Media MEDIA CLIPPING
National Post
August 28, 2011
-Peter Kuitenbrouwer
Floating Around Toronto: The pay is sweet aboard a boat full of sugar
Peter Kuitenbrouwer has spent previous summers walking across Toronto, Mississauga and up Yonge Street. This summer he spent his time on water, catching wildly different views of the city. In his final instalment of Floating Around Toronto, he gets a taste of life on the Federal Katsura as it delivers a load of sugar to the Redpath plant.
The steward, Jonathan Fernandez, puts down two small bowls of soup in front of the captain and me on the red chequered tablecloth in the Officers’ Mess. The soup tastes lovely; I ask the steward its name.
He returns and gives a name that, to Captain Andrzej Lasota, sounds like “egg drum.” The cook, Matias Abagan, emerges from the kitchen and clarifies: “Egg drop soup. Delta-Romeo-Oscar-Papa: drop.”
Welcome to the multinational, polyglot world of the M/V Federal Katsura, a salt-water laker tied up this week to the pier at Redpath, delivering raw sugar to the refinery. Built in Japan in 2005 specifically to come up the St. Lawrence Seaway (it has a breadth of 23.87 metres so it can fit, with 15 cm clearance on either side, through the locks), the Federal Katsura flies the flag of Panama, is managed by Intership Navigation Co. out of Cyprus on behalf of a German parent company, carries a Polish captain and a Filipino crew; sailing orders come from Fednav International Ltd., of Montreal.
She just sailed in from Brazil.
I have always gawked at the raw sugar ships at Redpath (a pastime made easier when Sugar Beach opened at the foot of Jarvis Street last year) and wondered about life on board.
On Thursday, I walk across the sticky pier of Redpath and climb the sticky gangway to the sticky deck of the Federal Katsura (where bees buzz on the sugar-strewn deck) to tour the vessel as my series, Floating Around Toronto, winds down. This ship sailed from Santos, Brazil, on Aug. 2, carrying 20,576 tonnes of raw sugar bound for Canada. She discharged some sugar in Quebec City on Aug. 19 before continuing through the seaway locks, arriving in Toronto last Sunday.
It’s quiet on Thursday; Redpath’s cranes had almost completed scooping raw sugar out of Hold No. 2 when a shore-side conveyor belt, which moves the sugar along to the raw sugar shed, broke down. When Redpath fixes the belt and completes unloading Hold 2 it has to call in tugboats from Hamilton to turn the 90-metre-long ship around, so Redpath’s cranes can complete unloading Holds 4, 5 and 6. I peer down into Hold 5; the dunes of tan-coloured sugar resemble the Sahara desert. The crew expects to sail from Toronto on Monday.
On Wednesday, as the Federal Katsura bobbed at its Toronto berth, eight crewmen disembarked to fly home to Manila, and eight fresh crew arrived. As he leads me on a tour of the engine room (fuel purifier, lube oil purifier, controls for ballast valves, generators; each component the size of my fridge), Gilbert Fernandez, the chief engineer, explains why so many Filipinos heed the call of the sea.
“In one month at sea you can earn what you would earn in six months on land,” Mr. Fernandez explains. “Our wiper here, the lowest rank, his monthly salary is more than the general manager of a bank in the Philippines.”
As I look at the wiper, Rotchell Robles, 28, his orange overalls smeared with engine grease, I mull the trade-offs. The sea and the overalls seem more comfortable than some stuffy bank; then again, Mr. Robles won’t see his two-year-old for 10 months this year. This separation takes a toll.
“My eldest son was two years old,” Mr. Fernandez recalls. “I was on the ship 14 months. When I came home my kid was scared. He didn’t know me.”
Things are better now. Mr. Fernandez spoke to his wife by Skype this week back in Imus, a suburb of Manila, and learned that his three children, whose school year began in June, are excelling. “That gave me strength,” he says.
Ships seem an efficient method of hauling cargo to and from our town, but these days we rely on our highways; Capt. Lasota said he passed just two vessels in the seaway on this voyage, compared to 10 or 12 vessels he would see on a trip back in 1993. He used to bring in loads of steel from Europe and cannot explain the slide in seaway traffic.
In the Officer’s Mess, the steward lays out for us a multi-ethnic feast: a salad of grated carrots and cabbage, Thousand Islands dressing, beef lasagna and lumpia Shanghai, a Filipino spring roll stuffed with pork. For desert he brings pineapple slices and chocolate cake.
Capt. Losota, 58, complains that the bounty of the mess hall has him filling his white dress shirt (with four gold stripes on the épaulettes) a little too snugly.
“This guy you can take, too,” he says to the steward, in a lilting drawl inflected with his native Polish, handing him back the cake. “Ask Cookie: do he want to kill me?”
