Home berth at the Seafarers Mission

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The view from the Seafarers Mission at 114 Quay St takes in the busy working port of Auckland. At any time of day, seven days a week, you can peer out from these second-floor windows and watch the ships - six or seven of them a day - arrive or leave for the open sea.

From the bridge of the Osha - a Russian fishing boat from Murmansk, in the upper icy regions of Russia bordering Lapland - the view is of Rangitoto bathed in the autumn sunlight. And, every day, a view of different ships arriving or leaving. The Osha stays put.

It has stayed put now for almost four months, the crew and ship apparently abandoned by the owners. The empty fishing nets are stacked on deck.

Down in the enormous refrigerated hold, which can handle 300 tonnes of fish at a temperature of -30 deg C, there lingers only a faintly fishy smell and the echoes of the remaining seven crew who clatter about the Osha's copious inner workings attempting to fill in long days in a foreign city.

They manage to create two hours of work for themselves a day doing general maintenance, cleaning and sharing cooking chores.

They have no money. Oleg Zaevskiy, the ship's engineer, has been at sea - or at port - since March last year. In that time, he says, he has received $2000. He should have received $10,000 and a percentage for the fish that the Osha should have been catching.

He is one of the seven crew left from the contingent of 27. Some were New Zealanders who have simply gone home. Others have taken the air ticket offered by their manning agent and flown back to their homes in Russia and the Ukraine, effectively breaking their contract and holding out little hope for the wage cheques they're owed.

The Rev Bill Law, chaplain at the neighbouring Seafarers Mission, is a welcome face aboard the Osha. He comes bearing bread and tobacco, not Bibles.

The gangplank is always down for Law and he returns the hospitality over the road at the mission. The Russian seafarers can call home once a week, free, for 10 minutes from one of the mission's seven phone booths.

Zaevskiy, whose home for a year has been a cramped cabin and a vessel designed to process fish, not to offer creature comforts, visits the mission every night. He calls it his "home away from home."

He, like the mission's other 20,000 visitors a year, is unlikely to know, or to care, that on April 2 at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Auckland, and in London at Westminster Abbey on April 4, services were held to rename the 144-year-old mission.

The Missions to Seaman is what the sailor's sanctuary has been known as since 1856, when Anglican clergyman John Ashley went on his holidays to Bristol, rowed out to visit ships, and was appalled by the conditions in which the seafarers lived and worked.

He gave up his parish to work fulltime in Bristol, setting up the mission which now operates in almost 100 ports.

In Auckland, Law has been arguing for at least a decade that within those ports, and on the ships which use them, there are now women. "And like the church, 75 per cent of seafarers' centres are staffed by women."

Law regards the renaming to Missions to Seafarers as something of a personal victory. In his little South Pacific outpost he has long flouted the British traditionalists within the Mission Society who "savaged" the idea of a name change.

Law had his mission sweatshirts (for sale in the shop along with airmail letter forms, soap and pies) printed up with the Seafarers logo as long ago as the one he's wearing, "about eight years." It's likely there was some peace to be had in the Law household from taking such a stance - his wife is principal chaplain at the Devonport Naval Base.

Law is, in any case, is the sort of battler who sees a cause as a challenge. The stocky, Liverpool-born cleric with a face as weatherbeaten as many of his seafaring mission visitors regards the dog-collar with as much enthusiasm as the blue-collar worker might the tie. A T-shirt and shorts are typical Law garb. And he's more likely to slip an impoverished seaman the price of an ale than he is to read him the Scriptures.

"We're not here as headhunters," he says, "we're here to care."

That caring involves walking a fine line between being seen to be "troublemakers" and helping seafarers to solve troubles. The mission maintains close links with the International Transport Workers Federation, the Maritime Safety Authority and the port health authorities.

Law has seen ships held together only by rust, ships infested with cockroaches, galleys stocked with food bought when already past its use-by date.

He's dealt with seafarers who have phoned home to receive the news of the death of a child - and with shipping companies who regard a request for bereaved sailors to return home as a dereliction of duty and will deduct from wages the cost of flying in a replacement.

On a Friday night at the mission Father Tom Laffey is dealing out the caring. (The mission's night duties are shared by the Anglican Law, the Catholic Laffey and retired Salvation Army major David Millar.)

Despite the name change - and the cross on the stairs and the little chapel with its wooden relief carvings of St Peter calming the storm - the mission owes its ambience to the old-style workingmen's club. There are pool and table tennis tables, plenty of ashtrays, pies in the warmer and beer on ice.

Tony Fernando, from Sri Lanka, is working in New Zealand on contract to a shipping company. He comes here most nights for the cheap beer ($2.20 a can), the cheap phone calls home and the "social life." When his wife joins him, he concedes, his visits might be curtailed.

"Call me Jerry" from the Philippines has been at sea for nine months. He's missing his wife and two young children. He comes to the mission twice today to call home and to read the Bible.

Many of the mission's visitors haven't been to sea in quite a while, such as 66-year-old Griff Fredrickson, who has lived next door in the Sailor's Home for four years. He was a watersider for 22 years and "it's nice to come for a chat. You can get all the religious guidance you need - I don't need any."

Fredrickson is waiting to win Lotto. "I live in hope." In the meantime he sits, having a beer or two, in his chair by the window overlooking the ports.

It's a favourite spot for retired seamen, says Law. "They sit there, look at this view and remember the old times."