Teaching English and playing music: 1969–1976

After college, Hardberger started his professional career with a short stint teaching English at Mandeville High School in Louisiana.^[2] He then worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houma Daily Guide in Houma, Louisiana. He left the newspaper to explore Mexico in an old school bus before returning to the United States to attend graduate school. After he received his MFA degree in 1972, Hardberger taught English at All Saints Episcopal School in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He left teaching to work as a drummer in various blues bands on the Chitlin Circuit.^[5]

Oilfield worker and pilot: 1977–1985

In 1977, Hardberger returned to Louisiana to work as a deckhand and then as a mate on the oilfield supply vessel Magcobar Mercury, in the Gulf of Mexico.^[6] After he earned a captain's license, Hardberger's employer sent him to the Dresser-Magcobar Drilling Fluids School in Houston to learn how to become a drilling fluids engineer. Hardberger initially worked in oilfields off the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast and then worked as a drilling fluids consultant in Guatemala during the civil war. Between oilfield hitches, Hardberger continued his flying lessons, earning commercial and flight instructor licenses, and took a wide variety of flying jobs, including towing banners, dusting crops, doing nightly check runs for banks, and transporting dead bodies for mortuaries.^[2][7]

Hardberger returned to the classroom for the 1984–85 school year, when he taught English and world history at Pope John Paul II High School (Slidell, Louisiana).^[8] He briefly returned to the oilfields of Guatemala in 1985, then began crop dusting on a full-time basis in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. At the end of the 1986 crop dusting season, Hardberger traveled to Miami to search for new work.^[2][9]

Ship captain: 1986–1990

When Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was overthrown as the ruler of Haiti in 1986, trade opened up between the Caribbean nation and the United States.^[2] After Hardberger left crop dusting, he found work on the Miami River as the captain of a small freighter.^[2][10] Among his commands was the Erika, a small freighter that transported cargo throughout the Caribbean. Hardberger's voyages on the Erika were the basis of his 1998 semi-autobiographical novel, Freighter Captain.^[11]

Recovering vessels: 1990–present

Hardberger left the Erika to work for a Miami-based ship owner, MorganPrice & Co.,^[12] as port captain responsible for overseeing port calls by the company's ships.^[2] During this period, a MorganPrice freighter, the Patric M, was seized by a shipper in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela. This required Hardberger to sail the vessel out of port under the cover of night and without clearance, in violation of Venezuelan law.^[13] The operation was Hardberger's first vessel "extraction" and is detailed in his autobiography, Seized.^[14]

Hardberger left MorganPrice in 1990 to form his own marine consultancy business in Louisiana. He was periodically retained by shipowners to extract their vessels from lawless ports without clearance from local authorities. In 1998, following his admission to the California Bar, Hardberger began to practice maritime law alongside his marine consultancy and vessel extraction business. In 2002, he formed the ship repossession company Vessel Extractions, LLC ("VessEx") to extract vessels illegitimately detained or seized in foreign countries. In 2004, Hardberger was featured in the Learning Channel series Repo Men: Stealing for a Living, in a segment titled "Repo Adventurer", documenting his extraction of a 10,000-ton freighter from Haiti during the 2004 rebellion and his delivery of the vessel to her mortgagee in the Bahamas.^[15]