By Warren Cornwall
Herald Writer
EVERETT — Gerardo Ramirez sat on the edge of his Everett hospital bed wishing for something that, at the moment, seemed as remote as his Guatemalan hometown of Puerto Barrios.
"I want to go home," he said Thursday evening.
The 58-year-old sailor is stuck here, say shipping union officials, because a ship owner left Ramirez and five other foreign crew members stranded for months on an unsafe boat moored at an Everett dock, with little food and no money.
"We don’t have food, we don’t have water, we don’t have nothing," Ramirez said in halting English of the conditions he faced at the end of November.
The accounts of Ramirez and two union officials paint a picture of a months-long saga for a group of luckless sailors stuck with dwindling rations on a boat that wasn’t seaworthy. All of it quietly unfolded on Everett’s shores.
"It was right under my nose," said Harold Pyatte, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 32 in Everett.
It’s not clear who owns the 150-foot cargo ship The Marlin, said Lila Smith, an inspector for the International Transport Workers’ Federation who has taken on the sailors’ cause. But she said the union has a responsibility to help Ramirez, who suffered a stroke while on the ship and now sits in Providence Medical Center in Everett awaiting money from the owners to pay for a ticket home.
The owners, or people affiliated with the owners who Smith said she has dealt with, could not be reached for comment Thursday evening.
Pyatte said he was alerted to the sailors’ plight in late November when he got a call from a union inspector asking him to check on a complaint about sailors stranded on a ship in Everett. He boarded the boat and discovered six sailors cooking their one meal for the day — four potatoes and six slices of pork.
The ship had been moored there since mid-September, brought to port because of steering and navigation problems, he said. The ship had initially sailed from Seattle, bound for Miami, Pyatte said.
He tapped the union for six turkeys left from Thanksgiving donations and began pressuring the boat’s managers in Florida to fix the boat and pay the sailors.
In the end, four of the crew, including Ramirez, opted to take their back pay and leave, Ramirez said. That’s because they feared the boat, which sails under the Bolivian flag, wasn’t safe to cover such a distance in rough ocean conditions, Pyatte said.
"Thank God for these people," Ramirez said, gesturing to Pyatte and Smith. "I don’t want to go back to this ship."
But before he could leave, Ramirez in early December suffered the stroke that landed him in the hospital. He still has a weakened left leg that makes walking difficult, he said.
The ship’s owners should pay for Ramirez to return home and for someone to accompany him on the flight to Guatemala City because of his medical condition, Smith said. She said people associated with the ship’s ownership have refused to pay, saying Ramirez quit working for them when he suffered the stroke.
But Smith said Ramirez was on the boat and still working for them when he fell ill, and so he is the owner’s responsibility.
You can call Herald Writer Warren Cornwall at 425-339-3463 or send e-mail to cornwall@heraldnet.com.
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