JOURNALS OF A FILIPINO SEAMAN

Guess vacation time is almost over, After two month I am now headed back again in Europe. The Company I'm employed with just called and gave me the details, They said I'd be reassigned again back to CONTI N.S.B. ships and to specific it will be CONTI Guinea. It was a good vacation but i had to face the reality of heading back again. Sometimes i wonder and ask myself is a Filipino OFW really the modern day hero's or just another faceless modern day slave worker ? I have a lot of skepticism about this. about the part why are we called that , are we truly a hero ?. As far as i know , Heroes selflessly die for patriotic cause , OFW's didn't die for their country - THEY ARE SOLD BY OUR COUNTRY TO SLAVERY AND EXPLOITED to patch up the mistakes of our society and our leaders, and be the "milking cow". I don't think OFW's will be phased out not for the next century or two given with these situation. Not until we learned the mistakes and understand it why w...

actual closure order of PMI way back in 2011  For sailors up to now, it is still a big puzzle on how we are going to end up later on our career. I haven't thought of it exactly on how will I end up after this "Sailing" and haven't laid out exact plans on what to do on my retirement, Honestly it's still  30 plus years early for me to think of such a thing but who knows ? Maybe retirement for me might come sooner than expected. Although I don’t publicly speak about it nor admit it directly to my relatives,  I might plan to take another college course and most likely it will be in the medical field - YES believe it or not it - I will be in the medical field. I'm not setting my eyes to be at least a specialist medical doctor. I'm not exactly sure on how long it will take me to reach that goal but maybe I do have enough life span to reach that kind of objective. At the back of my mind I somehow think that being a sailor is not exactly worth it nor even enough t...

this is a repost on an article I've read from Face book groups Para sa mga nagreklamo na hindi sila makasakay dahil kinakailangan ng backer.. Basahin ninyo ang katotohanan. FAKE PROMISES AND BROKEN DREAMS Earn dollars, see the world for free and have a girl in every port.” This is the phrase that maritime schools often use as come-on, either as a blatant offer or as a subtle hint, particularly on collecting girlfriends, to lure unsuspecting students. Little do they know that this catching phase has wrecked a thousand dreams. (1) ON THE SUPPLY and DEMAND IMBALANCE: The Philippines is producing 20 thousand maritime graduates a year and the industry can absorb only three to five thousand. (2) INABILITY OF THE GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY TO TAKE CONCRETE STEPS: There are almost 100 schools offering maritime courses. Most of these schools cannot pass the international standards and had been committing moral ‘estafa’ for years in the pretext of giving education. The sad news, the Commission o...

This footage was taken during my final day onboard, Conti Greenland dated december 22, 2014. I thank 2nd officer  Emery Kris C. Cacatian, for having an open mind in taking footage on the actual work of berthing (also known in tagalog as "Atraca" ) this will serve as an education information to people.

This were the videos i personally took using a digital camera ... Hope that the reader of this blog one day will find what do trainee's do on BTOCT Seminar (formerly GTF seminar)

My enrollment kit , basically a polo shirt, a piece of enrollment paper and a book (or manual)  STCW 2010 implementation is really making things worse, for Filipino sailors. Much worse is that for a typical sailor , all of his / her expensive training seminars will be totally nullified by the year 2016 and he / she will start from scratch again . This will be my situation a year after now. In the meantime , things are starting to get dire for me on the money. As predicted my reserve are near depletion and will be borrowing money soon. Since I'm already low on the money, I went ahead in enrolling a BTOC course in PNTC and used up my remain 10k to enrol on the important short course, when I got there I found out that PNTC now offers package prices for their short course on ship tankers. Taking GTF (now BTOCT) short course maybe exciting to take for new sailors, and college students , but for veteran sailors such as myself, this is only a waste of time, money and effort. In the first ...