Need for adventure is the reason I can’t get away from ocean work.
I would say my favorite “adventure” was when I was 19, my first year I worked in Alaska.
Me and 2 other people left coos coos bay, with no real ocean navigation experience (just lots of running boats around familiar areas)
It took us 8 days running full time besides stopping in port Angeles to get fuel. It was pretty surreal pulling into Ketchikan, with like 200 bucks to my name, and no solid plan. The plan was to get an urchin permit, but had nothing lined up, but the owner of the boat wanted me to go up there because he wanted me on the crew.
I split deckhand work with our main deckhand for a couple months until my boss lined up a permit for me, and he had the plant buy it, and I would pay it off 5 cents per pound that I picked (permit was just over 12k) so the plan started working.
I was there for a year that time, and we would come in every other day to unload in Craig, which was about a 7hr boat ride.
It was fun, working a long way from any people, in some of the most scenic places there are. We would pretty much eat fish for dinner every night because it was easy and available, and we would anchor up to sleep in one of the many bays on the west side of Dall island. Just the boating adventure was awesome up there, between exploring completely new places and the crazy bad weather in winter, but besides all of that, it’s amazing diving up there and that’s all we did, all day, every day.
It was a very fun time of my life, and we had a lot of fun, even though it was a grind, it was a good crew, and we made the best out of it. Being stuck on a boat with people will either make people close, or hate each other, luckily there was no crew drama, everyone had the same goal, everyone had thick skin, and everyone worked hard and pulled their weight, and we shared a lot of cool adventure