Iconic line from 'Captain Phillips' breaks ice with dour captain of French cruise ship
“Should I do it?” is a question I've often asked myself when traveling.
I asked it again when I was a guest of Max McKee, a Great Lakes shipping magnate who owns the Aquastar day cruise vessel and the harbor at which she is docked in Muskegon.
McKee had managed to get me a walkabout aboard Ponant’s Le Dumont D’Urville cruise ship, a French luxury liner moored at McKee’s dock that day during its Great Lakes itinerary. After Ponant’s passengers were picked up by a woman wearing wooden shoes and bused to Holland for a shore excursion, McKee and I, along with John Mullally and the Muskegon Chamber’s Linden Peterson, headed up the ship’s gang plank.
We were greeted crisply by the ship’s captain – a movie star-handsome young Frenchman dressed in pressed whites. He was a gallic, serious seaman who moved with alacrity having no time to waste while showing us his ship.
That is where I faced my dilemma. Ever since I’d seen the movie “Captain Phillips,” I’d made it a habit aboard boats to mimic the iconic line from the film said by the Somali pirate to the freighter captain played by Tom Hanks. Once committed to a silly habit like this, I force myself to stick with it - no matter the circumstance. So, I dared to interrupt the dour captain’s tour to deliver the line with Academy Award conviction:
“Hey, mon ami, look at me. Look at me,” I insisted.
The captain, startled on the stairwell, stopped in his tracks. When he swiveled, I stared him in the eye and stated: “I’m the captain now!”
After a silent pause, the captain, in a typically French c’est la vie gesture, simply shrugged. “Alright,” he said in a indifferent tone, “you think you can steer her out?”
The exchange broke the ice beautifully and the captain became good fun, even offering us a cold drink on deck.
“What would you drink if you were off duty?” I inquired.
“Whiskey,” the captain answered.
“I want to drink like the captain, so I will have a whiskey!”
“In the morning?” the sophisticated Frenchman shook his head and questioned. “Have a beer.”
Over that beer the captain tolerated my questions for a while, revealing his passengers say they very much like the Mackinac Island port stop, though he isn’t able to leave the ship.
“Is it pronounced ‘Mackinaw’ or ‘Mackinac?’” he asked.
The captain said he enjoys steering the ship from Lake Michigan into Muskegon Lake.
“You pass the submarine and the old cruise liner and the military landing craft,” he explained, referring to the USS Silversides; SS Milwaukee Clipper; and USS LST 393 – all serving as tourist museums.
The ship, in addition to being moored off Mackinac Island’s Mission Point Resort, sailed to such ports as Montreal, Detroit, Sault Ste. Marie, Tobermory, and Charlevoix, and would depart for Milwaukee later that day. The captain said he alternates between two months at sea and two months at home in France with his wife and children.
He assured me he’d never left a dawdling passenger behind. “We are not supposed to leave them, but I don’t tell the passengers that.”
Six days later and 3,000 miles to the south in Placencia, Belize, I stood in the Caribbean Sea aboard the deck of the Sirenian Bay Resort’s “Captain Jak’s” dive boat as it pulled out of the harbor.
“Hey, Doyle! Look at me,” I shouted in the sun to the Belizean man at the helm. “I’m the captain now!”
“It’s just from that movie,” one of the female passengers reassured another.
We all had a good laugh as his crewmate Moses then tried to push Doyle off the captain’s chair and into the brilliant blue bay.
Contact Michael Patrick Shiels at MShiels@aol.com His radio program may be found at MiBigShow.com or weekday mornings from 9-noon on WJIM AM 1240
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Iconic line from 'Captain Phillips' breaks ice with cruise ship captain
