Tarawa Sunrise

Here’s a sunrise for the Daily Posts Weekly Photography Challenge. This week, the challenge is to show a photo “taken in the early morning light”. Be an “early bird“.

I’m most definitely NOT an early bird! Last time I can remember really enjoying early morning was as a kid getting up for Saturday morning cartoons. 🙂

I was always a night owl. I used to stay up ’til 2-3 in the morning. I used to go out partying a lot. Or, I might stay at home reading a good book. Sometimes I just couldn’t put it down ’til I finished.

I’ve cut back a lot on keeping those kinds of hours now a days. Mostly because I have too much to do now. Things that have to be taken care of during normal business hours (9-5). Now I try to get to sleep by midnight (and it really isn’t too hard to do anymore). 😉

I only see the sunrise when I’m working the midnight to noon watch like I am now. I haven’t seen many good sunrises (or sunsets) this trip yet. Since we made arrival off Congo, it has been overcast. It clouded up a few days before we got here and hasn’t cleared up yet.

I took this photo while I was working on the tuna boat a couple of years ago. We were coming into the lagoon at Tarawa. The sunrise was just stunning. I had to run and get my camera.

This is one of my all time favorite ‘sun’ pictures. I keep one of my others as my header.

A Sailors Sad Choice

I was just really missing my job. Yeah, I know that must sound really weird. Crazy even. But I’m not crazy! Really!!

I don’t miss the work I do NOW, right at this moment. I DO miss the work I’m still sometimes able to find. Those few jobs that allow me to do what I’ve trained all my life to do. To sail the seas AS A SAILOR.

I went to sea for the FREEDOM it afforded. Freedom to just do my job (no worries), and enjoy life at sea with an occasional port call (with enough time to go ashore). Not much paperwork, no one really bothered us. We literally were in our own little world out there. Our own community. We all did our jobs yet worked together as a team.

OMG have things changed!!! (NOT for the better)

It seems like it’s almost impossible to find that sort of employment any more. You’ll take a job that’s totally confining, one almost as bad as if you were working on the beach. Paperwork out the ying-yang. Do a JSEA before you even get out of your bed (seriously, on one boat they actually wanted us to do that!). The only advantage is you don’t have to commute every day.

They micromanage every tiny little detail of your life, even to the point of telling you how to dress yourself every day.

WTF??? They hire us to run a multi-million dollar vessel with hundreds of peoples lives in our hands, but they think we’re too stupid to know how to dress ourselves? What’s UP with that?

At least the money’s decent. Not enough for the BS they put us through, but decent.

The other option is to find an interesting job. An enjoyable job. A job that actually lets you use the skills and knowledge you’ve worked so hard to gain. One that might actually GO somewhere INTERESTING at least every once in a while.

But it seems that every one of THOSE types of jobs entail working for people who think that their company is just SO wonderful that we’d just all love to work there for free and they don’t even want to come up with the minimum wage! 🙁

I’m still looking to find that happy medium. A job that lets me be a sailor that actually pays the bills at the same time! 🙂

Those tuna boats were close, I really enjoyed my time there. Take a look at these pictures and tell me you don’t understand my craving for adventure, don’t get it just a little bit, don’t wish you could be doing something like this instead of wasting hours in traffic everyday to get to a ‘regular’ job?

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