Serpent in the Glow

Watching Predators Below and Politics Above from a Ship Off Taiwan

I have been on this ship in Taiwan for over two weeks now. I will be heading home in just over a week, I think. Jet lag seemed to work in my favour for the first few days. I thought I’d hit the ground running. Waking up at two, three, then four in the morning as it wore off. Starting the day with water, an hour of reading the project engineering documents, breakfast, and an hour of exercise on the helicopter deck before the morning meeting.

Then the weather hit. Five days of gale force winds. We got a couple of rain-soaked groundhog days in the port of Taichung, before they kicked us out to free up a berth for their regular customers. Day, after day of choppy seas and strong wind. You might think we’re in the Baltic sea the way this shallow water gets up so quickly. If the rain was not so warm, and the sea so green.

You only get to see the Wet Moon in the tropics. It’s called ‘wet’ when it looks like a bowl, or a cup. Here, it was fat and blood red. A symbol of Mary, the mother of God. A smile. A friend to all women. A vessel of life, which points upwards to heaven.

Also, reportedly a sign of apocalypse.

We have fairly good internet. I call home whenever the time zones align. My youngest daughter has a bacterial skin infection after having chicken pox recently. She looks to be in so much pain, but she won’t take the disgusting medicine issued by the NHS. You have to go private to get the antibiotic that has sugar in it. My wife is angry at me, and jealous, for being away.

Video calls are painful. My wife vents and I sit in silence. The painful threat of childhood memories of divorce fills my chest.

I ignore the feelings and say nothing.

I think about my meeting with Erika Komisar, at ARC. She doesn’t approve of being away from your children. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for them. But so is not having a vocation, or an income, or a purpose.

I think the particular sacrifices and pain we pick up along the way is who we are. Or, at least, who I am.

It all passes. My daughter’s smile cuts through it all.

The weather improved, but the work did not. There have been so many technical breakdowns that the little work we have done has been repetitive and frustrating. A little bit ‘Groundhog Day’.

As it has warmed up, my prison yard walks around the helideck and the muster station have gotten sweatier, but more enjoyable. I walked 7.5 miles today on steel and aluminium. That’s about 18,000 steps, according to my phone. I’ve long held the theory that you take on the properties of your environment. I feel my body stiffening again, as it does on a steel ship.

The day after the night of the Wet Moon, I started to see flying fish around the vessel. Some even landed on deck, as they do.

I love to see flying fish.

Photo by John Cobb on Unsplash

They are just, so, … alien.

The first time I saw them was as a deck cadet on my first merchant vessel. A cruise ship, back in 2008, I think. Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand.

Flying fish remind me of a time when all this was so new and exciting. Back when the south coast of England still seemed foreign and warm to me. When I was green and full of wonder.

I remember the Filipinos warning me about spearfish that also ‘fly’ out the water and impale fishermen through the chest.

I remember them asking me if I like bread and finding that such a foreign question to ask.

‘What do you mean, do I like bread’?

Being Scottish, bread isn’t something you like or dislike. That’s like asking if I like breathing air or drinking water. Bread is bread! There is no day without bread, for me.

They eat rice out here. Bread is a luxury. Like cake, or scotch.

I saw a spearfish hit the side of our ship, and slip down the port side, riding the crest of our wake as we pushed through the turbulent spring tide. The tidal stream gets up to 3.5 knots here at this time of year, and rips past us like a river offshore.

That night I was looking over the side of the ship’s rail. We were working, so the deck lights filled the sea around us with a warm yellowing glow. The warm wind was fresh, at twenty knots. There were flying fish, escaping the illuminated crests of a wave, but being thrown back down by strong gusts. The fish couldn’t fly their usual distance and so glided laterally along the trough of a wave, instead the way they usually fly straight ahead over the next three or four crests.

To me they look like fairies. Something magical. But in truth, I know they skim into our world only to avoid the predators of their own.

I spent an hour watching as a serpent of the deep loitered, wriggling in the rough seas beside our ship, using our unnatural glow to its predatory advantage. It was maybe six or eight feet long. Silvery, but almost ghostly white. A snake eel, or a garfish. Too wide to be a spearfish.

Hunting.

I don’t believe that I should believe in Darwinism anymore. The enlightenment idea that Genesis is not correct is so damaging to our story of humanity, that I just can’t live in that story. When you look at a flying fish, it feels like a miracle.

Go on. Buy a goldfish. Teach it to fly.

But survival is real.

Watching alien creatures fight for their existence made me feel grateful.

That first big trip on the cruise lines took me to the Red Sea as well. 2008 was the height of the piracy time. We had armed Israeli and British guards on board for the transit, but it was a lot safer back then than it is now. I remember being lookout on pirate watch in the night and seeing miles and miles of bioluminescent jellyfish around us. They flashed reddish white, like lightening beneath the surface of the water. But they were synchronised. As if they, hundreds and hundreds of them, shared a single heartbeat.

I was the only one who saw that.

The night after I watched the serpent-eel hunting fairy-fish, I was doing my usual prison walk on the muster deck. My ‘the rest is history’ podcast was drowned out by a thunderous roar.

I took my headphones off and looked out from the ship’s side again. It was very dark this night, with thick cloud.

Two fighter jets passed remarkably close by above us.

They were slow, compared to jets I’ve seen in the navy, but you could feel their force in your body. The pair took a line to the north, passing by all the ships building the offshore wind farms that are now filling up the inshore traffic zone of the Taiwan Strait.

It was too dark to tell what they were, but I felt like they were on our side.

Sure enough, after a quick google the next morning, they must have been Taiwanese F16s, patrolling to fend off some intruders from mainland China.

Also, hunting. Not for fish, but for weakness.

The consensus here is that it is only a matter of time before the CCP annexes Taiwan. The lessons of Biden’s abandonment of Afghanistan and their failure to defend Ukraine have apparently not been lost on the Taiwanese, Dutch and Irish workers here. Donald Trump means only a slight stay of execution for them.

I am more hopeful than that. Trump is proving himself to be the pragmatic business-democrat that I always felt he was. Populist, pluralist, champion of the people in a way that the left wing imagine they are. The man is crushing it.

And don’t start on me with tariffs and markets. Everyone was waiting for a spectacular crash or reset for my entire adult life. Donald John Trump is the first person I’ve ever seen look that inevitability square in the face, and say to Wall Street, Bring it on.

When I stood at my dining room table at easter three years ago, I saw Jesus Christ in my mind’s eye, bloodied and lashed, but looking into my eyes with clarity. He had a look that said, ‘I choose this’. The very image struck me to the core of my being. Voluntary self-sacrifice. Its’ total contrast with the arbitrary imposition of sacrifice on ordinary people, by technocratic governments, during the Covid response. It was so stark, and so severe, it changed me.

Donald Trump has taken on the world this week, where nobody else has. On purpose. 99% of people do not care one jot about Wall Street. And neither does he. And we love that the cat is finally among the pigeons.

Nobody can believe the legacy media is still trying to act like he is just winging this whole thing. At what point are they going to quit that narrative? It’s so absurd.

China announced it has proven a 1-million-ton oil find in the South China Sea this week. The same week that Saudi Arabia announced several new discoveries. The same week of the tariff wars. The same week that Chinese shipyards have seen their order book fall off a cliff, and the US have announced a shipbuilding renaissance.

The Scheldt and the Rhine. The Taiwan Strait. The Baltics. Berlin. Protectionism. The Turks. Germany is being asked to build up a giant army and prepare to march across Europe. Rampant Jew-hatred. Cancelled elections. Political arrests. Jail time for tweets. Socialist governments covering up for criminal gangs in their ranks. You could not make it up.

I’ve been feeling old battle lines very keenly, these past few weeks in Poland, East Berlin, and West Taiwan.

It is all starting to rhyme. But the arms race now includes AI, robots, and battlefield nukes.

Like the serpent-eel, predators from the darkness like to use the light to their advantage. In the same way, hypocrites use virtue as camouflage. But the fish have learned to fly. At least, just enough to get out of harms’ way. From crest to crest.

The moon. The stars. The sound of the sea as waves are cut by the wake of a boat.

These eternal things take us outside of time. They bind us with every one of our ancestors, and every one of our descendants.

That is the glory of survival.

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