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.
Archive for the 'Ice' Category
Reading a great book about polar explorers from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, probably not a book to be reading when on a ship because of the amount of shipwrecks and all the disasters that happen to the various explorers, great read all the same.
I was working at a chart agents in Sweden a few years ago and had to organise charts for the Icebreaker Odens expedition to the North Pole, seen below doing icebreaking in the Gulf of Bothnia last year. The charts were Canadian and US charts, but the area around the pole doesn’t really have a detailed sea chart, theres no point, or there is the North Pole, but apart from that it’s just ice. So they use a plotting chart. Oden’s and a US icebreaker called Healy’s expedition is well documented on a few sites like…..HOTRAX05 and ARCTIC EXPLORERS and SCIENCE DAILY and there are tons more. Oden was the first non nuke ice breaker to reach the pole. It is also a sign of the decrease in ice thickness at the pole that such an expedition was possible.
Frozen St. Petersburg, and the locals do a spot of ice fishing.
Good idea to park the Lada when you’re fishing, wonder what insurance policy covers sinking due to cracked ice?
The ice smashed up from all the shipping traffic. The tiny black dots in the centre are people fishing a few feet away from our wash. People get their danger fix up here too……….
Above the cargo ship Canterbury Star, classic lines, below the Ice Breaker Mudyug clears the fairway.
A throwback to the bad old days, the mad thing was that there was a guy with binoculars, AK-47 and radio in that tower 24 hours a day, I don’t know what he was doing, maybe the Soviets forgot about him and he’s just working away?
Doing our own ice breaking on the way out from Russia



















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