TITANIC

Being at sea aboard huge luxury vessels is very glamorous and as a skipper come captain it is so easy to be wined and dined each evening by billionaires with the finest foods and drink the only drawback is that you steadily become an old soak, I worked alongside many captains who became just that, thinking back to a collision at night with JJ the skipper and a refugee boat he had got drunk with a stewardess and gone to bed leaving the vessel on autopilot the similarities to Titanic are on a much smaller scale but just as deadly , doing double dog watch shifts doesn't help instead of 4 hours you do 8 covering for someone or even the milk shift when you start at midnight and finish six hours later dozing asleep is so easy if the auto pilots on many of our crew used to come on the milk shift smelling of booze - sea watches disorientate you I've seen quite a few old sailors having a beer for breakfast as they come off the first watch at 4 am .