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.

“Flintercarrier” entering Grangemouth docks. 

I had my first experience of “Level Gates” and straight through at Grangemouth locks. We let go at a few minutes before high tide, and the pilot asked me if I would “take her into the lock”, I said I would and we proceeded to make way towards the 31m wide lock entrance, the ship being just shy of 23m wide. So plenty room to play with. As we arrived at the first set of lock gates I noticed that the gates at the other end of the lock started opening as the river level was the same as the dock level, (normally you have to wait inside the closed lock until equalisation is achieved)  the pilot turned to me and said “well, there’s a first for me, straight through cap’n”, and continued “ye’ll have ta ge her a wee kick more to get her through by the way” so I applied more pitch on the engine which the ship seemed to enjoy thoroughly and with a few nudges on the thruster and rudder here and there we slid through the locks in no time. As we exited the pilot noted his appreciation of my conning skills by saying “nae bother”. In other words I didn’t leave any paint on the granite walls of the lock.The best part of the job for me is just arriving and berthing, and letting go at the end, the manouvreing part.

Astern view of the “Wheel” 

The Forth and Clyde rivers are connected by a canal called just that The “Forth & Clyde Canal”, and just outside Falkirk there is another connection to the “Union canal” with a most peculiar looking mechanism called “The Falkirk Wheel” a fairly recent addition to the landscape, in the old days there was a series of locks which fell into disrepair and they came up with this device for linking the two. I didn’t see it in action, I arrived at closing time (story of my life!) but a friend has been and he described it thus “I went on the tour, lots of fun at 5mph.”

There is no straight through here folks unless your vessel can fly. Anyway if you’re in Scotland and are passing Falkirk, look it up fascinating sight.

Below is a dusk shot of one of the old lock gates on the Forth & Clyde Canal, now only used for pleasure barges these old canals were the goods transport infrastructure of the industrial revolution. Now we have motorways and trucks and containers. Look at the top photo.

Lock 14 on the Forth & Clyde Canal 

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!

Radar speed & position input

Time to breathe some life back into this blog as promised in last years final posting. January was not a great month for me so I wasn’t in the mood for any attempts at wit on the internet, I took a few photos which will be put up here eventually. So the end of February is the start of the new decade for this periodically updated blog, I’m back at sea my home from home with my second family, who welcomed me back like the prodigal son without the slaughter of any fatted calf but with plenty of enthusiasm which warmed the cockles of my heart and brought a hint of a tear to my glass eye. A karaoke session was ordered and plenty crooning ensued, murdering many an Engelbert Humperdink ballad and a few versions of the now apparently dangerous “My way”.



For all the great welcome I received coming back the farewells were hard on leaving my home and the mood on the way to airport early on a cold January morning was low. My fellow passengers on the transport bus to the plane were mostly men, middle aged and bored looking, until the last minute when 8 55+ gold chained slick backed tanned white toothed Rolex wearing chaps fell onto the bus laughing and grunting all half drunk at 7 in the am, there appeared to be one leader who was more tanned and had more hair oil and a bigger Rolex than the rest he was a good foot shorter than his com padres and seemed to have a Napoleon complex, he proceeded to tell jokes and the others howled with unfunny cackles that had the empty echo of canned laughter. Their high spirits didn’t raise mine. On the plane one of them wanted my newspaper, he said “you can give me that when you’re finished with it” near suffocating me in whisky fumes and cigar breath, anyone else in the world and I would have gladly obliged but some divil rose up inside of me and refused, he looked momentarily perplexed, but he moved on down to his seat. I should have just given him the stupid paper, I got more annoyed by him than he by me.



The plane was late taking off prompting the French air hostess to move me to the very front of the plane so I’d be first off because of my short connection, she gave me instructions and said you’ll have to move quickly or you might miss your connection, so when the ground staff finally got the stairs to the door of the plane in Paris I was off like a bat outta hell, of course the next flight was from another terminal meaning a bus ride, I arrived at the passport control and they ushered me through, another staff member showed me to the bus and there I waited for it to move away. And waited. Until it filled up with all of my fellow passengers, and waited until my 8 shiny friends finished their cigars and climbed on all happy out.I probably would never have made it with or without the Las Vegas 8.



I duly missed my connection at Paris CDG so I had a 6 hours of terminal 2 watching the world go by. The world literally passed by, all shapes and sizes colours and creeds going to the four corners of the planet. I took photos of the architecture and the furniture and a few people too…

Baggage trolleys awaiting usage

Young Japanese woman avoiding the airport air.

Eventually I got my connection and I have sea views as I write. OK that’s it for today, more installments on the way!

The picture is taken off the coast of Norway, Utsira to be precise and we had a hell of a night that went on and on. Rolling and sliding, the picture captures the moment fairly well. I wasn’t sick in the vomiting sense, but by Jaysus I was tired. Some of the boys were looking a bit green around the gills after the longest of nights, each battling his own private battle in his cabin, trying to sleep, moving onto the daybed or lying on the deck wedged into a corner, meanwhile outside the sea was boiling and churning and the sky was full of snow.

It’s not a great time of year to be trading in the North Sea or indeed any latitude North of Gibraltar, better to be “Pope Gregory IX aboard his steamship The Saucy Sue currently wintering in Montego Bay with the English Cricket XI and the Balinese Goddess of Plenty”, oh hang on plagiarism from Black Adder goes Forth there.

2009 has been a fairly sparse blogging year for me, with posts coming few and far between. I’ve had a lot on my plate in real life so my contribution to the interweb has taken a second or third place. Despite that I continue to get visitors and comments so in 2010 I will be up and running hopefully with a few more posts and photos to keep you all entertained and informed. The job is serious and the sea can be unforgiving but the sailors are all people with lives and stories, I’ll try to continue to give you a bit of a taste of their story here.

Anyway thanks to all readers for all the comments and encouragement in 2009. Best wishes to you all for 2010.

On the front of every tanker accomodation block you can see in huge letters “No Smoking” , there might even be some kind of rule that says you must have this text in letters so many metres high and wide. Not that it stops the smoking as this fine vessel was showing us today in Europoort. There are other messages too like safety first, and prevent pollution-save the environment..etc. The environment would most likely be a lot better off if there were no big dirty great oil tankers chucking out big black plumes of smoke.

But as the pilot said to me today, ” selling oil makes lots of money, saving the environment costs a lot of money..” maybe the COP15 crowd will come up with a way to get rid of the need for oil and keep all the Saudi Princes and the big huge Oil companies happy…..

Or maybe they won’t.

The lads and lasses from Greenpeace were off the coast of Copenhagen today with a large yellow banner saying “Stop Climate Change Here“, I don’t think anyone from the shore would have been able to read the great banner them being a good few miles from the shore, and I’m not sure there were too many readers of Roman script on the ships going by, if they had put it in Cyrillic it might have helped for all the Russian speakers on ships that I passed today .

The planes landing at Kastrup Copenhagen airport were passing too quickly I’d say for anyone to read the message so maybe it was my duty to post this photo here and now. Maybe they were only practicing for the big Climate Change Conference which in my humble opinion will end up being a big talking shop. But no better men & women than Greenpeace for raising awareness even if they were miles away from anywhere that it could be read, I suppose I read it.

And now you are.

Just had a week of Southwesterly gales battering the ship, culminating in a violent rolling last evening that turned my tidy cabin into a bomb site. The loose paper started first to slide onto the deck, a bad sign. Then the creaking and groaning. Up to the bridge to have a look at the weather, 2 more hours before the next alteration to a more comfortable course, bang there goes something flying off the chart table, ding-a-ling, the bell starts ringing itself, …back and forth to the rhythmic sound of the Pilot Books rattling back and forth in their secured shelf, gadunk, gadunk and the coffee percolator delivering clunks of hot beverage to the bin beside it.

Meanwhile down below in my cabin the fridge has had enough of holding any contents and the door swings open 2 bottles of a green colour fly across the cabin and disintegrate upon meeting steel bulkhead, shards of glass mixed with a sticky sugary liquid mixing in with the paper already on the deck, coefficient of static friction substantially reduced and not helped by worn out Crocs on my feet I go sliding and skating across the deck until I reach a bit of carpet which steadies me up. Clearing up broken glass on a rolling ship is work for stunt men, and not one of them am I. Eventually and mercifully we change course and get the sea on the quarter, the clean up complete I make it into the bunk and sleep the sleep of the exhausted.

Roll on next port, as long as it doesn’t roll too much.

“Full City” the Panamanian flagged bulker that recently ran aground off the coast of Norway and caused an oil spill when her bunker tank got holed. In dry dock after being cleaned up and awaiting repair. The view from the bow doesn’t look so bad, but underneath it looks like a mess.
The Captain was arrested after the grounding charged with failing to report the grounding in the correct manner to the local authorities, and is still under house arrest in Norway.

“The war on terror” was what the reaction to the 9-11 attacks was called, by the Bush crowd. They didn’t have great imagination with the naming of events, “operation enduring freedom” is another classic, it’s certainly enduring anyway. Anyway I’m not getting into criticism of US foreign policy under the Bush regime. One of the other things that happened after 9-11 was the creation of the ISPS code (International Ship and Port Facility Security Code), a knee jerk reaction designed to improve port security around the world, which has had varying effects and interpretations. The most significant difference is that the people who work at sea have suddenly become suspect at each port visit, there was a time when the Consul would be on the quay wall with a delegation of local dignitaries to welcome a ship to a port. Now it’s armed police checking that there are no “irregularities” or a sniffer dog, or a barking guard dog connected to a snarling security guard. Enduring freedom is right, enduring patience with gobshites required.

“Don’t mention the war” says my colleague to me on hearing that we were going to Germany, he might as well have said “don’t breathe”. You can’t help mentioning the war when approaching a German port, especially not Kiel. The first thing you see is a giant war memorial with a dirty great big U-boat parked on the sand beside it. A real life u-boat U-995 that managed to sink 6 ships in it’s short career at the end of WW2, it was a Norwegian U-boat for 20 years before being turned into a museum in 1971. Then you pass a U-boat memorial for all the German submariners lost at sea, half of the u-boat crews never came home, and of the ships they attacked most of the losses were from the merchant navy, so you get a shiver down your spine thinking about all the poor bastards that ended up in the cold Atlantic waters during the war.
Then we headed for the locks, which has been like all ports these days surrounded by 2 metre high fences with security gates and watch dogs and security guards. No offence to the guards only following orders and all, but the ISPS has been largely a winner for fence manufacturers, dog breeders and security firms who have cropped up in response to the “perceived threat“. Putting fences on the land makes it harder for jolly jack to go ashore and for the fire brigade or emergency services to get to the ships (unless they have a helicopter), and it doesn’t close the harbour from terrorists. The entire waterway is open without a fence in sight, ( OK in Gdansk they had two well hard looking geezers with black uniforms, H&K’s and wraparound sunglasses in a rubber dinghy, that nearly capsized when our wash hit it. Effective way to stop a ship?)and access to the quays from the water is wide open which brings me to my final mention of the war, WW2 anyway. The pilot made a sort of a gruff laugh and pointed at the fences, “security” he snorts, “not even during ze war did zey need fences here…….” He said a lot more too, but I won’t write that down here, don’t want to give the bad lads any efficient well thought out ideas.

So the lip service will continue, “Security Level 1 sorr!” (in best stage Oirish fashion tugging forelock earnestly)