Marlize van Romburgh

At first, pitch darkness. He walks inside the bridge of the ship and lets his eyes adjust. Blackness surrounds him, but he knows that in a few moments he will start to pick out the recognizable shapes and lights. There are the windows, outlined by the moonlight reflecting off the water outside. There, too, are the bright flickers of red and orange and yellow of the instruments and radar equipment on the panel before him. And looking out of those windows onto the outside deck below, the dark shapes of his fellow cadets standing on night watch.

“I’ve always been on the water. It’s pretty much all I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine being any other way,” he says. “I love it. I love the mechanical aspect of it and the feeling you get when you step onto a huge ship. There’s something about being at sea, and watching the waves and how they interact with the vessel.”

Robert “Thor” Proulx has been floating his whole life. The son of a commercial fisherman from rural Homer, Alaska, Proulx sailed around the world with his parents as young boy. In a sailboat, the three of them sailed down to Seattle and Mexico, across the Pacific, down to Australia and over to South Africa, stopping everywhere in between. If you ask him how many countries he’s been, he has to pause and think. “Fifteen… 20… I’m not sure.”

Proulx is a marine transportation junior now at California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, Calif., just northeast and across the Bay from San Francisco. Here, at this 800-student school in the California State University system, students are seamen in training. Along with a few of the requisite college science, math and English classes, cadets study steam engines and circuits, thermodynamics and fluids, radar and charts and constellations. They steer tugboats and 500-foot ships, weld metal and carve up the world by longitudes and latitudes. And as part of their curriculum, they live, work and study aboard a ship for three entire summers.

The Training Ship Golden Bear, the pride of the academy, sits docked at her resting place on campus. It’s late fall now, and she’s getting ready to hibernate for the winter. In fact, for most of the school year, this massive ship, an ex-Navy vessel designed to map the ocean floor, sits here, tied down and immobile. Students still come up here for odd tasks like checking the day’s weather up on the bridge, and when the on-campus dorms are full the ship’s staterooms function as overflow housing. But it’s only in the summer months that the Golden Bear fulfills her true purpose as a training ship. Then, about 300 cadets take her on two 2-month cruises. On a rotating schedule, the ship travels to Central and South America one year, Asia the next year and the South Pacific the year after.

Cal Poly gives its own students a chance to travel with and experience life aboard the Golden Bear with a unique program called Cal Poly at Sea. Up to 100 hundred students spend a quarter on the cruise, alongside two or three Cal Poly professors who teach regular Cal Poly classes aboard the ship. School weeks are six days long, but are broken up by three days in each port where students are allowed to travel on their own time.

For the California Maritime Academy students a quarter at sea is no vacation cruise, but two months of hard labor combined with classroom work. Cadets live in uniforms, they maintain the engine, paint and clean the exterior, chip and grind and weld. They learn first aid and navigation and stand out on watch for hours on end. The daily routine, lived by a 24-hour clock, is carefully mapped out blocks of time to eat, sleep and work.

But like many of the California Maritime Academy students, Proulx’s sea training started long before his first cruise on the Golden Bear in the summer of 2007. Living at sea with his parents – and later just his father when his mother passed away in Australia – he took the helm early and hasn’t left it since.

The young boy and his family traveled everywhere. Madagsacar, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea, they worked tug boats in South Africa, lived in Australia.

He grew up, sometimes in these places, but mostly it was in the middle of miles and miles of water.

“For a long time, it was just my father and myself on the boat in the middle of the ocean. He can’t be up all the time, so I had to learn really young, too, so I could be up half the time too. I was in charge of the boat and the sails. I had to change the sails if it starts blowing, change course, plot positions. It was very similar to being on a real ship, and I think that really made me who I am.”

In some ways, Proulx was bred for the water. His grandfather and several cousins were in the Navy, and his father sees him as continuing on a family legacy.

“It’s a family history and tradition of being on the water. I didn’t have to think about it, really.”

“My dad’s real proud of me, too. He knows I’m doing what I love and he thinks that’s just great. And I’m the first one on his side of the family to go to college too.”

Today, it’s a crisp and sunny California fall day on the CMA campus. Proulx is wearing jeans, leather work boots and a light blue T-shirt that boasts a sailing event on the back. He’s lean and of average height, but with powerful arms that look like they could spend days rigging masts. When he removes his sunglasses, which sit on a prominent Roman nose, marine blue eyes sparkle back.

He pauses and contemplates every question, then slowly answers with a slight hint of a drawl. Only in his mid-20s, he already has enough tales to fill a life story, but he’s only started.

He has one thing on his mind: he wants to be a captain for one of the largest ships in the world. It’s planned out. He’ll graduate in 2010, find a job as a third mate and climb the ranks from there; from third mate to second and then first mate, then a staff captain or chief mate, and finally master captain.

A ship’s captain, a job which easily earns upwards of $100,000 and up to $250,000 or $300,000, is a massive responsibility. Along with the daily tasks of navigating, crew management and keeping detailed logs, the captain is ultimately accountable for everything from oil spills to crew member injuries that happen aboard his vessel.

“It’s a huge responsibility, you have millions and millions of dollars of equipment under your command.”

Since he’s been at the maritime academy, Proulx has gone on two cruises: one with the Golden Bear the summer after his freshman year, and another the next summer with a commercial shipping company. The experiences were vastly different.

As a cadet on the Golden Bear, Proulx was just one of the 300-plus uniformed cadets packed into the ship. With so many students on board, living was crowded and privacy almost non-existent. Work shifts consisted of tasks like standing out on watch for hours at a time, handling mooring lines and standing behind the helm up on bridge.

Still, it was a learning experience and one that made for good travel stories too. Proulx and the Golden Bear traveled to South Asia that summer, a place he said was as culturally different from America as any place he’s been. In the Philippines the cadets went to beach during the day and at night they flooded a local bar and danced until midnight. In Hong Kong they were especially lucky, arriving in port just as a local beer festival was going on and alongside an American Navy ship, a perfect combination for a good time ashore.

And then there was Japan which was “totally different again.” Here the cadets found a clean, quiet country to reflect and contemplate in after a long two months at sea. They explored the port and admired the Japanese architecture, often traveling by the seat of their pants since almost none of the locals spoke English.

“It was quite an experience,” Proulx laughs, remembering.

The experience was made complete that evening when they sat down to order Sushi and realized they couldn’t read the menu at all. Feeling brave, Proulx said he just started pointing at words on the menu and left his meal “up to chance”.

“I love seeing different cultures and how they live and react. I’ve really enjoyed seeing different things, eating different foods.”

A year later, after his sophomore year at the Academy, Proulx embarked yet again on another journey, this time up and down the Mississippi River between Tampa Bay and New Orleans with the commercial Keystone Shipping Company. On continuous back-and-forth 30-hour trips between the two cities, they shipped oil and gasoline up and down the river.

For Proulx it was a learning experience even more valuable than that aboard the Golden Bear. Instead of 300 people, he suddenly found himself running a ship with a team of only 24. It made for much more privacy, the luxury of his own room and more time to spend “doing his own thing.” But it also came with a new level of responsibility.

“I was only getting paid maybe $2.50 an hour really, but it was an academic experience. The amount of responsibility they entrusted on me really helped me grow.”

On one of those trips back down the river, as they came into Tampa Bay, Proulx said the captain turned to him and said, “you’re in charge, you get to give all the helm commands” and he found himself at the stern, doing what the master of a ship would normally do until a pilot came aboard to steer it into port.

An air of confidence – undoubtedly gained from the need to be resourceful when practically alone in the middle of the sea – is evident now as Proulx strides up the steps to the bridge of the dormant Golden Bear. As he walks inside the warm room, brightly lit up by the sun reflecting off the water in the bay outside, he takes a casual inventory of the instruments around him. It’s obvious he’s at home here behind the stern and panel of navigation equipment. It’s easy to imagine that, were the engine droning down below and the waves crashing at the vessel’s sides, Proulx would be up here at the helm, calmly looking out at the horizon.

To the left of the stern, the captain’s chair sits like a throne, tempting and empty.

Filling that seat wasn’t always an aspiration though. In fact, Proulx credits a role model. When he was on the island of Mayotte as a teenager, Proulx met Kevin Garnier, captain of Polar Tankers, a man who he says mentored and inspired him to go for more.

“We talked a lot, and one day he just said, ‘If you love this so much, why would you want to be a tug boat captain when you can run the biggest ships in the world?’”

It was a life changing moment.

“Ever since, that’s all I’ve thought about.”

“I want to be on the water for the rest of my life because I really can’t imagine being any other way.”

Yet despite the romance in his life story – perhaps something that sounds like a Robinson Crusoe-type adventure to the average American college student – Proulx realizes it’s had its drawbacks too.

“I think that growing up on a boat for that amount of time really made me different. I didn’t go to a regular high school, I didn’t ever go to prom, I didn’t go to the Friday night football games. I missed out on a lot of the social norms, I guess.”

He was home-schooled, ship-schooled, really, for almost his entire life. And although he spent a few months ashore attending school in Australia and later in Thailand, an attempt to go to high school back in the States, simply “didn’t work out.”

He says he only met a handful of other children during the 10 years he sailed with his parents that were growing up the same way.

He realizes too, what the sealife means for having a normal homelife in the future.
“Going to sea makes it very hard to really have a relationship with anyone. You spend a long time away,” he says.

And despite hints that he currently has a girlfriend at another university, Proulx adds, “Eventually I hope to have a family and get married, but I haven’t met anyone yet that’s going to be able to do that. I think it would take a very independent person on both sides of the relationship.”

Proulx often finds it hard to adjust to shorelife again when he comes back from a cruise. “It’s a culture shock to be around normal people again. They’re not grumpy or focused on their job all the time. When you’re on the ship you’re working the whole time or you’re on-call for the time you’re sleeping.”

It’s experiences like these that have shaped the cadet. Soft-spoken and articulate, he talks about politics and world affairs like a political science student, sprinkling in his own opinions about everything from the war in Iraq — “why do people want to go to all these places they know nothing about and blow them up?”– to Western media — “Viacom owns everything.”

“Seeing other parts of the world, and how the media potrays those countries when you’re actually there when major events are happening, it really opens your eyes,” he says.

He finds that when he steps back on land, it’s not just his wobbly sealegs that struggle to adjust, but his entire state of mind. Family and friends back in Alaska live the lives of small-town Americans and tire quickly of exotic tales of pirates and far-flung ports.

“They listen at first, and then they just go back to living their lives again,” he says. “You really see how close-minded people get to outside things. I think they’re trapped. Trapped in their own little world.”

Trapped and land-locked is one thing that this cadet knows he’ll never be. Whatever sea adventures or challenges lie ahead, he’ll welcome them, just as long as he gets to sit in the captain’s chair as he does so.

He stands now, leaning over the side railing of the quarter deck. “This is all I want,” he says, peering down into the sparkling reflections below.