The picture is taken off the coast of Norway, Utsira to be precise and we had a hell of a night that went on and on. Rolling and sliding, the picture captures the moment fairly well. I wasn’t sick in the vomiting sense, but by Jaysus I was tired. Some of the boys were looking a bit green around the gills after the longest of nights, each battling his own private battle in his cabin, trying to sleep, moving onto the daybed or lying on the deck wedged into a corner, meanwhile outside the sea was boiling and churning and the sky was full of snow.
It’s not a great time of year to be trading in the North Sea or indeed any latitude North of Gibraltar, better to be “Pope Gregory IX aboard his steamship The Saucy Sue currently wintering in Montego Bay with the English Cricket XI and the Balinese Goddess of Plenty”, oh hang on plagiarism from Black Adder goes Forth there.
2009 has been a fairly sparse blogging year for me, with posts coming few and far between. I’ve had a lot on my plate in real life so my contribution to the interweb has taken a second or third place. Despite that I continue to get visitors and comments so in 2010 I will be up and running hopefully with a few more posts and photos to keep you all entertained and informed. The job is serious and the sea can be unforgiving but the sailors are all people with lives and stories, I’ll try to continue to give you a bit of a taste of their story here.
Anyway thanks to all readers for all the comments and encouragement in 2009. Best wishes to you all for 2010.
On the front of every tanker accomodation block you can see in huge letters “No Smoking” , there might even be some kind of rule that says you must have this text in letters so many metres high and wide. Not that it stops the smoking as this fine vessel was showing us today in Europoort. There are other messages too like safety first, and prevent pollution-save the environment..etc. The environment would most likely be a lot better off if there were no big dirty great oil tankers chucking out big black plumes of smoke.
But as the pilot said to me today, ” selling oil makes lots of money, saving the environment costs a lot of money..” maybe the COP15 crowd will come up with a way to get rid of the need for oil and keep all the Saudi Princes and the big huge Oil companies happy…..
Or maybe they won’t.
The lads and lasses from Greenpeace were off the coast of Copenhagen today with a large yellow banner saying “Stop Climate Change Here“, I don’t think anyone from the shore would have been able to read the great banner them being a good few miles from the shore, and I’m not sure there were too many readers of Roman script on the ships going by, if they had put it in Cyrillic it might have helped for all the Russian speakers on ships that I passed today .
The planes landing at Kastrup Copenhagen airport were passing too quickly I’d say for anyone to read the message so maybe it was my duty to post this photo here and now. Maybe they were only practicing for the big Climate Change Conference which in my humble opinion will end up being a big talking shop. But no better men & women than Greenpeace for raising awareness even if they were miles away from anywhere that it could be read, I suppose I read it.
And now you are.
Other activities including a short teaching stint at the local Maritime college and large doses of real life have kept me away from the old blog but I’m back on the high seas again battling the elements. The weather is on the agenda very much this time of year, low pressures rolling across the Atlantic inexorably creating havoc on land and sea. Read on for the gory details.
Just had a week of Southwesterly gales battering the ship, culminating in a violent rolling last evening that turned my tidy cabin into a bomb site. The loose paper started first to slide onto the deck, a bad sign. Then the creaking and groaning. Up to the bridge to have a look at the weather, 2 more hours before the next alteration to a more comfortable course, bang there goes something flying off the chart table, ding-a-ling, the bell starts ringing itself, …back and forth to the rhythmic sound of the Pilot Books rattling back and forth in their secured shelf, gadunk, gadunk and the coffee percolator delivering clunks of hot beverage to the bin beside it.
Meanwhile down below in my cabin the fridge has had enough of holding any contents and the door swings open 2 bottles of a green colour fly across the cabin and disintegrate upon meeting steel bulkhead, shards of glass mixed with a sticky sugary liquid mixing in with the paper already on the deck, coefficient of static friction substantially reduced and not helped by worn out Crocs on my feet I go sliding and skating across the deck until I reach a bit of carpet which steadies me up. Clearing up broken glass on a rolling ship is work for stunt men, and not one of them am I. Eventually and mercifully we change course and get the sea on the quarter, the clean up complete I make it into the bunk and sleep the sleep of the exhausted.
Roll on next port, as long as it doesn’t roll too much.
“Full City” the Panamanian flagged bulker that recently ran aground off the coast of Norway and caused an oil spill when her bunker tank got holed. In dry dock after being cleaned up and awaiting repair. The view from the bow doesn’t look so bad, but underneath it looks like a mess.
The Captain was arrested after the grounding charged with failing to report the grounding in the correct manner to the local authorities, and is still under house arrest in Norway.
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