The Ocean Countess heading northwards off the coast of Fedje, Norway at just around sunset. The bar was probably swinging with sun down drinking revelers who were all blissfully unaware of the black cloud gushing out of the funnel after the ship. According to Wikipedia she had recently undergone a refit for the cruising season, they might have changed a few piston rings and liners while they were at it but it wasn’t apparent from the exhaust, they might have been blowing tubes of course, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt as they say. But I doubt that.

We were early for our scheduled berth so we had to take a pilot to take us to a waiting anchorage inside the fjord, anybody who has been up and down the Norwegian coast knows that you can’t find many places to anchor, unless you have a specially large quantity of chain. The depths are ferocious only a few cables off the coast and they get deeper as you move seaward. Alternatively you could steam up and down wasting bunkers, or drift if you are far enough off the coast, not great in the winter with a dirty great Atlantic swell on the beam. We were taken to an anchorage which had a shallowest depth of 60 metres, deep enough like, the 60 metres was the top of a sea mount descending to 200 metres and deeper further away, we pinpointed our position with the echo sounder and a few cross bearings and a check on the GPS to make sure it was working. I didn’t bother un-boxing the sextant for a horizontal angle as it was getting dark and I had left the key in my other uniform pocket. Finally when we were well anchored and finished with engines some of the boys went fishing.

I went out long enough to get a shot of these two fine Pollock, otherwise the midges were enough to drive you crazy, small tiny bastards near invisible but they made your skin crawl. I jumped back inside quick style and observed from the safe vantage of the bridge window! There wasn’t a whole pile caught, not for lack of fish, but for absence of willing fishermen, willing that is to be eaten alive by the small nightmarish gnats. Enough for fresh fish on the pan all the same. Cheers!

Took the ship into dry dock last Monday for a lick of paint and a service on the engine, the preparation is quite intense getting all the floors covered and checking all the jobs that need to be done. The intensity lifts a notch when bringing the ship into the actual dock itself there is no room for making mistakes, and no excuses either. Fortunately the weather gods were smiling on me with a westerly breeze, sunshine, good visibility. After a few “dead slow asterns” and a “dead slow ahead” hard a starboard,thrust here and there we got a few lines out and made fast in the dock. There wasn’t much chatting done in the last 15 minutes of the operation only a few commands squawked across the UHF, “put out your headline” “heave your aft spring” and the likes. The coffee had gone cold in the mug, but I was happy anyway.

Next up was to trim the ship to even keel and pump out the dock once the gates were closed, this took a few hours but eventually we were high and dry and up on the blocks. During the time the dock is being pumped out the activity increases to maximum level with all sorts of people and containers landing on the deck from cranes and skylifts, it’s a literal avalanche of people and machines.

As the last few inches of water are pumped out, cherry pickers are lowered into the dry dock and the water washing gets going. The hull has to be cleaned before painting. After that comes grit blasting of certain areas, then paint.

Walking around under the dripping ship is a bizarre experience. Avoiding trampling on the jelly fish and seaweed lying on the bottom of the dock and ignoring the vile stench of rotten sea creatures took up a large percentage of brain power. The rest was in awe of the magnitude of ship out of water and the parts that you don’t see everyday brought to light.

My reliever joined the same day, and I left the ship in the afternoon for a stretch of leave, the din of shipyard fading into the cerebral mechanism better to write down quick before it fades completely! More next week.

Lightning silent through the rain ahead makes the clouds glow for a split second and reflects along the water. Other ships appear in the same moment then disappear as fast. Only to be seen with eyes, cameras don’t do it justice.

Having said that I did try to catch a few bolts but they are quick lads that don’t hang around for me to get the setting right on the camera. The blackness between the strikes was infinite, and suddenly the sky would be alive then quiet again. Natures own spectacular light show.

The ship above looked like it got a blast but it was much further away and hit the sea. The thunder rumbled away making itself heard across the bay, reminding me that “you have to listen to thunder”.

Yours truly reflected in the duty mess window, with the tank deck behind me, but ahead of me really…..
A slight blur from the double reflection in the thick explosion proof glass, it’s about 2 inches thick.

The old jug handles sticking out nicely after the head was shorn by one of the AB’s, why pay €20 ashore when you can get it done for a 6 pack or 20 tabs onboard?

Back at sea again, new ship same old job! Mixed feelings about the whole thing, missing home but enjoying the job. I suppose it’s normal.

So Friday feels like a good day to get re-started, there will be photos aplenty and a few stories from the life at sea. Will try to post weekly or thereabouts to click in next Friday to see if I have managed to stay afloat!

Above a ship called Kapten Borchov as we were on the way towards the locks at Ijmuiden. The plume of smoke in the corner is the steelworks at Ijmuiden.

ARA is the short for Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp and is often the destination/ source for our cargoes. You usually are told load in this or that port and take it to ARA, and then you know what way to point the ship, later you get told which of the A, R or A you will end up in. It is a handy place to be heading for ARA that is, great for spares, stores and crew changes with Schipol airport nearby (barring any geological catastrophes casting ash high up into the atmosphere), the down side is that ARA is a hub for all sorts of nefarious characters like vetting inspectors and port state controllers and Class auditors who like to come and give you lots of paper and generally make life difficult.
Then there’s the cheeky boatmen and dodgy salesmen, and the language barrier apart from all that it’s a great place to be and it’s all in a days work.

Below a tug in Antwerp assisting in a berthing operation.

A still night in March where the dark waters of Grangemouth dock became a mirror. The only sound was the oil rushing through the cargo lines and the cargo pumps whining at high pitch so you couldn’t really have heard anything else anyway but apart from that it was a quiet still night and you could have heard a pin drop if it hadn’t been for the deafening sound of the ships pumps in action.
If you had dropped the aforementioned pin in the water it the ripples would have travelled all the way over to the vessel in the picture above, it was very cold too so the pictures were taken with efficiency and I removed myself to the inner parts of the accommodation of the ship to get a bit of heat into me.
The noise of the pumps was muffled by the heavy watertight door, but then there are always sounds and noises on a ship. You work by sounds sometimes, if the engine pitch changes you can hear it and you know that something is happening outside the mate has altered course or slowed down. At night you are lulled to sleep by the gentle hiss of the AC (air conditioning) with the low purr of the 12 valve medium speed engine pulsing through the bulkheads. If the AC goes off for any reason you wake up instantly, silence on the ship means something is wrong, up to the wheel house quick time and see what’s going on. If the bridge has an eerie silence then you know there are problems without a word spoken, the ears have told you plenty already. These days the blackouts are few and far between thanks to the modern ships and power management. But you can still get them and the silence you get for the few seconds before the backup kicks in are weird!
Back home now and getting used to the silence, the featherlight doors instead of heavy watertight doors, no smell of diesel and solid ground! Home sweet home!

A photo of the Hanse Vision container feeder which I passed by in the Kiel Canal last week. You save plenty time by taking the shortcut through the canal, but you lose a lot of sleep and have to negotiate two sets of locks and change pilots often, 5 pilots in total from the Elbe to Kieler Forde. One takes you from the Elbe to Brunsbuttel, he gets off there and another takes you into the first lock. Then the first half of the canal has a pilot, and you change half way to another, and finally after the second lock in Holtenau you get a pilot who takes you as far as Kiel Lighthouse and you’re on your own again.
One of them was relating a story he’d heard about German grain which was being transported as food aid from Holtenau to a country on the African continent, apparently so the story goes half of the grain gets sold off through corrupt sources, the half that’s left lies on the dockside of which half is lost by vermin and going bad, the rest gets stolen…..the ultimate emptor the Federal German Government taxpayers. Of course you can’t believe everything you hear, but you hear a lot in this game.

Lights in the Kiel Canal bokeh effect

The picture has nothing to do with the post, I just like the lights and the effect I got by off-focusing called “bokeh” in the photography branch.

Anyway I’m in the shipping branch, branches are from trees and can make timber if the right sort. And ships can be made of wood if you have a decent shipwright and a few carpenters. Back in them days, the ships were made of wood and men were made of steel with marlin spikes for fingers these days the ships are made of steel and usually in China, and the men are made of flesh and blood.
Of course it isn’t all men these days either, plenty of young women are working at sea and that isn’t even a modern phenomenon. But you do get a few trainees at any rate.

I was observing and eavesdropping on the mate and the cadet as the latter was being instructed on some of the finer points of compass work, he was not taking any of it in when the mate got a bit agitated and let out a few choice descriptive words usually used shortly after having hit ones thumb with a hammer. The mate then came over to me and said “Cadet is same like the nail” and he smiled. I didn’t get it at all, and asked “how do you mean?”The mate smiled again and said ” same like the nail Captain, need plenty hammer to make work”

I was a bit worried for a while hoping not to find a semi-bludgeoned cadet later in the day fortunately my mate was being metaphorical, fortunate for me and the cadet!

Early this morning the Cuxhaven pilot boat loomed out of the mist around our stern to pick up the disembarking pilot. Called Lotse in German, Lots in Swedish. All these names are derived in some form from Lodestone, or leading stone referring to magnetised rocks which when suspended indicate magnetic north. And so you had a compass, modern navigation was born, after that you had pilots.

The pilots that fly planes are more common in the public eye but they got the name from the floating type.

But truth be told we had it first!

Below the SWATH pulls up alongside, 10 knots speed. And another sucessful pilot transfer takes place.

Tug Tytan assisting this morning.

The ship was approaching the port of Gdansk this morning, and I went up to the bridge for the usual procedure of pilot boarding. On the electronic chart screen I saw a notation written in manually “Water Brick” by the entrance to the port. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what a water brick was supposed to be, some building material used by Inuit to build igloos? It was escaping me but I had a rare flash of lateral thinking and I changed the reading order of the 2 words, so “water brick” became “brick water”, then I realised that it should have been “breakwater”. My navigator a non-native English speaker , or for that matter speller had made a slight error.Isn’t it interesting how the order in which we say words can change their meaning completely as in the above breakwater or waterbreak case, another example of breaks and whether fore or aft of a word is wind, a wind break is something for stopping wind, but break wind well you just can’t stop that always. I remember reading about a Captain on a certain British vessel that had broken wind during the manouvering and pilotage of his vessel, the smell being so violent that the bridge had to be evacuated. All hands ran out on the bridge wings pilot and all waiting for the smell to diminish. Subsequently the the unmanned vessel crashed into the breakwater, which was made of big granite blocks and not water bricks.