Seamen: "Enduring 11 months on a ship is terrible"

The wind on your face. Dry skin. Salt on your lips. The furious water breaking at the bow. Playful dolphins surfing the waves. A large whale waving goodbye as the Sun hides beyond the horizon, where the water and the sky become indivisible. Moving forward at full speed in the middle of nowhere. The immense ocean. Seafarers always talk about the feeling of freedom that sailing entails. But ships are also a prison in motion. Working in the merchant navy is hard. Months away from home. The same faces day and night. Practically, without getting off the ship for a long time.Joel is a 40-year-old Filipino sailor. He has been working in the merchant navy for 19 years. He has learned to live with the solitude and absence of his daughter Casidy, who will soon turn 8. In January, he left home to embark on a new voyage aboard the Seadrive, a 130-meter-long merchant ship flying the Maltese flag with a crew of 24, all Filipino. He has not been able to see his daughter again until this August. Almost eight months apart. A few years ago, when his father died, he asked to return home to be with his family and share their grief. They did not let him. "It was not convenient for the company," he confesses with a serious face. He accepted it resignedly. "Filipinos have too good a character," summarizes Pep Costa, a merchant captain who now works at the Port of Barcelona and lives on a 15-meter-long boat in the port of Garraf. Francesc Lleal was also a merchant captain. He is now 80 years old and lives in a house in Badalona. From the terrace, he contemplates the timid waves that die gently on the beach, nothing like the violent storms he endured when he was at the helm. In his house, wherever you look, everything is a maritime reference. The dining room is presided over by a painting of the steamship Apolo, a ship that disappeared in the Atlantic returning from Cuba in 1885. Two of his great-grandfather's brothers drowned in the ocean. "I was destined for the sea, my father was a merchant marine captain. At 5 or 6 years old, at school, they called me the sailor," he explains. As a child, he and his six siblings went a year and a half without seeing their father, who was stationed in Equatorial Guinea. As an adult, he was the one who was absent. Eighteen months away, uninterrupted.Seamen

Lleal, Costa or Joel are some of the millions of men who live or have lived from the sea. Today there are more than 2.5 million merchant sailors. Almost 60% come from the Philippines, India, China, Russia and Indonesia. For citizens of these countries, working in the navy means guaranteeing a future. Joel decided to become an officer because he had to help his family and doing electronic engineering, which was his dream, meant one more year of studies. "For them, working eight or nine months means being able to afford a house. That's why they end up going through the motions and accepting many things. If they endure, their children will be able to study," explains Costa.This is the case of Bhabik Tandel and Haraganga Mallik, two Indian sailors who call in at Barcelona on the last Tuesday in June. It's a good trade. They earn a good living. Like Lena Rose, a 35-year-old Filipino cook who lands in the Catalan capital with the container ship Mercury, coming from Valencia. The next morning it's time to leave for Casablanca and then, sea and more sea until Israel, Egypt, and Turkey. "I'll be away from home for nine months, I've only been away for one now, so I have eight left," she explains. Lena works 12-hour shifts, preparing different salads and desserts for her colleagues every day. When she's not working, she spends her day on her mobile or watching a movie in her cabin to "relax". The worst thing about her job is the rocking, as they have to secure everything – plates, chairs, pots and pans... – so they don't shatter into a thousand pieces. That, and the loneliness and monotony. "The ship is like a prison; if you want to get out, you can't. When you're in bed, in your cabin, you keep telling yourself 'I'm alone'," she confesses.Lena Rose is part of a group of 7 Filipinos. While she is talking to the journalist, the rest are waiting for her, playing billiards at Stella Maris, an international Catholic organization that assists sailors in many ports. A few minutes later, another group of Chinese arrives to exchange dollars and visit the city. They have a few hours. They travel under the Hong Kong flag and have an Indian crew member on board. They are the third group to pass through the building that Stella Maris has in the shipyards of Barcelona. Joel and three friends were the first. The last time they had been in the Catalan capital, they had visited "la Sagrada", as they call the Sagrada Familia, and now they are asking Ricard for advice on visiting the Gothic Quarter. Ricard Rodríguez-Martos is the alma mater of the organization. He welcomes sailors – they have 32 beds at a very affordable price – and helps them during their brief stay in Barcelona, although sometimes he has seen some abandoned sailor spend months living in the modest building. He himself was a naval officer for a few years. "It's a very nice job, but it left my daughter and wife alone, with the second daughter I quit," he recalls. This is what happens to many sailors. When they want to start a family or have children, they look for alternatives closer to home. Living together many months

Ricard receives citizens from all over the world every day. He has seen it all from his small office, coordinating the van that brings the ship's crew to the Stella Maris premises. "Seafarers are needed; on board the ship, Russians and Ukrainians coexist," he argues."The most important thing is not navigation, but that people don't kill each other," points out Lleal. During the long voyages, all crammed into the cabin, there were topics that could not be discussed. Neither politics nor women. Too many hours together. Too many hours seeing the same faces. Both while working and during rest time. "Before we carried 3,000 tons and could spend weeks loading and unloading. Today we carry hundreds of thousands of tons and they are unloaded in hours. This means that the crew has practically no time to have a beer on Las Ramblas," he adds. Port stops are ephemeral. Furthermore, new ports, especially the larger ones, are infrastructures far from cities. From life. From human contact. And there isn't always a Ricard to welcome and guide them. "And fortunately, the campaigns are getting shorter and shorter. Before, they used to be 11 months at sea and one month of vacation. "This 11-1 is a translation of the mentality of working the land, but enduring 11 months on a ship is terrible because you don't have Saturdays or Sundays, there are no holidays. You work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with your watches and your shifts, and the rest environment is still the same workplace, which is the vessel," explains Víctor Jiménez, president of the council of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), who believes that there are "certain companies and crew profiles that assume" these conditions."They are miserable conditions," states Germán de Melo, president of the Spanish Merchant Navy Officers' College, without mincing words, who denounces the abuse of overtime hours there. "It is the first sector to be affected by globalization. Qualified labor is sought, but the salary, vacation, and condition requirements are not the same. For Europeans, it is no longer attractive to be on board; policies must be applied to promote the attractiveness of the profession in European Union countries," adds Jiménez.Sailors experience an isolation that affects their psychic stability. There end up being "many squabbles" and it's better to lock oneself away to "read or write" in the cabin, says Lleal, who during the 23 years he sailed around the world saw how crew members who had "gone mad", who couldn't take it anymore, had to disembark on land. "In the middle of the sea you go crazy", he recounts.When he was a merchant captain, Pep Costa learned that sailors always push the limits. Even if you have a calm disposition, you need to know how to be authoritative. But above all, you must earn the respect of your crew. They spend many months living together and, as he says, "on a ship everything works, but not everything at the same time." Therefore, there will be problems and everyone will need to row in the same direction. They have all seen and experienced fires, water leaks, rescues of shipwrecked people, or even collisions between ships in the fog of Newfoundland. That's why Costa used to take a walk around the ship every day and interact with the entire crew: "There is always someone who wants to tell you something and doesn't dare to bypass the chain of command."

For Lleal, sailors are "men aged by a very hard life." He proved it by fishing in Greenland at 30 or 40 degrees below zero. They left port in January and returned, if all went well, after 6 or 7 months, when the ship was full. The only condition was that they could spend Christmas at home. Now things have changed, the conditions for sailors are better, but he saw – and especially suffered – how the crew spent months without showering, cleaning fish to salt it, with the stench that implies. In the middle of the ocean, the hardest thing was to have non-saline water.The return home and the pirates

One of the worst things for seafaring men is returning home. So much time away often means they don't integrate, that they feel strange within their own family environment. "You've been dreaming of your family for months, and suddenly you see that everyone is going at their own pace and you are a stranger," recounts Ricard. And this caused many sailors to end up separating. "In Galicia, land of sailors, there were many villages without men, who were at sea. Who organized everything in the village? The women, who were very empowered. The sailors' wives are special," explains Lleal, who points out that women are an "obsession" for sailors: many place names on the coasts are feminine references or refer to the woman's body. On the other hand, the female presence on board ships is minimal. Only 1% are women and the majority, like Lena Rose, are in charge of cooking or cleaning. In fact, in Spain, until the Constitution of 1978, one of the requirements to enroll in nautical school was to be a man.

An exception to the scarcity of women among merchant crews is Pilar Pasanau. Moving up was not easy. When she applied to be a captain, someone always appeared who put up barriers because she was a woman, and told her she lacked a "bad temper." "Everything was violent, you have a bad time," she recalls. Obstacles, which although they were occasional, gradually wore her down until she decided to take a turn in her life. Pasanau also suffered a lot with pirates. In 2025 there were 171 piracy attacks, mainly in the Strait of Malacca (122) and the west coast of Africa (21). She experienced it firsthand on the coast of Equatorial Guinea, during the lockdown. "They had detected me. I had a very bad time. All the guys were worried about COVID and I about the pirate attacks," she recalls.Pirates use fast boats and grappling hooks to board ships and avoid being detected by radar. Sometimes they even have drones to monitor vessels and assess the value of the cargo. Off the coast of Somalia, they usually hijack the crew and seek a ransom. In Southeast Asia, they assault oil tankers, shut down electronic systems and GPS, and transfer the fuel to pirate ships to sell the product on the black market. This has led some shipowners to hire mercenaries – mostly ex-military – to patrol the Indian Ocean route, using precision weapons to deter attackers. "Many business owners do not report incidents for fear of reprisals; they prefer to pay and be free," laments De Melo. Another of the major problems that workers in the sector suffer from is abandonment. In 2024, 3,133 sailors were abandoned. According to the IMO, in Spain most of these situations occur in the ports of Las Palmas, Cartagena and Tarragona, and on small or medium-sized vessels. One of the peculiarities is that it happens quite often on live animal transport vessels.

When there is a problem of abandonment or a crime on board in international waters, it is the country of the flag the ship flies that must resolve it. The fact that there are flags of convenience or countries that are more lenient with international regulations harms workers, as these states have neither the resources nor the will to investigate it.The automation of the sector is also a big problem for the future. Now there are half the crew members there were 40 years ago and the trend, according to Costa, is to go "towards autonomous ships and remove people from the equation".Just as there are few women, there are also few Catalans. Catalonia had always been a land of the sea. It dominated the Mediterranean in the 13th and 14th centuries; it was a pioneer with the Consulate of the Sea of 1272, which allowed the foundations of international maritime law to be laid; and, centuries later, the Indians made fortunes in the colonies of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But the country turned its back on the oceans. "While the navy was sailing, there were many Catalan sailors, but when it switched to motor and steam, with industrialization, workers went into industry," relates Lleal, who acknowledges that the sea is still largely unknown and on which many myths have been built out of ignorance. "Those who have explained what happens on ships are those who stay in port, not those from the sea, who are not accustomed to writing, with exceptions like Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. Those two are the clearest examples that show us the great beauty that exists at sea, far from land."