SS Santa Mariana - Prudential-Grace Lines
Seldom does an American merchant seamen experience the rare privledge of working on an American passenger ship, because frankly, they're money losing propositions for their owners. Most American ships are engaged in travelling from US port to US port (like San Francisco to Honolulu) and therefore protected from foreign competition under the Jones Act. One of the few American passenger ships to survive operating in worldwide trade into the 1970's was the SS Santa Mariana, and this only because she was a "rule beater". She wasn't designed exclusively as a passenger ship, she was also designed as a cargo ship. She carried 99 passengers, because that meant that she only had to have one doctor aboard. A normal freighter didn't need any doctor aboard so long as she carried twelve or less passengers. And every 100th passenger on a passenger ship required the shipping company to hire an additional doctor for the staff, an expensive proposition in this country.

The Santa Mariana was a plum assignment and my new shipmate Ray, who had sailed with me on the SS President Johnson that previous summer, had pestered our MARAD Rep in San Francisco for months begging for a chance to sail on her. It was also a golden opportunity to circumnavigate South America and go through both the Panama Canal and the Straits of Magellan, at the southern tip of South America, during the North American "winter" months (which would mean "summer" south of the equator).

When we boarded the ship in San Francisco, the Mariana was not in the aforepictured configuration, as the aft gantry crane had been removed in Seattle so as to allows us to deliver a Boeing Jetfoil to a Venezuelan company in Lake Maracaibo. So aside from a hold full of agricultural products from California's fertile central valley, we were also carrying spare jet engines and enough spare machine parts to outfit a small navy.

As soon as Ray and I stowed our gear in the Cadet's Cabin, I hunted down the Chief Engineer and introduced myself. The Chief turned out to be a gnarly old greybeard, slightly overweight, who dressed in an oil stained pair of coveralls looked like he belonged in the grease pit down at the local service station. His attire took me a bit by surprise, since it was the first time I had ever seen a Chief Engineer who looked like he had spent any time at all in the Engine Room. Usually, the Chief spends his days in his office, approving overtime for the other Engineer's and reading the latest Zane Gray Western.

The Chief greeted me warmly, and promptly explained that the ship was having some problems maintaining the required temperatures in the refrigerated cargo holds, which explained his more than casual dress. He then walked me down the hall to introduce me to the 1st Asst. Engineer, turned me over to my "real boss", and told the 1st to make good use of the cheap labor. The First laughed, and when the Chief left, gave me the "real reason" for the Chief's less than fashionable attire.

Evidently, our Chief was in "hiding". He had experienced an intimate encounter with one of the female passenger's who had not understood his casual attitude towards shipboard intimacies, and who was now making a project out of making the Chief's continued love-life miserable. She had even developed the bad-habit of calling at his cabin in the crew section of the ship and seemed quite determined to make an honest man out of the wiley old Chief. The First joked that some of the seahags aboard the Mariana, as he called all of the rather geriatric group of female passengers on the ship, had more sea time than either the Chief OR the First put together.

It wasn't until later that evenning when I went to a "movie" in the passenger section of the ship that I would discover just how true the First's comment had been. Of our 99 passengers, I'd have estimated that at least 70 were females over the age of 70, and so I doubted that I would be partaking in many of many future opportunities for passengers and ship's officers to mingle. Asides from this fact, I hadn't brought any formal dinner-dancing type attire... just some khaki's and a few greasy boilersuits. In fact, I would later find, there wasn't a single woman aboard within thirty years of my then young age. No, this wasn't going to be any episode of the "Love Boat"... at least, not unless you might consider four month's in a Rest Home to be a reasonable facsimile of an episode of Fantasy Island.