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Night moves

Published February 25, 2010 in Cadets, pinch of salt required and On the ship. 2 Comments

A view of the telegraph by night

Once on nights, always on nights. There is a tendency to end up on a run of nights for no other good reason than that’s just the way it goes, and no matter how much rest you get during the day, nothing beats a proper nights sleep. The engines are about to rumble to life, it’s 4.30 in the AM and I have a few minutes before the Rotterdam pilot boards for departure.

The other day we had the first real fire alarm of the trip, it went off in the middle of the night, luckily we were all awake and it wasn’t a real fire, just the toaster doing very well done toast and producing large volumes of smoke, one of the anonymous crew was responsible i.e. nobody owned up, but somebody did it….all the forensic was burned to a crisp in the toaster and I don’t know if you can lift prints from bread anyway.

Everyone charged to muster within seconds which is always encouraging, self preservation helps of course, the cadets ran up to the bridge with me, both looking nervous and edgy, the smell of smoke can do that to you, I wasn’t exactly cool & the gang myself until the reason was identified. (It’s the f..cking toaster again…) A collective sigh of relief went out silently over the ship.

One of the cadets red faced later came up to me, I thought he was going to own up to the toast….but no, he had been surfing a dodgy site on the net and just as a warning came up from “websense” about banned sites the bells went off, he thought that the alarm was because of him! Ah yes I thought to myself I might have overexaggerated in my introduction speech to the cadets about how much control big brother exerts!

Up the road, to the Mission

Published November 8, 2008 in going ashore, Cadets, French, France and From the ship. 1 Comment

One rule, 2 countries, 2 interpretations. In Rotterdam I couldn’t set foot off the ship without incurring great expense and hassle, and my bicycle was blacklisted, In Dunkerque, there was a free bus laid on to take us up to the Mission to Seafarers, free, gratis and we were treated with great respect. France 1 Holland 0. The French are enlightened. Vive La France!
The Mission itself (featured above in the photo) was no great shakes to be honest but it was not the decor we were there to admire, it was a bit of a change of scenery the Gallic bonhomie a few of beers and a game of pool. There were 2 out of tune pianos, 2 pool tables with worn out cloths and the cushions were like wood, but it didn’t matter. There was also a full size billiards table in one corner, I don’t think anyone else there apart from myself had ever played billiards or knew what it was….proficiency at billiards, sign of a misspent youth…..I’m crap at billiards, pool, snooker, the lads used to call me harpoon when I’d take a shot, my cuing action was that bad.

I was there with the deck cadet and the 3rd engineer, the poor cadet was what it seemed to me to be in a perpetual state of fear and looked like he was going to shit himself or cry every time I addressed him, and he answered “yessir” the whole time. He must have had it rough in the academy. We drank a couple of cold ones played a few frames of pool, warped cues and wooden cushions aside. The place filled up with seamen from around the globe, I was the only westerner in the place, apart from the staff, and I was getting looks from some people as if to say are you really on a ship? One crew had just arrived from Port Hedland, Australia. Their voyage was as long as my entire tour, 4 weeks.
Some of the guests had been shopping for food, eggs and milk, corned beef and sardines. I was thinking I won’t be complaining about the food again on my ship.
One of the staff was a living advertisement for Gitanes, he went out to the smoking area every few minutes to smoke a fag and cough up half a lung in the process and hack up and gob a few times on the ground before uttering something in French which could be translated as “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” then he pulled out a paisley patterned handkerchief and wiped the sweat off his brow from the exertion, and snorted heftily before stuffing it back in his back pocket. Then back to the bar for another swig of Vino. Lovely, it nearly put me off my beer, but not quite.
One of the other staff could speak about 5 languages apart from French and English, and was conversing away with the Filipinos in Tagalog much to their delight, then the VHF set on the wall hummed to life and another bus was sent out to collect more thirsty seafarers.
Most of the visitors wanted to avail of the cheap phonecalls home, I could see them sitting behind the smoked glass cubicles calling their loved ones somewhere in the world. Hard auld life for some of these lads, but the Mission provides some solace for them.

From the archives

Published October 6, 2008 in Archives, Cadets, Singapore, VLCC and From the ship. 3 Comments

Back in 1994 before pocket digital cameras, and when mobile phones were still a yuppie luxury I was a deck cadet and had the pleasure of “doing” a drydock on a VLCC. It’s a bit like the way Americans “do” Europe size wise anyway and takes about the same length of time. To get this photo taken (note the pose and complete lack of any belly) I had to get permission from the Superintendent to bring my old Olympus trip into the tank. And I’m guessing it was the mate Jerry who took the shot, thanks Jerry old boy, well you must be old now, you were in your 40’s back in ‘94 and I am no longer a cadet. You wouldn’t get me near the inside of a tank these days unless it is absolutely necessary, back then I was ready to jump into any hazardous space going and crawl any length of cargo line without the slightest hint of claustrophobia. I get claustrophobic thinking about pipes now.
The condition of the tank was passable although it looks very rusty, and the ship had already carried a few 100 million barrels of oil before I ever was there and lived happily ever after until it got turned into razor blades and other recycled steel products a few years from the time of the photograph. Esso or Exxon decided to get away from the carriage of oil using their own name after a certain Exxon Valdez had a fairly notable spill in Alaska, I actually visited the Exxon Valdez after the event when they had renamed it Exxon Mediterranean, later on it changed again to S/R Mediterranean, and the Esso Kawasaki became Kawasaki. The powers that be going on the “out of sight, out of mind, out of the courtroom” policy and I’m sure it worked well for them.
Anyway back to the drydock in Singapore, it was without a doubt the most exotic place I had ever been at the time, and the benefit of being a cadet was that there was plenty of time off, the downside was that I had no money, and left the dry dock in severe debt. I wrote about one of the escapades a while back http://timstimes.net/2007/03/14/ewan-and-the-marine-corp/

VLCC prior to docking. Now I will have to try and dig out the other photos from that time and see if there are any of the finished product or if they have been lost in the wardrobe of time.

Be nice to the spanners

Published September 5, 2008 in practical jokes, Cadets, oil and water, deck and engine room, From the ship, pinch of salt required and On the ship. 3 Comments

Have lost contact with the muse recently and got entangled in the Wire. All 5 series seen now, and I feel like Jimmy Mc Nulty after a wake at Kavanagh’s bar. Still it’s a great show.

Anyway back to blogging. I heard one about a cadet who thought he was very clever playing pranks on the spanners, a deck cadet needless to say who got great pleasure one day leaning over the skylight to the engine room and tapping a chipping hammer off the coaming to the rhythm of the engine. The engineers thought that one of the pistons had a knock and a general panic ensued with spanners running around like headless chickens trying to find the source of the knocking sound on the main engine. The cadet nearly lost the run of himself with laughter and dropped the chipping hammer into the engine room, nearly braining the first engineer. Well on a ship, you can hide but you can’t run, and you can’t hide for too long. He got away lightly with a few digs and a severe warning on pain of death if he ever wanted to pull a stunt like that again.

This could have ended the tale, but one of the engineers wanted some proper retribution. No better night than when the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see past midships, and everyman and his dog was on the bridge keeping lookout and stretching ears to hear the sound of a fog horn. The old man was pacing up and down nervously as he had a bit of a nerve problem and was jumpy at the best of times, the radars were manned and the ship was on reduced speed in the English channel. Suddenly there was the sound of a fog horn on the port side, all hand on the bridge went into action mode, but with binoculars pressed hard against eye sockets and nothing on the scope, it was a mystery. Then all of a sudden the fog horn was heard again but this time on the starboard side,all hell breaks loose in the wheelhouse, the old man nearly shit himself with fear.

Then the second engineer walks onto the bridge with a clarinet in hand, grinning broadly. He said I think this belongs to the deck cadet and walked off.

Be nice to the spanners or they can make life nasty.

The Lifeboat Drill

Published April 24, 2008 in training, Cadets, Drills and From the ship. 8 Comments

The Lifeboat Drill
(a true story, only the names have been omitted to protect the innocent from embarrasment)

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong often known as Sod’s Law.

After 32 hours on the Parana River up to Rosario we anchored just after midnight. After 6 hours deep sleep the old man was awakened by the arrival of many members of the uniformed shore authorities looking for the arrival clearance inwards documents. He shuffled down to his office with the entourage who obviously had eaten raw garlic for breakfast mixed with tobacco. After 90 minutes of paper shuffling and application of the ships stamp on documents here and signatures there, the dark sunglass gang were happy, not because of the paperwork, a necessary evil but because of the quantity of Marlboro and Whiskey they had received, the grease on the axle of commerce. Then they informed the captain that the ship would not go alongside for 2 days.

It was then that the Chief Officer came up with the splendid idea of testing the port lifeboat as it had not been in the water for 2 months, and this was the perfect opportunity to do this. Instructions were given to lower the boat into the water, and NOT to release it but only run the motor for about 10 minutes to get it up to running temperature, and test the water spray, the reason being that the current in the river runs at about 3 to 4 knots, so launching wouldn’t be so clever. Everyone was prepared and briefed, life jackets on and the boat lowered to the waterline. It was now that the young Filipino cadet decided to show off what he had learned at his weekly lifeboat muster since joining the vessel, namely to release the painter, because that was his specific job upon launching the boat, and no better oppurtunity to show he knew his duties with the old man leaning against the ships rails on deck a few meters above. Said and done, before anyone had a chance to react to the actions of the Cadet, as he had done what he had learned let go the painter. This meant that the boat had the same speed as the river, 3-4 knots with a fairly confused crew and bewildered Chief mate, who couldn’t understand how they had a man onboard who did what he had learned in all cases without thinking of the consequences. After 2 minutes contact was made with the boat by VHF radio, where we were informed that the motor was running well but the clutch wasn’t engaging. The advantage of a functioning clutch is that you can transfer power to the propellor shaft and thereby get the boat to go ahead or astern. When the clutch isn’t working it doesn’t matter that the engine sounds good, the boat was all the while drifting with the current downstream without regard to the well sounding motor.
So what does the old man do in such a situation with 4 men disappearing downstream towards Montevideo? You’ve guessed it, a new crew to launch the Starboard lifeboat as a rescue boat, everything went well with lowering, but there was an AB that had learned from the incident with the port boat, had the cadet not let go the painter then none of this mess would have happened, better to let the painter line stay put, because an AB knows better than a Cadet of course. 2 of the crew nearly fall overboard because of the tight line but fortunately all of them are still onboard when they eventually do get underway down the river no thanks to the dimwitted AB.
The port boat by this stage had been met up by a local fishing boat trying to sell fish, not really the most appropriate occasion to discuss the price of fish with the Russian Chief Officer, who was only able to communicate in the International seafarers language, which the fisherman clearly understood as they disappeared quickly away. A report came from the bridge that the port boat was 1,2 miles away doing 4 knots, a really great piece of news at this stage. 1 ½ hours had gone since the beginning of the exercise and it was nearing 12 O’Clock, lunch time, the cook noticing that his lunch guests were missing wandered out onto the deck and noticed that 2 lifeboats were heading downstream, his only comment being that maybe they could bring a cow back from the shore as they were passing as the feeding rates were astronomical the past month, not really a great suggestion to the Chief mate at this stage.

By now the rescue boat had reached the port boat and the towing operation had begun, the bridge reported that both boats were now doing 1.5 knots upstream against the current but in the right direction towards the mother ship. When they were about 100 mteres away came the cheerful news that the Starboard boats engine was overheating and the revs were reducing automatically, so the boat was only doing 4 knots same as the river, so they were making no headway.

New idea send out a mooring line from the stern, they float on the water, 220 meters of one line was sent out, not enough, a new one was connected so 300 metres of line reached the port boat, not the rescue boat, the whole thing was getting complicated even for the old man who threatened that if anyone let go of the mooring rope they would be collected outside Montevideo in 3 days 300 miles downstream. After another hour all boats were secured. Both lifeboats now used in drill, next drill in 3 months time. Will revert with new information and details of that drill.

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