17 crew on the ship, and one of them pulls the handle off the overboard valve so that it can’t be used. Nothing is said the broken handle is placed beside neatly in three bits and nothing is reported. No malicious damage or sabotage here, just pure stupidity. No excuse, someone somewhere accepted that a basic level of knowledge was required to be employed, and documents issued by “reputable” sources attested to the fact that yes this man has in fact a brain and is capable of using it. Documents, certificates, references the whole nine yards all to prove worthiness of employment.
Some time later during an inspection of the overboard ballast system, I note that one of the valve handles is broken, imagine if you will walking into the kitchen and noticing that the hot tap on the kitchen sink has no handle. Hard to miss. Very hard to miss. I turn to the engineer and ask, ” How long has it been like this?” the reply ” very long time…it wasn’t me” and I say “but less than a fortnight as that was when the last inspection was held, no?”
Blank face. No response.
I ask the Chief engineer later, he looks at me pale faced and shrugs his shoulders “What to do?” he says, “new crew, new problems”, I ask “when were you planning on telling me?” he replied well you know now.
The idea is that you report the incident so something can be done about it, like fixing or repairing or educating. But mostly the crew say nothing at all. Worrying really.
No blame culture is right, nobody admits to the problem so there is nobody to blame.
I’m the one in the lovely orange suit, the deck cadet is in blue, he is the computer expert and it’d his fault I got into wordpress, however he was not the one complaining about the wireless internet. Anyway, we are rigging the gangway in anticipation of a visit from a couple of service engineers, and they do arrive by chopper and can be seen below. The engine started to act the bollix so we had to stop, and seeing as how the Baltic was frozen solid it was just a matter of turning the engine off and the ship parks itself. So two chaps from Rolls-Royce came to fix our problem, and they did it in no time and we up and running again. Of course Rolls-Royce make all sorts of stuff from jet engines to deck winches and luxury cars, but that division is small in the grand RR scheme of things.
I once sailed with an engineer who had worked as an apprentice with RR in Scotland, he was making a tool on the lathe and the metal was glowing white hot, when a tiny bit flew off and hit his overalls square in the groin area and burned through like a hot knife in butter, he told us that he felt a sudden extreme pain in his penis as the metal had burned all the way to the skin and left a pinhole scar at the top of the “helmet” area. He was going to show us the scar but we took his word, he was too eager to whip out the evidence so to speak for it to be a make belief story and who would make that kind of stuff up. His wife left him, and he needed consolation so he came to Cork and went on the hit and miss, I met him one night in a pub on the Coal Quay, Dennehy’s Pub to be precise, he went off to the jacks after a while and there was a fierce commotion, he had gone into the ladies, I immediately thought he wanted to show off the scar tissue, but the reason was more simple, Dennehy’s has the toilet names as gaeilge so he figures Fir was F for female and Mná was M for male, wrong. Innocent mistake for a Jock to make I suppose.
A container crane crashing down onto the deck of a containership at Southampton dock the other day, I don’t know exactly which day but the pilot on the way out from Southampton told me it was on Youtube so here it is. Amazingly the driver of the crane survived, apparently he wasn’t in the cab at the time, which is where they spend 99% of their time, so he was lucky. The crash has caused a logistical headache for the port ships are being diverted and it will take weeks to repair. Reasons for the accident, unknown at this time…….
Source: Security camera (via youtube) footage as far as I know.
I was tempted to get closer but that would have meant breaking and entering, trespassing and ISPS infringement, so cowardice being the better part of valour, I decided to stay on my bridge and use binoculars.
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