Advaran origins

So this is advara's first blog post. Whoopee fuckin' doo...

What's an advara anyway? Well, it's an m.v. Advara, as it happens, and she looks like this -

...or rather she  looked like this. She's doubtless long since been converted to razor blades. The snub-nosed old girl was my first ship ...and you never forget your first ship. So said, Hamish Main, the other, more senior cadet on board at the time. No idea where he is now, as I have never heard of him since he left the ship. If you're still out there Hamish, I owe you a beer. Likewise, Roy Usher, the Geordie second mate, who took me under his wing and fended off for me both the sadistic cunt of a Captain (also a Geordie) and amorous queen of a second engineer. She was a lumber carrying ship originally called the Kyoto Forest and she was converted to carry containers around Australia and south east Asia. At 15 knots downhill with the wind behind her, she was never going to be an ocean greyhound but she did have some interesting ports of call. I joined her at North Point in Hong Kong on 27th December 1976, having just flown in to the old Kai Tak airport from having left childhood behind in Heathrow.

This was another world and a not altogether too comfortable one. Having been brought up in the not-so-wilds of Didcot, in rural Berkshire (now Oxfordshire post-174 reshuffle), this was just a bit different. The mate of the ship met us when we arrived and he was sporting a shining black eye, courtesy of the aforementioned cunt of an Old Man, who had, understandably perhaps on this occasion, belted the Mate for making indecent advances to the missus, who was on board for the duration.

After a couple of days we moved across to the Kwai Chung container terminal, where we exchanged cargo and I made a couple of homesick calls home: one to Mum and Dad telling them how much I was (trying) to enjoy life and one to my girlfriend telling her how I was in the process of conquering the Far East. I felt like shit, of course but it's one of the rites of passage, I guess.

Next port of call Sydney and another whole New World experience...