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Larry Dickens - Novelist & Mariner |
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Larry Dickens - Novelist & Mariner |
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Snapshots of how it all began. Once upon a time. . .
| When I was a kid visits to my Aunt Florence
and Uncle George's beachside motel on Savannah Beach, Georgia provided me
with my first exposure to ships. I wondered what were those dark,
fuzzy-looking shapes way out there on the horizon. One day while building sand castles on the beach with my little sister, one of those shapes approached us. It went up the Savannah River and into the port. It was my first up-close sighting of a ship. I wondered what kind of people were on it and from where had the ship come. |
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Visits to my Aunt Neila's in the 1000 Islands provided another source of wonderment
about ships.
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My interest in writing begin at early age, too. When I was a kid many people teased me about my last name being "Dickens" and I did not know why. They would ask me in jest, "Are you a writer, too?" or "Are you related to Charles?" My confusion stemmed from the fact that
my dad's brother was named Charles and I did not understand why so many people
seemed to know him. One day I asked my parents about Uncle Charles's
"fame" and they told me about the other Charles Dickens, the beloved author.
This introduced me to idea that people actually wrote books for an occupation. Nothing has changed since. I still receive them monthly and still hope that someday I'll have an acceptance letter to post on this site, though the lack of one hasn't stopped me from getting my stories out there or diminished my interest in writing them. The lesson here is to Never give up! Giving up is the equivalent of writing a rejection letter to yourself (though you do make out a little because you save on the postage). If you want to be a writer, then write! The more you write, the better your writing skills will become.
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After graduating from Horseheads High School in Horseheads, New York, I entered the Massachusetts Maritime Academy located in Buzzard's Bay. Four years later, I graduated with a B.S. degree and passed my USCG third mate's (deck license) exam. Forty days after leaving MMA, I found my first berth as third mate aboard a 500+-foot Army Corps of Engineers self-propelled suction dredge. It operated in New York harbor. We'd dredge the channels in the area and make sure they were at their charted depths so that ships could pass through them safely. |
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During the next four years I sailed on a variety of freighters and tankers and, eventually, became a deck officer with Energy Transportation Corp/Pronav and their fleet of eight liquefied natural gas carriers which has operated in the Orient for almost 30 years. These ships are part of a "floating pipeline" and each one carries 50,000 tons of liquefied methane at minus 265 degrees Farenheit from jungle ports in Borneo and Sumatera to utility companies in Japan. The methane is used to produce electricity for many Japanese cities, including Osaka, Nagoya, Himeji, and Tobata. These ships have a 936-foot length, a 143-foot beam, and a draft of 36 feet. They displace just over 100,000 long tons. They are huge! During my days at sea I spent a lot of my spare time writing stories, mostly fiction. On occasion, I would write nonfiction pieces about some of the people we rescued at sea. Sometimes, when attempting to become a writer, it is easier to start by writing about what you know, and then go from there.
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