A remarkable four decades at sea ends for Smersh Rabie

Singer tony Bennett ‘left’ his heart in San Francisco; Safmarine’s Etienne ‘Smersh’ Rabie left his appendix in Djibouti at the hands of a French Foreign Legion surgeon – one of many warm reflections of a grand maritime discovery spanning more than four decades and about to come to an end. Come September 30, eleven months shy of retirement, also his 59th birthday, affable Rabie, the carrier’s marine executive, will furl his orange and blue corporate tie but certainly not his memories, which brings me back to that appendix. In 1969, just two years after entering service, he contracted appendicitis aboard the Safmarine tanker Lanmar and was taken ashore at the former French protectorate of Djibouti (on the Gulf of Aden) where the Foreign Legion surgeon swiftly brought the necessary relief. Seventeen years were spent at sea aboard many Safmarine ships, including all four legendary ‘Big Whites’ – those sparkling, all-white ships that paved the way for the carrier’s historic, prime North Europe- South Africa trade. Rabie – who was born in Boons, a small village near Rustenburg consisting, as it still does today, of little more than a railway siding and cash store – developed an inclination for matters maritime as a sea cadet at school in Johannesburg. He acquired his nickname 'Smersh' on his first voyage aboard Safmarine's SA Statesmen – and the name stuck. As behoves all novices, he was ordered to chop wood for a braai marking the crossing of the Equator, tradition to this day, but incurred an officer’s wrath by accidentally dropping the pile onto his painful feet – and he was immediately labelled ‘worse than a Russian spy’. The original Smersh, immortalised by James Bond creator Ian Fleming, was a Soviet counterintelligence agency whose name was an abbreviation of the motto, ‘Smert Shpionam’ (‘death to spies’). Rabie’s career was momentous, to say the least, sailing into Durban as a second engineer on the maiden voyage of SA Helderberg in 1972, then standing by at Dunkirk for the commissioning of the second ‘Big White’, SA Sederberg. The note is distinctly nostalgic as he reflects: “Thirty years for those ships was a fantastic achievement – service reliability was such we would go for years without a single breakdown that would result in a stoppage of the vessel.” The four vessels were sold to Greek shipowner, Danaos, taken on bareback charter by Safmarine in 2002 after an extensive earlier Bremerhaven upgrade that added ten years to their seagoing life. Life has been an ongoing challenge for ebullient Rabie, none more so than overseeing Safmarine’s fleet renewal programme totalling 16 state-ofthe art ships over the past four years, with ‘huge plans in the offing for further expansion.’ Having progressed to chief engineer before heading ashore to occupy several senior positions, Rabie has huge admiration for the achievements of South Africa’s seagoing fraternity – and indeed for Safmarine’s ongoing commitment to turning out the very best young South African talent. “It’s all been very exciting and I would not have had it any other way,” says Rabie, unable to resist a final quip: “Gautengers still make the best seafarers.”