Shipping out in the 1970s

These tales of adventure, told in 10 separate stories, provide a snapshot history of the 1970s from the author’s unique perspective as a merchant seaman traveling around the United States and to ports around the world. Starting in 1969, the first story describes a journey from Seattle to a waterfront resort in Maine, to a vegetable oil factory in New Orleans, and across the Pacific to the red-light district of wartime Saigon. Others describe shoveling coal to power an ore carrier on the Great Lakes, a ship of the same type and on the same run as the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald that was lost four years later; a voyage to the Persian Gulf aboard the first American ship to put into Bandar Abbas, Iran when the Shah was still in power; up and down the Aleutian Island chain of Alaska during winter; transiting the Suez Canal after the Yom Kipper War between Israel and Egypt; and steaming down the west coasts of Central and South America during the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.
The stories include incidents of the author being jailed in Alaska on trumped-up drug charges, and of his being thrown into a dungeon in Egypt after the unsuccessful hijacking of a motor launch. Also included are accounts of hitchhiking the unpaved Alcan Highway from Alaska to Seattle, as well as along the Great Lakes, across the West, and on Route 66 while thumbing from New Orleans to Seattle. The last tale describes an attempt to smuggle a parrot from South America to impress his girlfriend in Seattle, the woman who is now married to the author.