Editor’s Note: Mark Pryor isn’t a journalist. He’s not a career aid worker or a social media activist. He’s a regular guy, a bartender in Richmond, who took a month off from Get Tight Lounge and a few other familiar haunts to volunteer with Sea-Watch, a German humanitarian organization that runs rescue missions in the Mediterranean.
When he told us about the trip, we asked if he’d keep a journal of his experience. He did more than that. He gave us a series of dispatches while helping rescue nearly 300 people fleeing unimaginable conditions in search of a better life. What follows is his personal journal, written at sea.
Read the next chapters HERE.
April 11th, 2025
The first couple days on a new ship are always funny and a little overwhelming. Essentially you have just walked onto and unpacked your bags on a highly-regulated deathtrap. Everything will kill you or at least take off a finger if you or others become careless.
It’s encouraged that you walk around the boat the first few days taking note of all the safety equipment. Where are the fire extinguishers, the manual fire alarms, the eye washing stations, the fire hoses, where is the muster station where we all go in the event of a general alarm, in the event of abandoning ship, where we all go in the worst case scenario when things have gotten so bad that we probably won’t all survive.
It being my second time on a search and rescue mission but first on this ship Sea-Eye 5, the ship is new and confusing but the overwhelming amount of information and general few-day confusion feels familiar and natural. Taking it all in with a shrug — I’ll get it in a few days.
The second time doing something like this is an interesting thing. My first ship, the Sea-Eye 4, back in 2022 was my whole maritime universe. It was the entirety of how ships existed tangibly in my mind. So I find myself expecting that ship while walking around this one. I keep turning corners and experiencing brief snippets of disorientation when I find myself facing the opposite way I expected.
April 13th, 2025
Had the first RHIB (Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat) training today in the port. Just a brief familiarization session for me and the other driver: slow maneuvering and getting used to how our boats respond. Since we were in the harbor we weren’t allowed to go any faster than 7 knots. No one said anything negative about my driving but then again most of them are German so it’s impossible to know. They could be experiencing intense anxiety about my ability and I would never know by their demeanor.
As I tooled around the harbor in the boat all the officers leaned on the bridge wing railings and watched me putter aimlessly about. I felt rusty and at times out of my depth and my impostor syndrome symptoms flared up. For a couple hours after the training I was pretty scared. Why the hell did I think I could do this? How embarrassing to show up 4000 miles from home to drive a boat in life and death situations, only to get in the boat in a harbor’s calm waters and feel uncertain and out of control and fraudulent.
I’ve relaxed since and given myself a little bit of grace. I’ve reminded myself that I haven’t driven a boat in 6 months and before that it had been a couple years. (And before that it had been… never… I’m just now realizing how insane it is that I am here when I’ve never even driven a boat back home in the US. As crazy as it sounds, this actually makes me feel better — it takes the pressure off. I’m not supposed to be good, I’m playing with house money!)
I’ve also never driven a boat this powerful and because of the diesel engine and electronic throttle there is a slight delay of response when the throttle is moved that I will have to get used to. I am allowed to have a little bit of time to break in, to get comfortable… right? No one else seemed terribly worried — but again, Germans: hard to read.
April 17th, 2025
We set sail tomorrow along with launching the RHIBs for the first time with the mothership underway. I am nervous. Three years ago, the last time I was on a RHIB team, we almost capsized in an incredibly dangerous fuckup while launching during an exercise.
The driver of that boat — a badass young Spanish woman named Yanira — stayed calm and executed a spur of the moment maneuver that very possibly saved me and our other crewmate from serious injury or death. I remember thinking at the time how relieved I was that I wasn’t the driver, that I’m sure I wouldn’t have dealt with the situation as well as her.
But now I’m the driver. And launching and recovering the RHIB from the mothership is the maneuver that has made me the most nervous in anticipation. It’s the maneuver you can’t train for — you kind of just have to do it.
It doesn’t help that I’ve spent the last few days assuming that I will get pulled aside by the Search and Rescue Coordinator or the Head of Mission to give me the bad news that they are replacing me as Driver — but so far nothing.
I still need to go over some driving-at-launch tactics with the Team Lead. Some do’s and don’ts. But I also can’t wait to feel the pitch and roll of the swells again, acute and immediate in a small rescue boat. I wonder if I’ll like it as much this time around being the one responsible for driving the boat and keeping everyone safe.
I have the confidence of inevitability of effort. I know I’m not going to not try, therefore what’s the use in anxiety?
I’m proud and I’m comfortable and I’m scared, but in a come-what-may kind of way. I feel good about our crew despite me being the most experienced person on my RHIB team — which is insane when I think about it, so I don’t think about it. I recognize the responsibility I have to learn and adapt quickly, to ask the questions, clarify the answers and internalize them and implement them, make them fast in my mind and begin to commit them to my hands’ memory at once in order to keep us all safe.
April 19th, 2025
The mission seems to be hanging by a thread. I think everyone knows it but no one wants to say it. My RHIB, Echo, is once again not working and this time it seems to be a little more serious.
José has tried three different fixes and so far nothing has worked. I sit up in the boat with him, handing him tools, too ignorant to help, watching as he tries to salvage my purpose by dismantling it bolt by bolt. So we go about our mission prep as if everything is fine but my team is moving through the days in a purgatory of purpose as we do our trainings all crammed on the other rescue boat, a jet propulsion boat, my team only getting occasional practice time on a vessel we will not use in the future.
At night I lay in my bunk and think about how a jet boat moves compared to a propeller boat and try to keep them separate in my mind so if my boat gets fixed I won’t have regressed in skill.
April 20th, 2025
Today I was helping José and Jannik work on my boat. José stood up at one point and reached into his coverall pocket looking for a tool. A stricken noise escaped from his lips. He pulled his hand from his pocket and opened it to reveal a snail, crushed into pieces. The snail not the only one crushed.
I have many questions about that guy.
Part II: Mechanical Miracles, Paper Saints
April 22th, 2025
Echo is going to be taken out for a test drive this afternoon. They craned the engine back out of the engine room and back onto Echo this morning. José has a theory that Echo’s engine is Catholic and that it has been reenacting the story of Easter. It died, it was entombed (dropped into the engine room, with a slab (the hatch door) placed over to seal the tomb), and then a few days later the slab was removed and the engine craned up and out.
It is risen, hopefully. An Easter miracle.
April 23rd, 2025
The miracle didn’t take.
Now we wait at anchor about ten nautical miles off the coast of Sicily as a new RHIB is shipped to us from the UK. Morale is low.
April 24th, 2025
I like how many of my non-native English-speaking colleagues say that they want to sit “in the shadow” instead of “in the shade.” It’s technically wrong, but it feels more correct somehow. More poetic. We are all just trying to sit in the shadow of something and survive the heat.
April 28th, 2025
Our new RHIB arrived today. It’s a lot smaller than the one we’ve been training on, which will make rescues a little more difficult, but it does have a two-engine setup that will help with slow maneuvers. There isn’t a whole lot of room on the deck for my crew to move about, so we’re having to rethink our tactics.
Morale is a little bit low as a result, but at least we know what we’re working with, and the anchor is up, and we are finally on our way to the Area Of Operations.
April 30th, 2025 (Morning)
.
We were in the Area Of Operation for about an hour before we got our first distress case. We launched and had a pretty smooth rescue of 104 people from a medium-sized wooden boat. I had some first rescue jitters and fuckups, but overall everything went smoothly.
As soon as we had gotten all 104 people on board, the bridge told us that we had a new distress case about three nautical miles ahead. We went ahead looking for the target. We found another medium-sized wooden boat, empty, drifting. We kept looking.
In the meantime, we were aware of a larger military-looking boat that kept circling us at a distance of about three nautical miles. We assumed they were the So-Called Libyan Coast Guard — fully funded and equipped by the Italians to keep people out of the EU. We also assumed that the empty boat we found had been intercepted by them and the people were now being illegally taken back to Libya against their will.
But there wasn’t anything we could do about that now, so we kept looking. After awhile the bridge called us back to the mothership.
Just as we were about to be recovered, the bridge radioed down and told us that five people had just jumped from the Libyan ship.
The most mind-bogglingly brave and desperate gamble I have ever seen — jumping into a vast sea with no reason to think we knew they jumped, jumping because death was better than returning to detainment and torture in Libya.
Luckily someone on the bridge of the mothership was keeping their binoculars trained on the SCLCG vessel and saw five tiny blurs jump off the bow of the ship.
We rushed to the scene. Not being able to see the people in the water from that distance I aimed my boat at the Libyan Coast Guard vessel and opened up the throttle. We had eyes on a single head among the swells and were both bearing down on it when my team saw three more off port side. Alpha, the other rescue boat, went ahead to the one while we diverted.
My team threw horseshoe buoys to them and then noticed one more head, tiny, another ~70 yards away. I swung my propeller clear of them and then I left the three of them there — safer than when we found them and more visible with bright orange buoys and with the knowledge that the other rescue boat would be close behind — but still I left them there alone in the vastness of sea.
We could hear the last boy long before we got close to him, gasping for air to prolong the desperate effort as he swam so fucking hard to get to us. My team pulled him into the boat and he crumpled onto the deck and the loud gasping continued for a long time as we kept moving, scanning the water to make sure we hadn’t missed anyone.
April 30th, 2025 (Later)
During the first rescue, one of the people on the distress case put up a heart shape with his hands and yelled “I love you!”
Teun, my Dutch crewmate, yelled back, trying to calm everyone and get them to sit down on their unstable boat while we distributed more lifejackets: “Love is better when you’re sitting down!”
Part III: Promenades and Pressure Points
May 2nd, 2025
After the first rescue, each of the three nights we had people on board, the Eritreans would walk back and forth across the beam of the ship. Just 10 to 15 strides and then turn around and back and then turn and forth. Over and over for hours. In twos and threes, arm in arm, speaking in soft tones.
An evening promenade in the safe prison of a ship. It was comforting, and I sat there wondering what they are talking about. I regretted for the millionth time my monoglotishness.
May 3rd, 2025
I feel a little weird on this mission. Part of me feels right where I want to be — like last time. I’m pleased to have done a good job so far; immeasurably relieved. Proud. Thankful for the opportunity and for the people who told me I could do this. Thankful that I trusted them trusting me more than I trusted myself.
Once again I find myself at a pinnacle of adventure but it all feels so normal when I’m in it. It feels like something that must happen, like something that I both deserve and do not deserve, for both the highs and the lows. The benefits and the trauma. The trauma that I hold most tender. The joy for which I am most shy.
I’m excited to have the knowledge that I have the skill to do this job. It has been a question in my mind for so long.
May 4, 2025 (Entry One)
I have a hard time writing about all of this anymore. I don’t think anyone is really surprised anymore. Everyone knows the world is how the world is — they just don’t know how close that reality is to coming in contact with and affecting theirs.
When I was younger, I used to think that the way I write might be able to change the world by luring people in with the comedy and then — when the reader least expects it, when they have succumbed to living with the quirks of my world — I slip in a truth which they cannot ignore and they cannot pretend they did not hear.
Maybe simply because I say it with a disarming sigh or a shrug, with a knowing nod and the admission that I don’t have fun answers. Or maybe I don’t have answers at all.
But I no longer believe that. And because I no longer do, writing about the ills of the world I have seen — or even just the ones I feel — has become a practice of self-mutilation with no exterior utility. And so I have a hard time writing about this, my trauma most tenderly held and beloved because it is not just my trauma, it is the shared universal trauma of humanity falling short of our self-assigned positive connotation.
I’m not sure if these things can be broken open with words. I’m not sure my words can find a way into the part of any soul, including my own, that needs to be dismantled to change.
But all of that is the pessimist in me talking. And it’s healthy every so often to tell the pessimist to shut the fuck up — even if you think that deep down you know they’re right.
May 4, 2025 (Entry Two)
I’m a little under the weather as we steam back south toward the area of operation. We disembarked 109 people in Livorno, Italy yesterday. It took hours. Everyone was required to have a medical screening by doctors who came on board. At least five different governmental or non-governmental organizations in their respective and different colored uniforms forming a needless spectacle. At least 75 people in all.
Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police, dressed to intimidate, standing there self-importantly — until the moment it started raining, when they decided that this proceeding could proceed without them.
For the first half hour, after my mooring tasks, I tried to corral the nine-year-old Syrian twins from wandering across the gangway or into official conversations. Their inability to sit still kept me on my toes. At times I could see the confusion and the fear naked on their faces — surrounded by all that pomp and circumstance, by all those adults acting important with their medical masks and full-body hazmat suits and their badges and their cute matching outfits.
I saw it in their pacing and wandering all over the deck as I tracked their movements, trying to both corner and entertain them. The sadness and the hope I felt with the whole thing. The constant rage that simmers and festers when I see the bravest people I have ever seen having to be pulled from an overcrowded boat or out of the water by a bunch of amateurs such as myself.
And then those same brave people get treated less-than-human when we take them into a port in a so-called “civilized” society.
The hope I feel when they are onboard the ship and the children are running and playing and teaching us words in their language. The nine-year-old Eritrean girl who sat with some of us and taught us how to count and say a few words in Tigrinya. The girl who would check in the next day with some of the crew to see if they had done their homework. She gave me one short lesson one evening and the only thing I could say as she gave me a hug — as her single father was leaving the ship — was the Tigrinya word, pronunciation butchered, for “thank you,” both true and all I had.
After the four hours of border regime pageantry had concluded, the crew got to leave the boat without a single authority around, just our passports and a dinky little just-printed piece of paper that was our shorepass to prove we belonged.
We went to the bar in the port and had our first alcoholic drinks in a few weeks, then we walked through the open port gate and disappeared into the city. And when we reappeared from the city we walked back through the open gate — not a customs agent in sight — and got back on our ship and we fell asleep, a little drunk, to set sail in the morning for a second trip into the area of operation to do it all over again.
Read the next chapter HERE.
Main photo by Kenja-Jade Pinto
A Brief Guide for Context
What Is Sea-Watch?
Sea-Watch is a German nonprofit humanitarian organization founded in 2014 by a group of civilians who could no longer watch migrants drown in the Mediterranean without taking action. Since 2015, they have operated civil search-and-rescue (SAR) missions between North Africa and Southern Europe, primarily along the dangerous Central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy.
Their fleet currently includes multiple ships, including the Sea-Watch 5, a 58-meter German-flagged offshore support vessel that joined active service in December 2023. Crewed by international volunteers like Richmond’s Mark Pryor, Sea-Watch 5 and her sister ships have collectively rescued tens of thousands of people fleeing war, poverty, and persecution.
Sea-Watch is politically and religiously independent and relies entirely on private donations. In addition to rescues, the group advocates for safe and legal routes to Europe and openly challenges the criminalization of rescue operations by EU member states. Their work is regularly obstructed by bureaucratic delays, detentions, and port closures—especially in Italy, where political hostility toward refugee arrivals has intensified.
Despite this, Sea-Watch continues its mission with the belief that no one should drown at Europe’s doorstep.
Learn more: sea-watch.org
What Is a RHIB Team?
A RHIB — or Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat — is a fast, lightweight rescue craft used in maritime search and rescue. On missions like Sea-Watch 5’s, RHIB teams are the frontline responders: launching from the mothership to reach boats in distress, distributing life jackets, and helping transfer people to safety. Each RHIB team usually includes a trained driver, rescue personnel, and sometimes a medic or translator. They’re the first human contact many refugees have after days or weeks at sea — often operating in rough, high-stakes conditions where every second counts.
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