Seeking balance at sea and on land | maritime engineer

Sam Stanton 0:00

The ferries is kind of a weird job because it's one of the only boats you can work on that's at the same place every day. So I still work a 12-hour shift. I don't work two sixes anymore, but I can actually drive home at night. You know, I get off work and I can go home. Every boat I've ever worked on is like you get off work and you go to your cabin and go to sleep.

Dave 0:32

Hi, I'm Dave Weich, and you're listening to Work-Shaped Life.

Dave 0:41

More than 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by ocean. But of the 8 billion humans living on this planet, only 2 or 3 million work out there. Sam Stanton has been earning a living in engine rooms for almost twenty years. First on an educational tour boat running up the west coast, and then other passenger vessels, and eventually tugboats servicing giant oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. A few years ago, Sam took a job with Washington State Ferries. No more sleeping in a cabin, bobbing on water, trapped on the boat. Now he’s home every night with his wife and kids. Did I mention that Sam lives on an island? Anyway, life at sea is super work-shaped. Shifts every day for weeks straight. Making do in confined spaces, and with the people sharing those spaces with you. And then you find yourself back on land, in your “real” life, navigating an existence with a corresponding shape of its own.

Dave 1:50

How do you describe what you do if someone says, hey Sam, what what do you do?

Sam Stanton 1:54

I'm kind of the ride along mechanic on a boat, I guess. So marine engineers keep boats running and you can't just pull over the side of the road if you're in the middle of the ocean. You have to have the mechanics with you. We maintain the engines, the electrical systems, plumbing systems, lighting systems. Everything that keeps a boat running. And right now I work on the Washington State Ferries. So I work on a boat that goes between Whidbey Island and Mukilteo.

Dave 2:25

And how long have you been doing that?

Sam Stanton 2:27

I've been with the ferries almost three years, but I got in my first boat engine room almost 20 years ago now. Weaseled my way into the engine room and decided I liked it and stuck around.

Dave 2:41

How did you get involved in boats in the first place? And then what did that look like to go from getting involved with boats to weaseling your way into the engine room?

Sam Stanton 2:49

So I had no idea this field of work even existed as a kid. I went to college to get a chemistry degree and everything kind of went sideways on me after about three years. I ended up in over my head in a drug scene. I needed to drop out and go to rehab. I was in a bad spot and I landed in kind of a halfway house type situation in a town and they said, "You've got to do something every day. You can't just sit around here." Like, "Pick something and go do it. " And this kid tipped me off. They were like, "If you write in “Wooden Boat Foundation,” every day in your calendar they'll drop you off at this place." It was in a town called Port Townsend out on the Olympic Peninsula. It's an amazing little town. He was like, "They'll drop you off this place. We'll just play with boats all day." And I was like, "Okay. Sounds cool." Some people were still in school. They'd drop them off at school. Some people... It was for young-men-in-early-recovery type halfway house situation. I was 22 years old, recently dropped out of college, recently, in pretty bad shape, strung out, and I was like, "I'll go play with boats. I've got to stay busy." And it was just this little nonprofit that has now grown into a huge thing over in Port Townsend … It was like, go pump the bilges out of these boats and clean them, and we got some stuff to organize over here, whatever. There was a couple of us that we were volunteer helpers, this little nonprofit. We were repairing a dock one morning. We were working on the dock and there was this big sailboat tied up, and the crew of the sailboat started waking up and coming up on deck and having their coffee, and I was like, "Wait, that's someone's job. Someone's living on that big boat." What's silly is I probably could have just said, "Hey, how do I get a job on this boat?" But like I said, I didn't think I had anything to offer. So I was like, "Oh, I know." I ended up going to trade school. Basically I'm like, "If I go to school, someone will hire me to work on their boat." Because I just didn't know what else to do, and I was kind of resetting my life anyway, so I'm like, "If I go to trade school, I can learn a skill. I'll be useful." I went to trade school. I ended up going to work in the boatyard there fixing boats and it was cool. It was really neat work. The shop was really cool. We were working on cool old wooden boats. It was really romantic. It smelled good. There was like cedar shavings and pine tar. And it was a really fun time to be like 23 years old and just doing physical work that felt good. I was like a laborer even after going through school. Again, I probably could have just gone down to the boatyard and said, "Hey, do you want a laborer?" Instead, I spent a year of my life in trade school. It gave me the confidence to go ask for the job, which is what I needed. I kind of ran into this thing in the boatyard where I was like, "Okay, I'm working over, working some 40 hours plus some overtime every week. It's very physical." For the time, I was making enough money to support myself, that was cool. But I didn't have any time to do anything I wanted to do other than work. I felt like I had to recuperate from doing hard physical work all week, that ate my whole weekend, and then I'd go back and do hard physical work all week. And I kind of wanted to get out of town. I was getting the drive to travel. And a guy I went to trade school with said, "Hey, they're hiring deckhands on this boat." He'd gotten hired to be the captain. He was an ex Coast Guard guy. He said, "If you want to come work on this boat, we're going to take it down to San Diego and back," or whatever. And I said, "Oh, well, yeah, I'll do that. " I called up and I applied and I got a job. It was a boat that took kids out on field trips and did educational stuff. I had done a little bit of outdoor ed stuff. I had enough of a resume, plus they were paying like $500 a month. Honestly, they probably would have hired anyone with a pulse, but I had enough of a resume to be like, "I'll be the guy who leads your field trips." And like I said, I weaseled my way into the engine room. On that boat, like a week into the job, the engineer failed a drug test, and I'm still sober recently. I've got out of rehab. And I said, "Well, I'll play in the engine room. I have a little bit of mechanical aptitude." Again, this was not a place that was paying well or hiring the cream of the crop necessarily, but it was a job. And I didn't become the engineer that day, but I got to fill in until they sent a new engineer. I was like, "This is..." I've always liked kind of tinkering with things since being a little kid. They had a take apart table in my kindergarten where you could rip apart typewriters and whatever other toy they put on there that was like, that's where I sat until the typewriter was destroyed. So I was like, all of a sudden I've got this whole room, it was full of machines, it's hot, it's noisy. There were problems like day one, three different things broke and I'm trying to... I have no idea what I'm doing. I was in over my head, but I was like, "This is cool." We got underway again, headed south down the coast and it's like, I don't know. For me, there's something about a hot engine room with cold air coming in through the blowers. It's a weird space. It's a bit of an anti-gravity chamber when you get in big waves. Yeah, I liked it right away.

Dave 8:10

I imagine that you were in part just really grateful to find something of interest, have a job, to be sober, all of those things, but was it consciously strange for you that suddenly you were out on the water doing these things?

Sam Stanton 8:27

A little bit. I mean, I was kind of just flying by the seat of my pants, just one thing leading to another, like, "Okay, here's the thing in front of me." I was young enough, like I said, I think I got on that boat right after my 24th birthday, right?

Dave 8:43

Connect the dots then. So you found this interest, you found this genuine, I don't know, fit for yourself, and then we're still talking in your mid 20s, this is a while ago. What were the steps that it took to get to where you are now?

Sam Stanton 9:02

I just was on an adventure for a while. I worked some more in the boatyard after that and I was doing a lot of traveling. I was just kind of leaning into being in my 20s and I would work on a boat or work in the boatyard, save up some money, buy a plane ticket, go spend a bunch of time somewhere. Traveled in Asia, traveled in New Zealand. And I ended up doing some of this WWOOF volunteering that they have on organic farms. So I was like, just as a way to make traveling cheaper and like, "Oh, I can go stay on a farm and help out." And I got in my head like, "Oh, man. I really wish... If I could do something, if I could do whatever I wanted with my life, money was not an option, I would probably be farming." I was like, "This is super fun. Get my hands in the dirt." I still have all the troubleshooting and machinery. And I was like, "I want to do that. " And so I was like, "I should get serious about my career because I'm never going to be able to buy a piece of land otherwise." I was like, well, I knew if I got on tugboats, they would pay pretty well. You can make a good dollar working on a tugboat, especially if you can get in the engine room. So I got my sea time, took it to the Coast Guard and took exams, took some classes and I got licensed and I went and got my first commercial maritime job before I'd been working on passenger vessels, which is fine, tons of passenger vessels, but I went and started working down in the Gulf of Mexico or whatever they're calling it these days. But yeah, I was down with Gulf of Mexico on the oil patch, working on boats that were helping big oil tankers empty their cargo offshore into smaller oil tankers. Tugboats are kind of crazy machines to operate. That job I had down in the Gulf was like I saw chains break and fly past my head multiple times in my first month down there, and it was like, okay, this is... I knew right away that wasn't the right job for me, but the people who were in it loved it because it was some cowboys. It was a crazy job that was for people who like adrenaline more than me, but it gave more sea time and more experience. And one thing after another kept being like, okay. I chased advancing very quickly at that point. And I just kept running because I was like, "I want to buy a piece of land," so I kind of got out of this, "I'm just going to be itinerant and travel and work," thing, and I want to buy a piece of land. I want to farm. I'd been working non-union jobs, finally got in a good union job, which brought the quality of life and pay scale way up, got my engineer's license, got my first chief engineer job where I'm in charge of the engine room. When I decided I wanted to farm, I started chasing it hard.

Dave 11:46

So in that moment though, you're working in the Gulf still with that chief engineer job?

Sam Stanton 11:52

Yeah. That boat took me all over the place from, everywhere from Green Bay to Corpus Christi, Texas. So we were all around Gulf of Mexico, East Coast. Got to go up around in and out of the Great Lakes, which that was pretty cool, going through the locks up in the St. Lawrence Seaway and all that.

Dave 12:11

And so what does your personal life look like at this point? How much time are you spending at sea on a boat? Do you have a relationship? Are you seeing friends, family, anything? What does that look like?

Sam Stanton 12:24

That is kind of one of the killers of this job. When I was working passenger boats, often I would sign a six-month contract, go work on a boat for six months and then go off. I met a woman working in one of those boats and we worked on a couple boats together and traveled a lot together. We ended up splitting up later and I was just working on, around when I shifted to commercial work, honestly, and maybe related, but the first job I got down in the oil field was I worked 28 days and then I get 14 days off and those are typically the worst jobs in the industry where they want more than a one for one ratio. So I worked 28 days, and during that I would work 12 hour shifts every day for 28 days straight. They said it was 28 days and hopefully someone shows up to relieve you and you can go home and then it's like hopefully you're not 300 miles offshore at the end of the 28 days. They were not very interested in our quality of life at that job. But it was experience. Yeah, I had to get a foot in the door. Pretty quickly once I was able to upgrade my license, I got another job that was called even time. So I worked, that job was a month on, a month off, roughly. It was also a place that didn't care very much about their employees. That was the non-union world is kind of scary. Yeah. So I'd work a month, I'd get a month off. That's not super conducive to relationships on land. I had a really tight friend group where I was living in Rhode Island at the time. I wasn't in a romantic relationship and I was off at sea and I'd come home and I'd play and sometimes I'd work, pick up some shifts on a little tourist sailboat and make some extra money. And then I'd fly to Thailand for a week with a friend and hang out. And I ended up developing really close friendships with other people who can do things on weekdays, because it's like my whole worry, I'm home for a month. I had a lot of disposable income. I was still in my 20s. Other people that were not bound to the nine to five who we could hang out. I did a lot of surfing. Went to yoga class all the time and just kind of had a good time, but it wasn't... Most of the people you meet on those boats are on their third marriage or something. It's not conducive to home life. I ended up moving back to Oregon. I met my now wife. I'd already been in that industry a long time and I met her and then four days later went off to sea for a month. I was like, "Here's the deal. This is what I do."

Dave 15:07

In that moment, could you see the day when you were not going to be living this way, or was that still kind of more of a dream?

Sam Stanton 15:14

It was a dream, but it was one we shared. I mean, the day we met where it was like, "Hey, here's me. I work on boats. I really want to have a farm. I like riding motorcycles. I'm into old cars." And then she had the same list basically. She was like, "Well, works on boats." We lived right down the street from each other and it was like, okay. I had four days to let her know I was interested before getting on the boat and it was clearly mutual from day one, so it was like off we went. And I kept doing that schedule. I switched to a two-week rotation maybe six months into that and so I would do two weeks on, two weeks off, but that was, after being used to a month, two weeks was too short. I couldn't be two weeks home, especially on that boat. I was working the whole time I was on the boat, I'd work a six hour on, six hour off rotation. 12 hours a day, two six hour shifts.

Sam Stanton 16:21

Dave 16:22

But never more than six hours off?

Sam Stanton 16:25

Yeah. So it just turns a whole month into a blur. It's not a healthy thing. This is not a healthy thing, but yeah.

Dave 16:36

So what you would sleep for four or five hours when you could?

Sam Stanton 16:40

Yeah. One of the two off shifts, I'd sleep like the whole six hours, and then the other off shift, I'd sleep three hours, maybe four hours. So I could sleep like eight, 10 hours a day, but it's not in any way that makes the circadian rhythm work. You do that the whole time on the boat and then I fly home, and I got to recover from that. I would land in, I was flying to the East Coast to get on this boat, or like I'd fly from Portland to Fort Lauderdale and get on a boat and sail around for two weeks, and then I'd fly home and it's like midnight and I'm having a caffeine withdrawal headache and I've got to go to bed. And it was normal to me. But the two weeks was too short because I felt like coming back to normal circadian rhythm would take three days, and then I'd have like a week and then three days of getting ready to go back to work at the end. So it felt like if I have a month off, I can burn a couple days just sleeping, getting back to normal. I think the ideal for me would probably be 21 days.I have a good friend who works like four months on, four months off and seems to have a healthy marriage and relationship with his kids. But that's got to be hard in some ways, but he wouldn't have it any other way because when he's home, he's home for four whole months and can just be there completely present. And that, being able to just put it away. When I come home from work, no one is calling me, no one is... It's like someone else takes over my job and they do it until I come back and take back over.

Dave 18:19

Right. And so now you have a relationship and you're on this crazy job with six hours on, six hours off, but you're coming home and you're with someone that you actually want to spend time with. How did you get into a life that was more sort of manageable?

Sam Stanton 18:37

Well, I don't know that I have.

Dave 18:40

Okay. You’ve got time still. You’ve got time.

Sam Stanton 18:44

Yeah. Moderately more manageable now. After a couple years and getting married, we ended up buying a farm where we live now with the idea that maybe we could figure out a way to actually try to make a living off a farm, which is not a good idea. Lots of people try, and nobody says, "Get into farming. It'll be easy and you'll make lots of money." It's like, oh, that's a thing that people don't do anymore because it's impossible.

Dave 19:14

And you're on Whidbey Island, is that right?

Sam Stanton 19:17

Yeah. We're on Whidbey Island. It's about an hour north of Seattle and across a ferry. And depending on traffic, it could be an hour drive or three. But yeah. We ended up getting this place and we thought if we grow perennial crops that don't need tending to every day, we'll grow... We planted a bunch of lavender, and maybe we can kind of still go away to sea and come back and get this thing off the ground. And that didn't really work. It took two years where we worked six day weeks and just worked constantly trying to make a farm go. Right in the middle of that, we had a couple kids that, also not very conducive to a sane amount of sleep and energy expenditure. So at some point it was like, "One of us needs to go get a job because reality must be faced. We can keep trying to farm a little bit, but we need to address reality." So I went and got back on a tugboat for a little bit and that was not really fun. I was doing two weeks on, two weeks off again. At the time we only had one kid at home, but it was just like, "This isn't that cool to be away." And then I ended up making the switch to working at the ferries. And the ferries is kind of a weird job because it's one of the only boats you can work on that's at the same place every day. So I still work a 12-hour shift. I don't work two sixes anymore, but I can actually drive home at night. I get off work and I can go home. Every boat I've ever worked on, it's like you get off work and you go to your cabin and go to sleep. And so because of where we live, this is an option. I kind of had to restart my whole career though, which has been hard. I was in a different union before. I had no seniorities. I'm back in an unlicensed position, back as what they call an oiler and working my way back up. So after working for quite a while as a chief engineer, and now I'm an oiler who's working for an assistant who's working for a chief. But the quality of life is, like I said, you're kind of trapped in like, okay, I am used to having half my life off. I could not imagine going back to working five days a week and having two days off. I know that's normal for everybody, but it's just like that would be torture for me. I need chunks of time to focus on stuff that matters to me. I work 12 hour shifts and I go to work and take care of machinery and then I can drive home and actually see my kids and my wife and play on the farm a little bit and then turn around and go back to work.

Dave 22:07

You're no longer cultivating crops and whatnot for income, is that right?

Sam Stanton 22:12

Yeah. I mean, I sell lavender plants now instead of trying to like... Before we had a whole setup to distill lavender oil and make nice smelling things and sell them in the market and sell them wholesale to shops. We were growing mushrooms and selling to restaurants, and just... Instead of like trying to make this our whole lives, it's like, "Okay, I can sell some lavender plants to landscapers and random people off Facebook marketplace that want lavender plants." I don't know why I was so driven towards like, "I have to be self-employed." Because it's like self-employment for me was absolutely miserable. I do not want to be self-employed. I'm loving being a state employee where, like I said, I can go home.

Dave 22:57

Was the life you're living now modeled for you in any way by anyone you knew?

Sam Stanton 23:03

Not really. The farming thing, we had family friends who have a farm down in Southern Oregon that we would visit as a kid, and so as a small child, I was like, "This is amazing, this beautiful piece of land and being outside and gardens and animals." That was modeled by those guys down in Southern Oregon that were close friends of my mom's. But yeah, working at sea, this all just... I got exposed to it by accident as a young adult.

Dave 23:41

What's the strangest thing you've done for money that you're willing to talk about in this very all-over-the-place kind of resume?

Sam Stanton 23:52

I was traveling in my mid 20s. I got a work visa in New Zealand for a year. I have these working holiday visas for young people. I think you have to be under 30 and you can only seek temporary jobs. I got a job in a tangerine orchard and it was like a work, stand in line and we're going to select a couple people and we'll come and you got work type situation for migrant farm workers kind of, and it was a scam basically, but it was also just miserable. It was thinning tangerine trees. You come up to a tangerine tree with like 800 unripe fruit on it and you got to throw 600 of them on the ground so that none of the fruit will touch each other while they're growing because they'd get discolored and wouldn't be marketable, and they paid you by the tree. And if you were too fast, they give you bigger trees for the same price per tree, and if you're too slow, you were fired. And if you missed any and there were tangerines touching each other, you'd have to run back and redo that tree and then that would get you off pace so then you're not making as much money. It was a miserable job. Yeah. That one will push you towards radical unionism pretty quick.

Dave 25:10

That sounds horrible. I mean, did you get to do it in the rain? Is there anything else that made it even worse?

Sam Stanton 25:15

That sounds horrible. I mean, did you get to do it in the rain? Is there anything else that made it even worse?

Dave 25:26

Do you eat tangerines these days?

Sam Stanton 25:28

I did. I mean, it smelled fantastic. I mean, I was just like being coated in tangerine oil all day. I still love citrus.

Dave 25:35

What have you learned about finding work that suits you that you think you do or would share with people?

Sam Stanton 25:44

I think for me, I'm like the typical millennial that got told you should do something that fulfills you and then if you're doing something you love, you never work a day in your life type thing was what I was raised on. My mom definitely did that. She was a school teacher and she was absolutely passionate about it. Her entire career, she loved what she did. It certainly was hard at times, but that totally worked for her. She got her summers off too, which was good. She really loves the outdoors, so it meant she could go hiking and enjoy the Northwest stuff. And for me, I don't know if I'm just like too intensive a person for that. So it's like if I'm doing something I love doing for a living, which is what I chased with the farming and everything else, it just becomes all consuming. I need a job—and I think there's a lot of people that do—that's something I can put back on the shelf when I go home. I am passionate about being a good marine engineer and about learning. There's a lot I love about the job. There's an endless number of skills to learn. I will never have mastery. Even if I stayed on the boat I'm working on now, it's just like a massively complicated machine, hundreds of different machines working together. Something different will break and I'll need to figure out how to fix it, but there's nothing wrong with chasing a job that provides me the money and time to do what I want to do with my life outside of work and that's what this job has done. That's what I couldn't get from jobs I loved, or even working in the boatyard, which I enjoyed a lot. It was like, yeah, if I make enough money to survive, I'm working too many hours a month to do anything fun and the work isn't fun enough to justify that there. But I think this is a great job in that, like I said... Although it's a little bit of a stretch, because I'm starting my career over at the ferries. I'm no longer the chief. If I was making chief engineer wages, I'd be living pretty comfortably, and I can do that with a lot of time off. The ferries especially are great for time off where I can... Every boat I ever worked on, I worked, even time rotation, that was all my time off. Even time, work a month, go home a month, work a month, go home a month. The ferries, I can take a vacation and take what would normally be a work week and take that off, and then I've got a three week break, and I can do that quite a few times a year if I work the system right. So working seven, 12 hour days in a row lets me concentrate on my work there and then seven days off lets me concentrate on the other stuff I'm passionate about when I'm off.

Dave 28:30

People have a hard time going from like you're talking about the chief engineer to the oiler in whatever the relative comparison would be in their own industry. But I think part of that is because they don't get the benefits that you're talking about. I mean, you took a couple steps back, but for a world of change in terms of life quality.

Sam Stanton 28:56

Yeah. It's a mixed thing, too, in just an oiler doesn't necessarily get to do as interesting of work as a chief engineer. It's more go crawl down in the bilge and scrub out all that oil and clean things and oil things rather than if something really breaks, that's now someone else's job to engage their brain with and dig into it. And I've developed rapport with the chief engineers I work with that means they'll let me get engaged with stuff more mentally. I've just tried to lean into like, "Okay, I got a couple years here as an oiler. The thinking can be someone else's problem and I can go home at night and see my kids and do that."

Dave 29:46

How do you think about that experience now in college? How do you think about being in rehab at that age when you have the benefit of hindsight?

Sam Stanton 29:58

It doesn't even make sense to me. The math doesn't add up. I look back and I think…that was true within a year or two of... There was such a fast rebound for me and someone that's maybe the age I was or the people I just landed with and the places I landed, but it was a very shocking transition. I mean, I was in pretty deep. It was a life-threatening situation, and it was just like within 18 months it was like, "How do I even have this life? It's way beyond anything I..." I way overshot what I would've thought was possible very quickly, and then it's just been like I'm on this ride. And it hasn't all been easy. COVID times and becoming a parent and everything, it's like my world has gotten rocked multiple times since I rocked it for myself at age 22 or whatever. Life is challenging. It continues to be challenging. Trying to farm and have kids at the same time was not a great idea on its face and it was hard, but I'm in a good place now and I'm grateful for having landed where I am.

Dave 31:25

Work-Shaped Life is produced by the team Sheepscot Creative. It's hosted by me, Dave Weich, edited by Bailey Cain and Michael Nipper, with production support from Benna Gottfried, Rosie Struve, Amelia Lucas, and Kate Sokoloff. Next time on Work-Shaped Life:

Katrin Hinrichs 31:44

I don't know what it is. People are just born really fascinated with something, and for me it was animals. I had guinea pigs and snakes and spiders and tried to keep a crab alive once that I brought back from the beach. I had tropical fish, we had rabbits and cats and dogs, and I begged for a horse every year until finally I got one.

Dave 32:11

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