A lifetime of feeling the sea's allure
Call him Capt. Manny.
Everybody down on the waterfront does, even though Manny Aschemeyer last helmed a ship in 1969.
Officially, Aschemeyer is executive director of the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which tracks ship movements at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. But he is much more: historian, statistician, booster and news service.
Next month, he'll be pulling up the gangplank after six decades on or near the sea. Aschemeyer's maritime years provide a window on the modern evolution of shipping.
He still remembers the safari he took during a voyage to Kenya 43 years ago. One night, there was brandy to be sipped with friends as Mt. Kilimanjaro's snowy peak shone like silver in the moonlight.
"No one gets to do that anymore. There's no time," Aschemeyer says, because tight profit margins have led to ships that are much bigger and faster. Crew sizes have shrunk, as has the time spent in port, which is now sometimes as short as 48 hours.
When Aschemeyer was sailing, "The whole purpose was to go ashore and see something that you had never seen and experience something that you had never done."
Nowadays, "Everyone now is either working or sleeping or eating."
Growing up in Baltimore, young Manny and his father, Fritz, could walk to any dock and usually get aboard a vessel for a tour. Fritz Aschemeyer had trained to be a seaman like his own dad, but wound up a painter and decorator of Loews movie theaters.
Still, Fritz wanted his son to go to sea. He would invite seamen home for dinner to "hear their exotic tales of faraway places," Manny Aschemeyer says. "My family says I was brainwashed and I guess I was. But I was able to make captain before my father died, and I'm very proud of that."
Aschemeyer eventually became a master mariner, a status that meant he could command "any ship in any ocean."
A typical cargo vessel in those days was 450 feet long and carried about 8,000 tons of freight, but not a single cargo container. The cargo was on pallets or as separate items that had to be loaded piece by piece. It could take days to load and unload a vessel. The size of a crew back then would be about 50 and included plumbers and carpenters "because we had to maintain the ship ourselves," Aschemeyer says. A transpacific crossing took about three weeks.
Today, that voyage takes about nine days in a ship that is nearly three times longer and can carry 100,000 tons of cargo in about 8,000 containers.
