Seafaring culture

An old colleague of mine, Lauri Vuorinen, published his musings in Finnish that I have freely translated into English. On the subject, the pictures are all courtesy from another colleague Hannu Vartiainen from 70's-80's.

Culture, I’m thinking of it because this damned book is asking what I’m thinking of. Seafarers culture, it is really worth thinking of, back in the day when everyone had it. In the 60’s and 70’s everyone researched it, I mean culture. Seafarers culture was represented by Jorma Ojaharju (Finnish writer and sailor). The man wrote a few good books but I don’t count “The dogwatch” to be one of them, then we return again back to seafarers culture. There were some short movies about it, there was my old colleague, Kempas, he said he knew fuckall about culture but that a ship has to be made ready for sea.

Well, the best description about seafarers culture was mentioned by my school mate and colleague Jussi, he verbally painted me the following picture where I have slightly added detail:

Small sized “blackbow” coaster of Effoa is sitting in some obscure port, all the works have stopped for the day, it is not Christmas nor Easter. Several sailors have gathered in a small 2 persons cabin. On the table there is a one litre bottle of 60% vol Koskenkorva vodka, a stainless steel decanter with mixed berry juice, a smoldering ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, duralex glasses, a few coffee cups with the double green stripe. In addition the cabin is full of tobacco smoke, noise, shouts, swearing, and lascivious laughter. The drunken sailors in there are in paint smeared dungarees and coats, a part of them, clearly engine room crew, are in oily boilersuits. On the table is a cassette player, the cassette is playing Finnish melancholic schlagers or pop, slightly out of tune because the batteries are about to die.

This is depicting the seafarers real "romantic" life, if anyone is missing it, that’s a whole different matter...