The Girls In The Ports – Escaping Reality

By AI-GPT4o-T.Chr.-Human Synthesis-02 May 2025

In many of my stories from sailing the Seven Seas, I’ve written about the girls I met ashore during my years at sea. To me, they were welcome company between voyages—bright spots in unfamiliar harbors.

Back then, I rarely stopped to consider what their lives were truly like, or what they had to endure just to survive. For many of these girls, life was a constant struggle with only a faint hope of something better. Most of the girls we met in port cities worked in seamen’s bars or clubs—places where lonely sailors sought warmth and escape.

When I returned home to Norway, I would show pictures and tell stories of these girls to my family and friends. They were often impressed—especially my mates. “What lucky encounters,” they’d say, admiring how beautiful the girls were. What I left out—what many of us left out—was that most of these girls were, in fact, prostitutes.

Still, we treated them with respect. And in return, they respected us. They were not without feelings—on the contrary, many were full of emotion. They could fall in love, hold onto dreams of a different life, and believe that maybe, just maybe, one of us could be the way out. But we were restless men, passing through. Even when the girls tried to show us the depth of their feelings, we didn’t always understand. Or maybe we didn’t want to.

In some ports, if a ship was scheduled to visit several harbors, a girl might travel to meet it—at her own expense—just to see one particular sailor again. Most of us never realized how much that meant. We simply took it as a sweet surprise when she showed up—again and again. It was a luxury we thought little of at the time.

During long stays in port, many of us unmarried crew members would strike up what we called “steady” relationships with girls ashore. We lived it up, as they say. But we soon noticed that the girls didn’t want to stay in the red-light district. They wanted more. They longed for normalcy. They asked us to take them out—to tourist spots, everyday restaurants, or regular nightclubs far away from the seedy streets.

For them, even one night in a disco with flickering lights, air conditioning, and the popular music of the day was like a return to civilization. Holding each other close on the dance floor, we could almost believe we were just another couple in love. And perhaps, for those fleeting moments, we were.

These brief escapes meant everything to them—a glimpse of a different life, a temporary reprieve from the harsh reality they’d return to when we set sail once more. For us, it was a romantic interlude before moving on to the next harbor—and the next girl.

Most of these relationships lasted only one visit. Sometimes we kept hope alive with a few letters, but as time passed and the ship didn’t return, the connection faded. In the best cases, the girl received a postcard. Often, she received nothing at all.

Sometimes a letter arrived at my home long after I’d gone to sea again. My mother would open tear-stained envelopes containing heartfelt messages and photographs from girls who had cared more than I’d realized. Looking back, I feel a pang of guilt. I wonder if I ever truly understood the impact I had on some of them.

We were young then—at sea in the prime of our lives. These girls became substitutes for the girlfriends we would’ve had, had we lived ordinary lives on land. Without them, our youth might have felt lonely, even hollow.

So today, I send my thoughts to those wonderful girls. They made all the difference. Because of them, I experienced the ports of the world not just as places on a map, but as part of an adventure rich with human connection. I hope with all my heart that as many of them as possible found the better life they once dreamed of.

Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if we’d had mobile phones, tablets, or the internet back then. Could things have turned out differently—for them, or for me? I’ll never know. But one thing is certain: though the ships have long moved on, the memories remain.

We were young, scattered across oceans, chasing adventure beneath foreign skies. Life at sea was both freedom and exile—drifting between ports, leaving nothing behind but wake and whispers. But every voyage eventually led to land, and with it, the girls ashore.

They were always there—waiting without really waiting—in the narrow streets of port cities, leaning against doorframes with eyes that knew more than they let on. Some worked in seamen’s bars, others in clubs where the music throbbed like a second heartbeat. They laughed with us, danced with us, and shared meals and stories in languages neither of us fully spoke. To us, they were the color and soul of the harbor—bright threads woven into the gray fabric of steel hulls and cargo holds.

We never asked too many questions. We didn’t want to. Behind their easy charm lay a quiet desperation, a life lived in survival mode. Many of these girls were sex workers—though we rarely used that word. In our minds, they were just “the girls,” and we treated them with a respect born from shared loneliness. We were all drifters, after all.

Still, they dreamed. Oh, how they dreamed.

Some of them hoped a sailor might be their way out. You could see it in their eyes when they clung to your hand a moment too long, or when they laughed too hard at your jokes. They’d ask to see the sights—real places, away from the red-light districts. They wanted photos near statues, dinner in normal restaurants, dancing in the same kinds of clubs we might have visited back home. And for a night, for a weekend, we gave them that. Not as charity, but because in their arms, we also found a fleeting kind of home.

In one port—maybe it was Manila, maybe Recife—I met a girl named Lina. She was radiant in a simple blue dress and walked like she’d once danced on better stages. We spent four days together, doing everything but talk about who we were. She showed me her favorite street-food stand and how to hitch a cheap ride to the beach. I took her to a nightclub, where disco lights flickered above us and the bass echoed through our ribs. I remember thinking, as we swayed together in that darkened room, that we looked like any couple, anywhere. And maybe we were, just for that night.

When we sailed, I left her a photo and a small wooden charm from Norway. She gave me a necklace made of cheap beads and said, “So you don’t forget.” I wore it until it broke in a laundry machine somewhere between Cape Town and Marseille.

Sometimes, the girls followed us.

If a ship made multiple stops along a coast, some girls would travel after it. Not out of obsession, but out of hope. We didn't always notice the cost—hotels paid from their own pockets, hours waiting at the harbor gate just to catch a glimpse of our faces. For them, love wasn’t just a feeling. It was a ticket to something better.

For us, it was more complicated. We cared, often deeply, but our lives were made of leaving. Every embrace was temporary, every promise softened by salt and steel. We told ourselves they knew that. Some didn’t.

Now and then, letters would arrive at our home addresses. My mother once opened one for me—sent from a girl in Dakar, full of photographs and poetry and a pressed flower. I never wrote back. I couldn’t. What would I say?

Time went on. New ports, new faces. And yet, something stayed with us—an ache not just for the sea, but for those we left behind. Those girls who, for a few hours or a few days, treated us not like wandering ghosts but like men worthy of love.

I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if we’d had smartphones, video calls, instant messages. Would any of those relationships have survived? Would Lina and I have stayed in touch, seen each other’s children grow up on screens? Would one of us have moved?

I don’t know. But I do know this: they mattered.

Without them, our youth would have been emptier. They gave our shore leaves meaning, turned strange cities into places of memory. They didn’t just warm our beds—they softened our hearts, reminded us that even sailors could be loved, if only for a night.

Wherever they are now—older, perhaps with lives and families of their own—I hope they found peace. I hope someone treated them with the care they deserved. And I hope they remember us not just as passing strangers, but as fellow dreamers, carried by tides we couldn’t control.

Because long after the ships sailed, long after the bars closed and the letters stopped, the memory of the girls ashore stayed with us—quiet, luminous, and real.

Time, memory, and the weight of unfinished stories

Years passed like waves against the hull—sometimes gentle, sometimes unforgiving. I traded one ship for another, one ocean for the next, each voyage pulling me farther from the young man I had once been. The names of ports blurred, but the faces of the girls never did.

Each one stayed etched in memory like salt on worn teakwood—Marisol from Veracruz, who called me mi capitán and cried without shame the morning we left; Akiko from Yokohama, who spoke little English but whose quiet presence healed something restless in me. And Anika from Hamburg—sharp-tongued, full of fire, who told me she would never wait for any man, even as she watched me walk back to the ship without looking away.

We believed we were untouchable then. Young, sunburnt, invincible. We thought we were the ones passing through their lives. But in truth, they passed through ours—leaving behind echoes, long after the music stopped.

Some of the boys married girls from land. A few even tried to bring them home—girls from Bangkok, from Port Elizabeth, from Buenos Aires. But back then, the world was less kind to such love. Families frowned, embassies hesitated, and the dream of a new life often crumbled under the weight of paperwork, prejudice, and poverty.

Still, once in a blue moon, you heard of one that worked. A fellow I knew from the North Sea trade married a girl he met in Valparaíso. They bought a fishing boat and ran charters together. She ran the books, he ran the engine. Last I heard, they had grandchildren.

But for most of us, the girls ashore remained stories. Unfinished ones. Quiet regrets tucked between logbooks and faded photos.

I came ashore for good in the late eighties. My sea chest, battered and dented, sat in the attic next to a box of yellowed letters I never had the courage to burn. By then, the world had changed. Ports had become cleaner, regulations tighter, and the old seamen’s bars were either shut down or turned into tourist traps. The magic was gone—or maybe we had simply grown too old to believe in it.

Sometimes, I would hear a song from that era—a disco tune or an old bolero—and be transported. I could see her again, laughing under neon lights, her face lit by the spinning reflections from a mirrored ball. For a moment, I was young again, and she was there, and the world still held promise.

Once, I returned to one of those cities—alone, older, slower. I wandered the same streets, but they didn’t recognize me. The bar was gone. The corner where we shared ice cream under a flickering streetlamp was now a bank. No one remembered her. And I didn’t even know her last name.

That was the tragedy of it all. So many lives intersected, so briefly, with no way to trace the afterstory.

But if I close my eyes, I can still see them.

Not as they might be now—but as they were then: bright, bold, vulnerable. Girls who dared to dream, even in the shadows. Who laughed loudly and cried softly. Who asked so little, and gave so much. They were not just company for the night—they were the soul of every port, the fragile hope behind every farewell.

I sometimes whisper their names, like a prayer cast into the wind. Not for forgiveness, but for remembrance.

And in the stillness that follows, I like to think that somewhere—across oceans and years—one of them might be remembering me too.

A Quiet Reflection: The Girls Ashore

They were not just girls in bars or shadows in the doorways of seamen’s clubs. They were not merely “company for the night” or passing episodes in the drifting lives of sailors. They were women with stories—many untold, some forgotten, but none without weight.

Each of them lived a life between worlds—on the edge of the everyday and the extraordinary. By day, perhaps mothers, daughters, sisters. By night, performers of a role shaped by circumstance, necessity, and resilience. The world rarely gave them much, and yet they gave much of themselves—to strangers, to dreamers, to men seeking warmth in foreign ports.

To call them survivors would be too simple. They were architects of their own endurance. In cities that barely cared if they vanished, they learned to create meaning out of fleeting moments: a dance, a shared meal, a letter scribbled in broken language.

For a few hours, they could slip out of the labels society had given them and become simply women—seen, spoken to with care, held as if love were possible, even if just for the night. That mattered more than most of us ever knew.

Behind every bright dress, every laugh too loud or wink too practiced, there was someone who remembered childhood lullabies, who once braided her sister’s hair, who dreamed of kitchens filled with light and the smell of bread baking. The street did not erase these things—it merely taught them how to live in fragments, between memory and necessity.

Some of them chased ships from port to port, hearts stretched thin with hope. Others turned away and never looked back. A few disappeared entirely—swallowed by the tide of time, violence, or poverty. But many, quietly and against all odds, found another path. Love, perhaps. Or work with dignity. Or simply peace in a quieter neighborhood, where no one knew their past.

We, the men who passed through their lives, were often too young, too blind, or too selfish to see clearly. We saw only what we wanted to see—a smile, a warm bed, a few nights of tenderness. It is only now, in the hush of later years, that we begin to understand.

These women carried much more than we ever asked them to. They bore the weight of survival with grace. And though the world rarely thanked them, I believe many of them saved lonely men from sinking further into themselves.

So today, let us remember them not as accessories to a sailor’s story, but as stories in their own right—rich, difficult, beautiful. Let us think of them with kindness, with respect, and with the hope that life eventually gave them the gentleness they so often gave to others.

And let us carry their memory like a soft echo from a distant harbor—never loud, but always present.

Source: Ivar Haug - Norway.

The End.