nudged us, between other ships and past other berths, with a precision I can only describe as orchestral. The pilot spoke on the radio in a low, unhurried voice. The tugs answered. The ship turned, very slowly, in a space that did not look nearly big enough, and then slid sideways towards the quay with the delicacy of a large man getting into a small chair.

Tiny's deck crew had the mooring lines ready fore and aft. Lines went over. Winches turned. And at a little after nine in the morning, Pacific time, after nearly four weeks at sea, we were alongside.

Customs

Customs and immigration came aboard at ten. Two officers, very polite, very serious, entirely uninterested in jokes, as Priya had promised.

I sat in the ship's office with my passport and my forms, in black ink and capital letters. One of the officers looked at my passport, then at me, then at the passenger declaration, then at me again.

"Purpose of your voyage, sir?"

I had prepared for this. I had decided to tell the plain truth, in as few words as possible, in the manner of Captain Halvorsen.

"I had some free time," I said.

There was a pause. The officer looked at me for a long moment. Then she stamped the form, handed it back, and said, "Must be nice," with a face that suggested she would very much like some free time herself. I took it as a blessing.

Solid ground

I was cleared to go ashore just after lunch. I only went as far as the end of the quay and back, because the real shore leave is tomorrow, and because the port is not really a place to wander. But I walked down the gangway and stepped onto concrete for the first time since Busan, and something very strange happened.

The ground moved.

It did not move, of course. I moved. My body has spent so long adjusting to the gentle roll of the ship that solid ground now feels wrong, and for the first few minutes I swayed like a man coming out of a pub. Tiny, who was on the quay checking the lines, watched me with enormous amusement and said, "Land sick. Good. Means you are a sailor now."

I stood on the quay for a while, looking up at the ship. I have lived on it for four months, and I have never seen it from the outside properly. It is absurdly big. It is the size of a street. My cabin is a single window, high up, near the back. I found it eventually and waved at it, which was foolish. Something moved in the window. I am almost certain it was a cat.

Evening

The ship never sleeps in port. All night the cranes worked above us, lifting boxes off and putting boxes on, under floodlights, with a noise like distant thunder. Elena served tacos at dinner in honour of California. They were very good. She said, with a perfectly neutral face, that they were "practice for tomorrow". I do not know how she knows about tomorrow. She knows everything.

Container was in the canvas bag again when I got back to the cabin. She has decided the bag is the problem. She may be right.