Last Monday, Ben and Lisa Miller found themselves on the second floor of a Keelung Pizza Hut, a place they sometimes go to for the afternoon special. Between 2pm and 5pm, you can get a personal pan pizza, drink and salad bar for NT$145. There are four kinds of pizza from which to choose. They usually get the Supreme.
The Millers are sailors and, while it's not the most cliched sailors' hangout, the Pizza Hut suits them well enough. And the surroundings be damned, because like all sailors, the Millers have plenty of stories to tell.
For example, there's the one about embarking on a round-the-world journey in an 11m ketch and only making it from Okinawa to Keelung. Where they got stuck. For four months now. In a city where it rains an average of 206 days a year.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BEN AND LISA MILLER
That not-really-very-intrepid tale, in fact, is mostly full of paperwork that bureaucrats can't seem to get done and the perplexing things harbor officials have told them, about how they're scared to leave Taiwan before receiving compensation for their damaged boat, and also about spending much of the summer and early fall sitting around a hotel room flipping channels.
"You know, just a couple weeks ago, we lost Star World," said Lisa, referring to the satellite channel that airs American TV series. "I guess the hotel just changed systems or something."
Ben Miller retired from the US Air Force in 1993 after 20 years of service. He stayed on in Okinawa, where he'd already been stationed for nine years, and ran charter cruises.
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
A sailor like his father and grandfather before him, he's spent the last decade buying boats, fixing them up, and selling them to get something better. That trading cycle came to an end last fall, when he finally quit his civilian Navy job, flew to Hawaii and bought Remedy, a Pearson 365 sailboat built in 1976, the 95th of its design run. The boat is 11m long, 3.3m in the beam, and has a draft of 1.3m.
After buying it, he went on to "beef up" the hull with extra ribs and fiberglass, giving it the strength it would need for offshore sailing. Last September, he sailed it back to Okinawa via Guam, encountering 7m to 10m waves along the way.
Lisa, who's also a third generation sailor, moved to Okinawa seven years ago as a civilian social worker for the US Marine Corps. She met Ben in 1994 and married him in 1997. In the Web journal she'd originally intended as a record of Remedy's progress around the globe, she wrote: "We met sailing, fell in love sailing, and we left our first home by sailing away together."
PHOTO: DAVID FRAZIER, TAIPEI TIMES
So Remedy sailed out of Okinawa's Nase Port on April 28, carrying Ben, Lisa and a Chihuahua they'd named Crew. They passed through the harbor entrance with four other boats, a circumstance they saw as a kind of symbolic sendoff, embarking on one of those journey of journeys, a trip around the world. It was supposed to take them to the Philippines, Singapore and western Thailand. Then they'd sail underneath the southern tip of India, past Arabia and through the Red Sea. The Suez Canal would issue them to the Mediterranean, and when they finally got tired of Greece, Italy, France and Spain, they'd cross the Atlantic and return to the US.
The preparation process itself took about four to five years of saving money, rounding up equipment, planning routes and so on. When they finally cast off, the whole of their possessions consisted of what was on the boat and some furniture in storage. The first ports of call were in Japan, and from there they went on to Pusan, Korea., where a prior run-in with Russian boat thieves won them a kingly welcome from the gentleman whose yacht they'd saved.
Not quite around the world
For the 1,100km passage from Korea to Taiwan, they picked up two crew, a Taiwanese friend and a bad-tempered Korean alcoholic. Naturally, they didn't find out about the Korean until they were under way. "He threatened to cut my throat, among other things," said Ben, who considered duct taping the guy's arms and legs and throwing him in the bilge.
The wind was also against them on the Korea-Taiwan leg, so they had to zigzag the whole way, racking up only 140km to 150km miles a day. In the end, it took a little over six days.
Remedy finally sailed into Keelung Harbor on the evening of Friday, June 29, and the Millers tied her up along an old sea wall in the corner of the harbor at a spot that was almost, but not quite, visible from the Pizza Hut window. They were careful not to dock too close to the rough sea concrete, not wanting to scrape up the fenders or give the rats a chance to walk across the lines.
A day and a half later on Sunday morning, the unsavory "Korean fella" was being deported and the Millers were having breakfast on shore. That was when their yacht was rammed by tugboat 1323 of the Keelung Harbor Bureau, piloted at the time by captain Jiang Tsong-ming (
"We were walking back when we saw it through the trees, the broken mast," said Ben. "I know accidents happen, so actually when I walked over there I wasn't too excited."
Later that afternoon, the Millers met with officials from the Keelung Harbor Bureau, who immediately admitted responsibility for the accident and even mentioned the possibility of full compensation within five to seven days. They put the Millers up in a hotel, which they offered to pay for, and said it would neither be necessary to get a lawyer nor to file a lawsuit. They also asked the Millers to provide an accident report, damage assessment report and estimate of repair costs within 24 hours.
At the Millers' request, the amount of their estimate will not be disclosed in this article, as the case is not yet finalized and they fear that pre-settlement publication of the figures could further delay a resolution. Suffice it to say that according to Ben, when the estimate was returned to harbor officials a day later, "They almost shit a brick, man!"
Keelung is the second busiest commercial harbor in Taiwan and one of the island's four international harbors (the others are Kaohsiung, Taichung and Hualien). But according to Wu Fu-sen, the chief at the Harbor Bureau that handled the Millers' case, Keelung only sees two or three yachts a year and has never seen an accident involving any high-priced foreign pleasure crafts.
"Accidents do happen," he said, "but usually it's just a few thousand new Taiwan dollars, or maybe even NT$10,000 or NT$20,000, and people just pay up on the spot," he said.
So the incredulous harbor officials required the Millers to hire an independent surveyor, which the Millers say cost them about US$2000, took three weeks and came back with an estimate slightly higher than their own.
In the meantime, an approaching typhoon made it necessary for the Harbor to pull Remedy out of the water and put it up on blocks at Wharf 19, the spot Lisa now refers to as "its final resting place." Moreover, the Millers, who had no bank in Taiwan, have yet to be processed by immigration, and were relying on Ben's retirement pay as their only means of support, also began to receive a weekly subsidy from the Harbor to cover their food and lodging.
Caught in red tape
Four months later, the Millers are still receiving that same subsidy, and amid a slew of bureaucratic delays, they're still playing the waiting game. As matters have dragged on, they've also noticed how the eventuality of getting paid has developed into more and more of "a concern."
"We're not in jail, but we're really in a situation where we don't feel comfortable leaving the country," said Ben. "If we're not here every day keeping the fires lit, it may take twice as long, and where does that leave us?"
"I try to be optimistic, and honestly I think we will get paid," he said. "Everybody has told me that the amount of time we've been spending is just a part of doing business here. But at the same time, it's almost like they make us feel like they're doing us a big favor by paying us for the damage to our boat that they did."
If the waiting has accomplished anything, it has given the Millers a chance to learn a few of the details behind the accident that crippled their boat. They didn't find these out from the harbor officials though, or their shipping agent or any of the official reports they can't understand. The information came to them from another tugboat captain, a guy they ran into on the wharf one day, who told them how the 1323 experienced generator failure while coming in that Sunday morning, preventing it from putting its engines in reverse.
Tug propellers are attached so that they can swivel 360 degrees. The design makes tugboats highly maneuverable, which is necessary for bumping freighters through a crowded harbor. A failed generator, however, leaves the tugboat unable to rotate its thrust, which is what the tugboat 1323 needed to do that morning in order to slow down.
Still, the tug committed breaches of harbor protocol that, beyond its mechanical failure, could be seen as negligent. As Lisa pointed out: "It should have never been coming directly into us. It should have been backing in."
As a result of the accident, Wu said the tugboat skipper, Jiang, was given a demerit, his first. If he gets two more, he will lose his job.
Captain held responsible
But even though the Harbor Bureau has correctly assessed responsibility for the incident, the office, especially its head, Liu Tai-min (
"Jiang only makes NT$500,000 a year," said Liu. "He could never afford to pay that!"
Currently, the case rests with the MOTC's Controller's office, which will decide Jiang's responsibility and, according to the latest estimates, approve disbursement of the settlement anytime from three days to two weeks from now. After that, it will take another three to five days for the money to matriculate through the Harbor Bureau and actually materialize in the Millers' hands. Lisa, using her own personal experience, translates the remaining wait into "another month."
The settlement itself was arrived at with the help of a lawyer, which the Millers' eventually found it necessary to hire, and will involve cash compensation and allow them to retain possession of tens of thousands of dollars of equipment installed on their boat.
However, the Millers will have to abandon their ruined craft, pay back their living subsidy, which continues to accrue, and renounce claims on other expenses, such as fees paid to their lawyer, the shipping agent and the surveyor.
Still, as the agreement signals a welcome relief from their hotel room and Pizza Hut purgatory, it's a deal the Millers are willing to live with. Sipping on their Pepsis and gazing into the overcast Keelung skies, they've reflected long and hard on their situation and managed to put a lot of things in perspective.
"Nobody got hurt, we're safe; we realize that in the big scheme of things it's not really that bad," said Lisa, "but at the same time, it's been frustrating."
The couple has also revised its plans for what comes next, since the round-the-world scheme has pretty much been scrapped. What looks more likely is heading to the US on an airplane with their Chihuahua and starting over. And of course, they don't have any intentions of giving up on sailing.
"We're gonna try to get another boat that we can get a little bit cheap and put some money in it and fix it up," said Ben, adding, "I guess there's worse case scenarios than spending the winter in Houston and then cruising around the Bahamas in spring."
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