We are in the green area (indicating 17-21 metres per second or about 40 knots) in the German Bight getting hammered by a storm coming down from the north west, it’s been blowing all day and is showing no sign of letting up. These storms are all very well in the winter but at the end of June (climate change?)you want to be out painting or sunbathing not helping sea sick cadets and lashing everything down. Sleep is a luxury also, and everyone is a notch crankier and irritable for the lack of it.
It can’t go on for ever but it feels like forever when you are getting thrown about the shop, salt spray covering the windows, no one allowed on deck, too much water and risk of going over the side, engines groaning on reduced speed, and the creaking of the bulkheads and deckheads. Then theres the smell of diesel and cigarette smoke, puke and body odour, over cooked coffee and soap. The menu is limited to toast and peanut butter, if you can stand up straight for long enough to butter the toast, or if you have any appetite in the first place. There isn’t much in the way of chit chat either, just knowing glances or scowls. Roll on tomorrow!
Life at sea is grand all the same.
There was a sort of tradition of leaving graffiti on jetty’s, usually the ships name and date and names of the crew sometimes. It is less common these days because terminals have put their foot down and started fining ships, and it was easy to do with the name of the ship painted on the jetty!
Below is from British crews from the 70´s.
The “Britannia House” referred to in the above graffiti was the old headquarters of the then mighty British Petroleum Company in London, the sailors that wrote this on the jetty in Antwerp obviously thought this very funny showing their disdain for the leadership, I can hear their laughs echoing down the decades.
Above the crew of the “British Maple” leave their calling card on the concrete jetty back in 1977.
The crew of the “British Tenacity” had an interesting philosophy “only here for the beer” great advertising for BP there!
Above from the crew of the “British Trent” back in 1976, she came to a tragic end in 1993 when she caught fire after a collision with a container ship in thick fog off the coast of the Netherlands. 9 died including 2 Irish, one of whom was in the same college as me and the other was from my home town, it brought back the memories seeing the graffiti.
Accident report from the MAIB
Pauline from Luxembourg appears from the mist on the Humber, passing our berth at South Killingholme. I can’t help thinking of the Smiths song “ask me” where he writes “frightening letters to a buck toothed girl in Luxembourg”. Surprising to see that little Luxembourg has big ships.
The above shot was taken at full digital zoom so it is fairly grainy, but you can make out the boys getting the hawsers ready.
Melusine passing by between the torrential rain showers, same shipping company, Cobelfret, as Pauline but registered in Belgium.
Final ship for this post is the Maersk Voyager from Vlaardingen in the Netherlands of Norfolk Line, which is of course a subsidiary of mighty Maersk. All 3 ships are Ro-Ro’s (Roll on, Roll off) and operate scheduled services to Immingham, and Killingholme.
Norfolk line schedules for those who may be interested.
Cobelfret have also schedules but you have to dig around their site a bit.
Loading again at Immingham, heading for Antwerp after that. Immingham is known as Ming Ming in the locality and by sailors too, there is a great pub here called the Lock Inn, a shrine to formica counter tops and is great for chips and gravy, if you dig that kind of thing. If you want to get your head kicked in it is also the place for that kind of thing. It was modern in the 60’s the pub I mean and not getting heads kicked in, don’t really know when that got popular.
My tag problems of the other day have turned into a monstrous job, bad enough I thought but I have since discovered that some of the tags crossed over, but landed on the wrong posts! Aaaargggh! So folks searching through the blog by category won’t be having fun trying to make sense of the tags, I fixed about 25%of the problem yesterday, hopefully it will be fully sorted by the end of the week. Then I can start blogging normalization and begin to comment on other blogs again.
Baltic Cloud approaching her anchor position, so close to us that I could hear the engines whine when as we see below the old man put the engines astern to take the way off…….resulting in a nice cloud of soot that would have the German Wasserpolizei dancing a jig and slapping air pollution fines on you quicker than you can drop anchor.
Fortunately for Baltic Cloud, her cloud of soot landed on Russian water and she probably would never get within shouting distance of Germany, most likely as her name suggests plying the waters of the Baltic, more or less all the time.
When the smoke died down a dull din of anchor cable rattling out of the chain box was heard across the anchorage with a smaller cloud of rust and dust covering the boys on the fo’csle, but they were probably protecting themselves with Red Marlboro and thus avoided inhaling rust.
One of the less glamorous sides to the job is the medical locker. Usually it means counting pills and tubes of cream, and ordering new stuff when the use by date is near, then sending the old stuff ashore. Most complaints are dealt with quickly and usually entail a paracetamol or two, a glass of water and a pat on the back, off you go. Others less often require a bit of ointment and bandaging after a skinburn or sunburn!
Today I had to resort to the telephone doctor, I received a request for a certain type of medicine from one of the crew, now we have a fairly vast selection of drugs and an individual of dubious moral character in charge of the keys could indulge in some recreational pharmaceutical experimentation or get high often. The medicine in question was not in stock. I checked my medical dictionary and we had another drug with the same ingredients but not the same form. I rang the doctor on our special Radio medical hotline and was given instructions that they had the same effect, the only difference being application, up the bum, yes the famous suppository.
When my client later got his medical prescription his face contorted when he learned of the application method, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep a straight face and not think of the gag “for all the good these are doing I might as well stick them up my hole”, easier said than done, I asked if he knew what to do and made it clear that assistance would not be forthcoming. I don’t get paid enough for that kind of carry on!
One of the crew was pronounced deaf by 2 of the officers, they had apparently deduced this fact because they claimed he did not respond to them when they spoke to him directly. The fact of the matter was that he was not deaf at all, he just hadn’t a clue what was being said to him, so he got nervous and froze. Unfortunately he froze for the same 2 guys at different instances. He also asked them to repeat what they had said, so they did but he still didn’t understand and he had a facial expression to match totally spaced out looking with a wrinkled brow and eyes darting about like goldfish in a small bowl. They of course added this to the list of evidence of deafness. But he just didn’t understand their dialect, so he would ask others to explain too scared to ask again because he thought they would shout if he asked too much, of course they would shout, they thought he was deaf!
He was a bit nervous at the best of times anyway, he got a bit of spray splashed onto his face when climbing the foremast and he thought the ship was sinking! The sun was shining and the weather was beautiful he just got a few drops of spray on his cheek, but it was enough for him to get a panic attack and he wrapped himself arms and legs around the mast and called for help on the radio, but he had the receiver volume turned down so he didn’t hear the bridge calling him back and asking what he needed help with, this time the old man witnessed the event and heard the previous damning evidence. So the mate had to go up and get him down from the mast, when he got there he started shouting at the small figure clinging to the mast (because he believed him to be deaf) the sailor of course figured he was getting a bollocking so he said nothing of course! He was hauled down like a sack of spuds, then he started bawling crying out of the shame of being manhandled in front of the whole ships compliment.
When I tried to prove that his hearing was ok, it was already too late, his detractors had already made his supposed deafness a reality. Maybe he should put in a claim for a hearing aid? What?
The new address is working well thanks be to the gods of cyberspace and my own lucky guesses at which buttons to press in the transfer, which was more fluke and coincidence than any real software expertise. Anyway before I go smashing champagne bottles off the holographic hull of my new ship I have to report a tag failure of grand scale.
In the great migration all my posts merrily followed but as they crossed over the river Styx they all lost their identities so they are all uncategorized and I have to plough individually through them to re tag them……lovely. Do I have a backup of my old blog with me? No that would have been too smart! Some tag pain coming up!
In this job changes happen fast and often without warning, we try to keep ourselves prepared and updated by continuous drilling onboard and education by means of attending courses and seminars when on leave.
I attended such a course 4 weeks ago, Radar and ECDIS(electronic chart display information system) were on the menu. The immediate thoughts I had were “How long is it, where is it and who is going to be there?” Answer, 2 days, Copenhagen and 7 shipmates of various ages, ranks and acquaintance, 3 of whom first time acquaintances.
On the first day of the course, we met for breakfast, got acquainted reacquainted and chatted about the usual crap, we got a taxi to the course simulator building where they had a bridge simulator. We got mildly bored for the day, I had to concentrate to understand the Danish guy running the course, me being the only non-Scandinavian, the Swedes all looked like they were taking it all in. Picked up a few bits of information during the day, but was more interested in what was happening after the course.
Beer was the first order of priority, myself and 2 other guys went into town for a few jars before the evening meal. One of the lads I had sailed with previously the other was on the sister ship and we had just met that morning. We sat in the sun and enjoyed the cold beer, the boys admitted that they hadn’t a clue what the Dane was saying either, we laughed at how ridiculous the scenario was. We didn’t have any deep discussions about the meaning of life or philosophical debate about our existence, we just drank our cold beer, enjoyed the sun and watched the world go by. We talked about daily events that happened to us on our ships and about what skippers were arseholes, about the ones that were good too and Who had witnessed what fuckups onboard and other salty stories. We observed the pretty city girls go by in their summer clothes and then talked more.
After a few beers we had to rush back to the hotel for our evening meal, we shared a communal piss against a sheltered shrubbery along the way and laughed at ourselves out loud to the dismay of the passers by.
The evening meal was pleasant and the course concluded the next day. We went our seperate ways and thought nothing more about it.
News reached me the other day that made me sad and slightly shocked, the first time acquaintance I had been drinking beer with in the sun in Copenhagen had committed suicide. A week after the course and for reasons unknown to me he stood up on a bridge parapet and took a jump to his death.
Thinking back I wonder how long he had come in his thought process on that day in Copenhagen or was it something that had just happened that led him to his last action. Maybe we should have spoken more about life and philosophy when we supped our beer instead of the usual banal bullshit, maybe it was already too late.
Its too late now anyway.
He has passed on, rest in peace shipmate.
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