Winter Wilson, third mate. Master, Mates, and Pilots (MM&P)
Winter Wilson, 44. Third mate, Master, Mates, and Pilots (MM&P), Oakland, California. 27 October 2025
“I like being on the sea. I much prefer being underway than in the berth. Being underway, it's not peaceful. I mean, we just came down the coast from Tacoma to Oakland and we were in seven meter seas and we got the ‘S’ beat out of us. But on a nice night, you can see every star in the sky and it's, I don't know, it's peaceful. It's solitude. Some people don't like it because of the solitude. I actually do like the solitude, I can be alone in my thoughts.”
I just got off the Matson Manulani as a third mate. 70 days, the Northern Triangle which is Oakland to Honolulu to Tacoma and back to Oakland. I’ve been sailing deck for 11 years.
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The big thing is the time off.
All of my work experience has been around boats. I started off on small boats down in Los Angeles and Long Beach doing harbor cruises. The money wasn't there. My younger brother went to sea in the same union and he was making twice as much money as me, and working half as much. I decided at 30 it was time for a career change, and I liked it.
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I'm married and I’m home just long enough for my wife to get tired of me and tell me to go back out to sea. We met while I was shipping, and so it's all we know. It's worked so far. We've been married for three years. Happy to see me leave, happy to see me come home.
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I take any Matson job I can get. A lot of times the jobs out of Long Beach go to China, so that would be Long Beach, Honolulu, Guam, Okinawa, Ningbo, Shanghai, and then back to Long Beach. That's a 35-day loop.
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I like being on the sea. I much prefer being underway than in the berth. Being underway, it's not peaceful. I mean, we just came down the coast from Tacoma to Oakland and we were in seven meter seas and we got the ‘S’ beat out of us. But on a nice night, you can see every star in the sky and it's, I don't know, it's peaceful. It's solitude. Some people don't like it because of the solitude. I actually do like the solitude, I can be alone in my thoughts.
On a long transit from China back to Southern California, 12 days, you can get into a routine. You do your job. You do your work. As third mate, you do safety inspections, and you're just kind of in your own world. And it's not an office. Some people work in offices, and I don't know how they do it.
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I think the galley in the Steward’s department would probably be the worst (job). Inevitably someone won't like what they put out and there will be complaints. If you're a good steward, you have a very happy crew. If you're not a good steward, you have a very unhappy crew.
You know, every job on the ship, I would guess, has its ups and downs. Sailing captain, you're the one that goes to jail if something goes wrong, or the one that gets fired. There's stress levels with the higher-ranking jobs, and less stress with the lower-level jobs.
Some of the sailors, the unlicensed ABs, they're all smiles because they do their job and they're not worried about it. The chief mate, the captain, a little bit more stress-related, a lot more responsibility.
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I've been only on U.S. built ships for the last six years, so I can't say for sure how good the Chinese ships are. I do know that the foreign flagships tend to get scrapped a lot sooner than the U.S. flagships.
In China, it's different. It's communism, not capitalism. Without getting political, when the government's funding the ships then you can scrap them every five years, or every ten years.
When for instance Matson is building their own ships you're going to amortize that over a much longer period, and make them last, run them for 20 or 30 years.
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My favorite port is the port I go home in. I'm not a shore hound like a lot of people are. A lot of people go ashore in every single port.
I happened to go ashore when I was here in Oakland because I had a car here in the Matson parking lot. I never went ashore in Tacoma.
Ubers were really cheap when they started and they're getting expensive now. And to spend $60 on an Uber round trip to go have a burger and a beer is just not in my budget. I could do that and then I'd just have to get on another ship sooner, which isn't a problem, but if I spend a little less money while I'm at sea, I can stay home with my wife a little longer.
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Favorite thing about the life – the good sunsets, good sunrises. The scenery when it's nice is unbelievable. And some of those sunsets you'll never see anywhere else, never anywhere in the world because you have to be out on a flat, calm ocean, surrounded for thousands of miles in all directions by water.
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Winter Wilson, third mate. MM&P
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Photo: Robert Gumpert
Transcription: Michele Colyer
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