Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dataviz1000 | Hacker News Reader

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1. A group of EECS graduates get jobs as deckhands and stewardesses on mega yachts in order to bug the yachts to glean information for trading securities.

2. They install computers in the electronics cave below the wheelhouses because nobody knows what most of the electronics there do in the first place.

Today there are hundreds of mega yachts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with thousands of unscreened workers maintaining the yachts before they leave in November for a season of cruising and charters in the Caribbean.

3. They get caught by Russian mafia while in Martinique or St. Lucia.

4. They MacGyver their way out of the Caribbean while being chased by thugs with unlimited resources.

I'll get around to writing it one of these days.

Visiting Ft Lauderdale as students on spring break and chatting with barflies gives one of them the germ of the idea....

Perhaps, someone in the MIT ocean engineering program doing a semester at sea on the Corwith Cramer breaks bad. Back in the day they would lure crew by using ladies of the night to entice a victim into a Shanghai Tunnel [0] where they would be abducted. Our protagonist working on submersible project on the Corwith Cramer gets seduced by a yacht crew member while having a drink at the Leeside Pub or the Captain Kidd bar in Woods Hole. It wouldn't be the first time.

Personally, I had planned to spend a season working in a restaurant in Miami Beach and was evacuated from the inter-coastal because of hurricane Irma. The only bed I could find was in a crew house in Fort Lauderdale. All the windows were boarded with plywood and they had several kegs and dozens of bottles on the table as we waited out the storm with a party. Fortunately the storm tracked the West Coast. Someone asked what I did and I said I was a chef. They suggested I become a private yacht chef. Two weeks later I was cooking on a private sailing yacht in the Bahamas.

Probably more interesting if a storm blows the protagonist into a situation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghaiing

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