SEA DUTY
By Dick Kraus
Newsday Staff Photographer
Retired
 
OK. So it’s not a bad life. Retirement, that is. I wasn’t sure that I was going to like it. I’ve been a working news photographer for over 40 years and I was sure that I would be bored out of my gourd, not working every day.
 
But, I’ve been able to get myself psyched by keeping myself busy with various projects, one of which is editing and contributing to this feature and by shooting the pictures that I wanted to make and not because I had to.  And having the time to do all of these things and to do some things that I’ve never been able to do in the past.
 
 
Like today. I’m sitting alongside the pool on deck 11 of a luxury cruise ship in the Caribbean, trying to concentrate on this journal but constantly being distracted by nubile young women in bikinis. And now the steel band is tuning up. Ahhh, but I digress.

The Adventure of the Sea. Length: 1,020'. Passenger capacity: 3,114. © Photo by Dick Kraus

I am reminded of other days at sea. Believe it or not, one of the first photographic jobs that I ever had was on cruise ship, 52 years ago. I was 18 and just out of high school and a couple of courses at a commercial photo school. I was waiting to be called into military service during the Korean War. Through the school, I was offered a position as an assistant to the ship’s photographer aboard one of Moore McCormack’s cruise ships, the SS Brazil, from New York City to South America. It was a three week cruise and for an eighteen year old kid, quite a golden opportunity. Compared to the ship upon which I am writing this, it was a row boat, but in it’s day, the Brazil was considered First Class. Think about this, though. That ship had about 7 decks and carried about 400 passengers. This ship has 14 decks and carries over 3,000 passengers. There was just the photographer and myself, and the work wasn’t very hard. There must be about eight photographers on this ship and they are always busting their chops from morning to night. I got to see some exotic places, like Trinidad, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Montevideo and Buenos Aires and I loved it. I had enlisted in the US Navy before I left and after this cruise was over, I was sure that I had made the correct choice. I loved life at sea and travel to foreign ports. I had no illusions that life aboard a navy ship would be anything like luxury cruising. But, I was ready to go to sea.

The SS Brazil. A lot smaller. © Photo by Dick Kraus

Four years I spent in the navy. And not one day of which was ever aboard a ship. When my four year enlistment was up, I had to listen to a re-enlistment spiel. I was told that if I re-upped, I would be guaranteed shore duty.
 
“ Why,” I asked.
 
“ Because your record shows that you already have four years of sea duty,” I was told.
 
“ Are you sure that you have the right records in front of you? I joined the Navy to go to sea and never spend a day aboard ship,” I said.
 
“ Ahh, that may be,” said the Personnel Officer. But you flew for two years (I was an Aviation Photographer’s Mate) and you spent two years overseas (Naples, Italy.) That all counts as sea duty.”
 
I turned down the offer and returned to civilian life. I finally got my sea duty, but it was as a Newsday Photographer. Newsday publishes on Long Island (NY) and we are surrounded by water. During my career, I had ample opportunity to cover stories on the water.
 
One of the first was one of the most unusual. I had to drive up to Groton, CN where I met with a bunch of Sea Scouts who were going to spend a day aboard a navy sub during a training mission. Our boat was a World War II era diesel sub. No fancy nuclear subs for us. The first thing that I learned when I stepped aboard was that being 6’ 4” was an impediment. Everywhere you went on the sub meant stepping through hatches (doors) which required one to step over a combing while ducking under a low opening. Step and duck. Step and duck. Step and “OUCH! OH, SHIT!.” I never got the timing down and I carry scars on my forehead to this day.
 
The salty old Chief Bos’n’s Mate who put us aboard wished us a good voyage. Then he added, “May you surface as often as you submerge.” Hmmmm. We made about eighteen training dives, under the waters of Long Island Sound, and we surfaced an equal number of times, and that is a very good thing.
 
During the many OpSail events held in NYH Harbor, I spend days aboard chartered cabin cruisers, getting up close and personal with naval ships from many nations, as well as an assortment of some of the most beautiful sailing ships of the world.

I spent a day aboard a working tug boat that was over one hundred years old.   Then, in pursuit of a story involving a wandering barge of Long Island Garbage that made international headlines for an entire summer as it was refused a landfall (or should I say, a landfill) I spent weeks at a time living and working aboard the ocean going tug that was towing the garbage up and down the east coast

The Break of Dawn tows the Islip Garbage Barge up the east coast. © Newsday Photo.

One summer day, a reporter and I went out to the east end of Long Island, to join a sport fisherman going out to sea from Montauk Point in search of tuna. The poor reporter got sea sick the moment we passed the breakwater and wasn’t able to function until much later in the evening when we came back to the calmer waters inside that same breakwater. But, I was able to relate to him, the events of the day. I got some good art, and even caught a small tuna of my own.

One of my longest sea voyages was with the Coast Guard. When the US instituted the 300 mile off shore fishing ban to keep foreign fishing fleets from depleting our stocks of fish, I was sent to Little Creek, VA to join a Coast Guard Cutter that was about to patrol the ocean off of Cape Hatteras. The ship was a 360 foot vessel and as soon as we cleared the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, we encountered the heavy seas that are common in the North Atlantic in March. The ship climbed the backs of the twenty foot waves and crashed down the other side. It worsened as we took our position off of Cape Hatteras and by dinner time half of the crew was seasick. I have been blessed with an ability to withstand mal de mer but I could tell you exactly where my stomach was at any given time. Movies were shown at night in the officers mess and it was amusing to be a part of an audience whose metal chairs would slide back and forth across the mess deck in unison as the ship rolled through the ocean. During the day I would stand on the ship's bridge, photographing the fleets of American fishing boats, many of them half the size of our ship. You would catch sight of one as it rose on the back of a huge swell and then it would disappear into the trough only to rise again. It amazed me how anyone could work or even survive under these conditions. I had borrowed a gyro stabilizer for my long lens. Trying to hold a 300mm lens steady under those conditions would have been imposssible.

Years later I would be out on the ocean on one of those small fishing boats, but thankfully in calmer, inshore waters. I was assigned to do a story on the Long Island fishing industry. My boss must have seen one of those old 1940's movies like "Captains Courageous" because he wanted me to spend a couple of weeks on one of these boats doing a man against the sea kind of picture story. It sounded great until I found out that the local boats were only going a few miles offshore in pursuit of squid. They would go out before dawn and return in the late afternoon. I made a few trips with several boats and soon found out that squid isn't a very esoteric looking fish. They are slimy, shapeless globs and when they are dumped from the trawl nets onto the deck, they certainly bear little resemblance to fish. But, that summer, none of the trawlers were fishing for anything else. Squid were plentiful and in demand by Asian markets.

When TWA Flight 800 exploded in mid-air off of the south shore of Long Island, I spent most of that summer on various boats and ships covering the search and rescue and then the recovery operations.

The First Family stands on the bridge of the guided missile cruiser and reviews the navy ships of many nations. © Newsday Photo/Dick Kraus	On July 4th, 2000, New York City held a gala bi-centennial in New York Harbor, featuring another magnificent Op-Sail. It was another day at sea for me and aboard a couple of US Navy ships, no less.
I joined the First Family boarding a guided missile cruiser and cruised up and down the Hudson River and NY Harbor reviewing the ships of our navy as well as those of foreign navies. Then the media was taken by helicopter to a nuclear aircraft carrier in the harbor where Clinton made some speeches and reviewed the passing Op-Sail fleet.

So, in spite of the US Navy's design to keep me on shore, I did manage to squeeze in a good amount of sea duty as a Newsday Photographer. And that ain't bad.

Now you must excuse me. I have to get dressed for the formal Captain's Dinner and I don't have time for anymore of this idle chit-chat.

Dick Kraus

 

Friends,

As you may have heard, two Newsday journalists had been reported missing from Baghdad, Iraq, during the last week of March. Photographer Moises Saman and writer Matthew McAllister had been taken from their hotel room by Iraqi officials and their whereabouts were unknown for a week, causing great concern to their families and to everyone who knew and worked with these fine and dedicated young journalists. On Tuesday, April 1st, Newsday heard from them. They had been released unharmed at the Iraqi-Jordanian border.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who called or wrote to express their concern and offer their prayers and good wishes.

 

Dick Kraus

 

 

newspix@optonline.net