I Must Go Down to the Sea Again...

It's time.


I'm still able to pay all of my bills, but money's finally gotten to the point where I actually have to worry about it. That means it's definitely time to get back out to sea for a bit.


Oddly enough, I have been trying to get out for some time now. Unfortunately, the shipping industry reacts to market influences just after the manufacturing industry. If nobody's making things, nobody's shipping things. If nobody's shipping things, no ships are moving. If no ships are moving, no navigators are needed. If no navigators are needed, I'm going to be sitting on the beach for a while yet.


In the meantime, I've been picking up a few watches here and there aboard ships in port. As the Port Relief Officer, my job is to come down and cover the cargo watches so that those officers who are working on board can get a much-needed night off.


To get these gigs I have to appear in person at the union hall at noon for the job call.  Then, if I'm lucky enough to get something, I have to be back on board the ship that night to stand the watch.  The following day I have to go back to the hall to get paid, so if everything goes the way it usually does, I end up cranking out a 36-hour sleepless day.


Despite all of the nuisance, it's nice to be doing something professional on a ship again.  I even look professional:



That picture was taken aboard the MV Horizon Falcon, a Horizon Lines containership.  Here's a file photo of her from a better angle:


After finishing that gig at 0800, I had to make my way to Santa Rosa by 0915 to take care of some Navy business before going back to the Heart of Gold and promptly losing consciousness.


My next gig was aboard the SS Maui, a Matson Navigation Company containership.  So excited was I at the prospect of standing another watch that I ended up arriving at the pier early.  Three days early in fact.  That's what I get for not reading the dispatch before driving to Oakland to get lost in the freezing cold, pouring rain, and pitch dark.  Oops.

When I went back I still got there early in order to learn my way around before taking responsibility for the ship's safety.  I was glad I did too, because she's a somewhat odd old ship.  Here's a file photo of her:



The odd part about this ship in particular is the split superstructure configuration with the pilothouse and quarters forward and the engineroom and support spaces aft.  In more modern ships, these are all combined together at the stern.  Fortunately, the inport cargo watches give me a chance to get familiar with whatever wierdness these ships have before I find myself out at sea on one of them.  I also get to see the sun come up:



I've been pretty consistent in picking up the midnight to 8am shift, so after the job call I've had hours free to catch up on other projects while waiting for midnight to roll around:



Wednesday night I stood watch aboard the MV Mokihana, a combination container/Roll-On Roll-Off ship (aka car carrier).  She was originally built purely as a containership and was later retrofitted with a garage section aft.  Here's a picture of this oddly hermaphroditic ship:



The garage section back aft has parking spaces for over 1,300 vehicles.  Here's a shot showing some of the eleven levels inside:



It's huge. Like me:



Cargo operations shut down at 4am, so I got to spend the next four hours waiting for the sunrise:


I also got to see the APL Thailand pull in:


With all of the running around and sleep deprivation, I'm definitely geared back up to go out to sea again.

Fingers crossed I'll find a ship soon.

(In case you were wondering, the letters "SS" before a ship's name stand for "Steam Ship" while "MV" is "Motor Vessel" and "SV" is "Sailing Vessel")

.

Back to Work Intermittently

The other day I started looking through my binder of papers, licenses, and certificates to double check that everything was in order so I can start looking for a ship again.  Somewhere in this process I noticed that my semi-annual drug-free certificate had expired.

When I went down to the union hall to get set up to take the drug test, the dispatcher was really happy to see me.  It turns out that there hasn't been anybody in the hall lately, so nobody's been available to fill any Port Relief Officer* jobs.

I don't usually like taking these gigs because they destroy whatever sleep schedule I'm on and it tends to take me fully two days to recover afterwards.  Still, it does come with a paycheck and I'd hate to be on the other end of the deal; stuck on the ship because nobody bothered to check in and see if there were any ships in port.

So since then I've renewed my drug-free certificate and been the only one around and willing to pull all-nighters on deck on three separate occasions.  The first time I got to take the watch for a full fifteen hours aboard the APL Phillipines, the very same ship I was paid off of back in February.  The second was aboard another container ship named Horizon Hunter** and the third was the APL Singapore.

In all I've now worked for about 45 hours spread out over three and a half nights.  The views have all been pretty nice:


And despite the ridiculous hours and unpredictable schedule, I'm in pretty high spirits:


*Port Relief Officers are union members who take the night watches on ships in port in U.S. ports.  This way the ship's officers get a chance to rest or go out and catch up on buying necessities or have dinner or whatever.  It's a pretty good deal.

**Horizon Hunter is a pretty cool name for a ship.  It sounds like it goes places.

2009 Sea Voyage Part 4E: The End

DAY 86: Arrival in Long Beach

Today's weather was a nice break after the past few days. Here's a winning snapshot taken off the starboard bridge wing as we passed through the Channel Islands:


Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how nice the weather is once you get within range of the rusty brown miasma that makes up the local Los Angeles atmosphere:

As we made our approach I headed up to the bow where I joined the Ordinary Seaman already standing by as lookout:

We crossed through the breakwater and entered LA Harbor right around sunset:

Once we were moored, everything suddenly got crazy. I got pulled every which way and had all sorts of things distracting me along the way. I was hoping to be off of the ship sometime around 1800, but with all of the extra noise it ended up being closer to 2030. Damn.

Still, Ana was waiting for me by the gates to the container terminal. After a somewhat brief bout of complaining about my being late, we headed back to the apartment and I won't be discussing the rest of the day's proceedings.

Day 87: Easy Day sitting in Port

Today I was supposed to start my day by taking new crew members around and showing them the safety and lifesaving systems on the ship. It all sounded so simple.

I was supposed to have the new crew meet me in the cargo office at 0800. By 0840, I'd seen three of the nine folks I was expecting and figured nobody else was coming. The 3rd Mate was the same guy that was here when I'd started this job, so we were getting caught up on all of the things that had changed since he'd left. That's when the 1st Assistant Engineer popped up on the UHF radio:

"Anybody on the air," says he, "I've got a medical emergency in the main control room. We need the AED down here right away."

The AED is the Automated Electronic Defibrillator. It's the thing you plug into someone in order to zap their heart back into working properly. On this ship it lives up in the officer's mess.

I ran from the cargo office up to the mess to grab it. What I didn't realize was that they were shampooing the carpet in the mess. This wasn't a problem on the way in, but when I ran out into the tiled passageway I lost my footing and slid through three other guys as I tried to turn the corner.

"What the fuck!" one of them yelled, "why don't you watch where you're going?"

"Sorry," says I, "I don't have time to deal with you guys."

From there I scrambled down the four decks worth of stairs toward the main control room. On the way, folks started pointing me to the upper level of the main engine room. When I got there I found a small crowd standing around a man lying prone on the deck gratings.

What I found was a 65-year old male who was being treated for shock. The 1st Assistant was there and said that the man in question had been feeling dizzy and lightheaded and had to steady himself on the railing. Then he started to lose consciousness, folded up, and collapsed.

By the time I got there he was awake and aware. He had a strong pulse and steady respiration, so it was unlikely that I was dealing with a cardiac event of some kind. The paramedics were on the way, but I still had plenty of time to sort out as much as I could. I was able to learn that the patient takes medication for high blood pressure, hadn't had anything to eat all day, and regularly suffers from low blood sugar.

When the paramedics did show up (along with a whole platoon of firefighters) things got interesting. They rigged a stair chair to haul the man up to the main deck. At the same time, the Chief Mate had contacted the terminal and had them bring their "rescue basket" over to the ship.

Once the paramedics were confident that they'd stabilized the patient, they strapped him into a stair chair for extrication from the engine room. Somewhere in there I had a bit of conversation with one of the firefighters:

"I thought we were supposed to be going to the engine room," says he.

"You're in the engine room," says I.

"Where's the engines?" asks he.

"You see those things over there? Those are the cylinder heads. You're standing on the upper level and the engine is over four stories tall."

"Oh. Damn."

I guess it's easy to miss the forest for the trees in a place like this:

Anyway, I grabbed the patient's personal effects and headed up the ladder to make sure things were prepped to get everything off the ship. When I got up to the main deck I found complete pandemonium. The Chief Engineer was yelling at the top of his lungs telling the 3rd Mate to bring the terminal's basket inside the passageway on the main deck so the firemen could load the patient into it.

What he didn't seem to realize was that the rescue basket was essentially a skeletonized 20-foot container. There was absolutely no way to fit it inside any of the doors into the main deck passageway.

Moments later, the firemen had hauled the patient up to the main deck. At this point they'd been turned around six or eight times since they'd come aboard and had no idea where they were. Unfortunately, when they started looking for directions to figure out where they were headed, the loudest, most in-charge-seeming guy was the Chief Engineer.

With all of the yelling that was going on, I can understand why they would make that assumption. Still, all he was doing was creating distress and confusion. It took a bit of effort, but I managed to get everyone's attention, steer them toward the rescue basket, and get them safely off of the ship.

I really can't wait to be done dealing with the Chief.

Once that minor little emergency was taken care of it was all downhill. In fact, for most of the afternoon all I had to do was sit around and wait for one of our suppliers to deliver our charts and publications. They never showed.

A few minutes before 1600, I stopped by the cargo office to see if there was anything else for me to do. That's when the Chief Mate asked me to help him unbolt the manhole covers on some of the voids in the forepeak. If nothing else it was an opportunity to earn some overtime pay.

DAY 88: Delayed Delays

We were supposed to be leaving today at 1800. Instead, the terminal fell way behind on loading our cargo and it's going to be more like 0300 tomorrow before we actually get underway.

Sometime just before lunch, the navigation supplier finally showed up. I'd say he brought all of the charts and publications I was expecting, but he didn't. It was all stuff we needed, but not the stuff I ordered. Supposedly those are in the ship's warehouse somewhere, so I don't have to worry about it.

Once I was told not to worry about it, I went ahead and called Ana to come and pick me up. I met her at the pier just after 1600 with all kinds of plans for the afternoon and evening. Then, as we were driving away, her phone rang.

It turns out there was a minor problem at the Coast Guard Sector Command Center that she had to come in and fix. Oh well.

After a bit more running around, we ended up back at the apartment. Not long after that, Ana started nodding off. Then she offered to take me to the ship so I could get some rest. Nothing transparent about that I suppose.

I'd like to say I actually got some rest, but by the time I got back to the ship it was only a couple of hours until...

DAY 89: Enroute Oakland

We were underway at 0330. Casting off went quick and smooth. Then it was time to try to get sleep again. I didn't. Instead I did some laundry and some packing.

Oh well.

My afternoon watch went pretty smoothly as well. The sky was overcast, but there was very little shipping traffic to contend with and the sea was fairly calm.

Once again the plan after watch was to get some rest. Once again I failed.

DAY 90: Arrival Oakland

I was supposed to be paid off of the ship upon arrival in Oakland. As luck would have it, there was a VIP tour group scheduled to come down and visit the ship this afternoon. As a result, the Captain asked me to stay aboard for an extra day to help out because, "when you answer questions it sounds like you know what you're talking about."

I'll take that for a day's pay.

When the tour group finally got up to the pilothouse, I was asked to give a quick overview of the electronics and whatnot. Two minutes into my totally unprepared speech, the guy in charge of the group cut in and told me I had two minutes to finish up before they had to head out. Two minutes isn't much time, so I just opened the floor up to questions.

"Do you worry about icebergs?" one of them asked.

"I do not," says I, "Today's my last day."

That brought a bit of a chuckle from the crowd. The rest of the questions were pretty predictable, but I had fun with it all the same. Then it was time for them to leave. On the way out, one of the visitors stopped me and said that he works in "corporate communications," developing training material and presentations for executives, and he thought that my presentation style and material was very well thought out and effectively delivered.

Not bad for making it up on the spot. I guess I do sound like I know what I'm talking about.

For the next couple of hours I was tasked with following a group of engineers around while they poked around some of the modifications that were installed in the shipyard. They were a lot less entertaining, but I did get to trade sea stories with one of them who happened to be a retired US Coast Guard Warrant Officer. Cool.

With all of the tour guide work done, I stopped by the Captain's office and got paid off. So once again I am briefly flush with cash and overwhelmed with free time. This will all change very rapidly.

Now back to our regularly scheduled unemployment.

2009 Sea Voyage Part 4D: ...and Back Again

DAY 77: Great Circle North

Today we’ve been headed North to get some distance between us and a low pressure system that’s rolling across the Pacific and causing all sorts of foul weather. Even though we’re on this course to avoid nasty weather, it’s been a bit unpleasant. The ship has been pitching and rolling in the perfect corkscrew motion to get over half the crew seasick.

I like seasickness. Not the actual being seasick, because I’d imagine it’s pretty uncomfortable. I like the fact that other folks get sick long long before I do. I take it as a sign that I’m a superior mariner; a symptom of belonging on the water.

DAY 78: Not Much to Talk About

The elevator has been inoperative since we were in Chiwan and a Chinese scrap metal dealer, thinking he was trapped inside when it stopped for a moment, beat the crap out of the inside of the elevator and destroyed the control panel before anyone could pry the doors open and drag his crying, screaming, little body out of it.

Now we’re stuck taking the stairs until we get to California where the spare parts are waiting. These are the stairs:

Fortunately, my room is only two decks from the pilothouse. Here’s a shot of my room:

It’s pretty cozy.

That reminds me: when I started this job I mentioned what looked like a cupholder above the toilet paper dispenser in my room as an illustration of how well appointed the space was. Here’s what it looked like:


I was wrong. It is not a cupholder. I didn’t figure it out until I used the head in the ship’s hospital and found one with all of its parts intact and in place:


It’s to hold the ashtray. I guess that makes some sort of sense.

DAY 79: Time Changes

This ship is kinda fast. Fast enough that you can almost get jet lag with all of the time zones we cross in not too much time. In order to keep up with local time, today we rolled the clocks ahead by three.

There’s no good way to do this that will make everyone happy. To make it a bit more equitable, we break it into three one-hour time changes. On this ship they happen at 1400, 1800, and 2200. That way each of the watchstanders gets to enjoy one shortened watch. The cook gets an hour less to prepare for dinner, and the day workers probably get an hour less sleep, but it’s the best option all around.

The only other bit of excitement for today was a fire and boat drill.

DAY 80: Still Going

The weather predictions have been getting pretty interesting lately. There’s a handful of low pressure systems that will be building up and crossing our path as we make our way across the Pacific. We’re following a great circle route, so most of them will pass well south of us as we near the Aleutian Islands. At some point though, our course will veer back to the south.

For now it looks like we’ll pass between two major weather systems. This seems to change every time we get a new updated weather report though. One report will have a couple of storms passing right across the top of us, then the next has us scooting comfortably between them.
It’s still far enough away that we can’t really do anything about it yet, but it’s going to be interesting.

DAY 81: A Duplicate of Day 80

Today we crossed the International Dateline. So while yesterday was Wednesday the 10th of February, today is too. So I’ve come back from the future. Still no jetpack...

By now we're way up in the northern latitudes and about to start bending around to the right and angling for Southern California. It's pretty up here:



DAY 82: Will Navigate for Cash

The deck cadet has been having trouble with his celestial navigation homework. He’s going through the process just like his professors probably told him to do it, but somehow he’s just not quite able to fix the ship’s position using celestial observations.

To be fair, it’s not the easiest thing in the world. Celestial navigation isn’t exactly brain surgery, but it does require a bit of knowledge and tremendous attention to detail. You can teach someone the essentials in a couple of afternoons, but the only real way to become proficient at it is through repetition.

The other day we were talking about it and I decided to add some incentive to his plight. Here’s the plan:

1. Weather permitting, we’ll each make three observations of the sun during the afternoon watch.
2. Having made the observations, we’ll both go ahead and reduce them to lines of position (LOP) using the altitude-intercept method.
3. Whoever manages to establish the more accurate LOP (using the GPS as the reference) two out of three times, wins $5 for the day. We’ll tally this up when we get to San Pedro.I like this plan because it gets me back into practice with the sextant. I used to be pretty good at this type of work, but by now it’s all rust and cobwebs. I’m overdue for clearing the dust off of that part of my professional qualifications.

Today was the first day we were competing. Here’s a winning shot of me taking an observation of the sun:


Navular, isn’t it?

By the time we each reduced our first observation, my LOP was about 7 miles off from the GPS position. The cadet was a little over 30 miles off. On the second round, I was just about 7 miles off again and he was still over 30 miles off. On the third round, my LOP was within 5 miles of the ship’s position, but I’d already won the day’s match.

Once I’d plotted my third LOP, I stopped to look over the cadet’s shoulder as he was working through the calculations to reduce his observation. I noticed one particular error (there’s about a thousand ways to get the math wrong) and, when he corrected it, his third LOP was also within about 5 miles of the ship’s position.

Then I made the mistake of the day. I told him to check his work on the other two to make sure he hadn’t made the same mistake. It turns out he had. Once he reworked them both, they were both just outside of 5 miles off from the ship’s position. With my little bit of assistance he beat me today, starting him off with a $5 lead.

Good for him. For now…

In other news, we advanced clocks another three hours today. The ship is now on California time. That, and the weather's starting to take a turn for the worse:


DAY 83: A Touch of Weather

I’m not sure if I’ve remarked on it or not, but since I’ve started this job the weather has been surprisingly benign. At worst it’s been a bit cold in some of the places we’ve gone, but other than that there really hasn’t been anything to complain about.

Until now that is.

Ever since we left Yokohama we’ve been watching the satellite images and weather forecasts tracking a handful of low pressure systems rolling across the Pacific Ocean. For a while it looked like we were going to pass right between a couple of them, but in the late hours of last night one of them slowed down and we were stuck with the choice of stopping altogether or just slowing down a bit to cut across the tail end of it.

The ship’s schedule being as vital as it is, the decision was made to cut across. How bad could it be, right?

During my morning watch things were pretty comfortable. It wasn’t until sometime after breakfast that the seas started to really heap up. By the time I went up to take the afternoon watch, it was downright ugly. We had swells that were hitting us on one quarter and wind waves hitting us on the other quarter. They were taking turns grabbing the ship and knocking it off course to one side and then the other. The combination had the ship pitching, rolling, and yawing in an amazing sort of 3-axis corkscrew motion perfect for making a mess of everything. Just about the same time we start to settle out and ride smoothly, another heaping swell shoves us sideways and starts the whole thing all over again.

Here’s a quick video clip I took from the pilothouse:


I realize it doesn’t look all that rough in that clip, but bear in mind that the ship is over 900 feet long, the window the camera is looking through is about 100 feet above the water, and those waves are upwards of 30 feet high. The whole thing makes for a bit of a wild ride.


The ship has been rolling as much as 30 degrees to either side. It’s bad enough that we’ve slowed down to a crawl and turned the ship so that the largest of the waves hits us square on the stern. This way the rolling is minimized and there’s less likelihood that any of the cargo containers will break free and fall overboard. During my watch we did end up with one briefly exciting moment where the ship started some synchronous rolling and we had to put the rudder hard over to break the cycle before something snapped.

I’m loving it.

While motion like this makes it nigh unto impossible to sleep, I haven’t gotten the slightest touch of motion sickness. Meanwhile, much of the crew is incapacitated. I took a moment before bed last night to put away the few things I had sitting out on my desk in my stateroom, so when my watch ended everything was pretty much where I’d left it. This strikes me as a hallmark of a capable and competent mariner.

With that in mind, walking past the Chief Engineer’s office brought and oddly smug sort of smile to my face:


I can't get too smug though. While my stateroom remained largely intact, it turns out that the filing cabinet in the hospital wasn't bolted down. Why not? I couldn't tell you, but I'm responsible for the hospital, so this is my bad:


DAY 84: Channel Fever

I suppose I still haven’t quite adjusted to the time changes, because for no reason at all I can’t sleep. I should be able to sleep. I haven’t really had any sleep for the past two days, but somehow I’m still not feeling especially tired.

Weird.

The weather’s started calming down a bit. Here's a winning shot of a squall line as it passed us by:

In other news, today I bested the cadet at celestial navigation. So we’re even now. With a bit of luck we’ll have clear enough skies to make observations tomorrow too. I’d hate to think we’d made a wager and no money got to change hands.

DAY 85: Last Day in Transit

I still can’t sleep for some reason. The weather was pretty crappy today, so the cadet and I are still tied on the whole celestial navigation thing. Other than that, today was mostly spent finishing up some paperwork, updating some of our navigation pubs, and making tiny bits of progress on a few projects in my stateroom.

On an unrelated note: this was supposed to be a 70-day job. With the shipyard side trip added in, a couple of weather delays, and the Captain asking me to stay aboard for one extra day to help out with some VIP tour group the day after I was supposed to pay off, it’s looking like I’ll be on board for a full 90 days.

Tomorrow we'll be in San Pedro. After that it'll hopefully be an easy week and I'm done with this job.

Stay tuned...

2009 Sea Voyage Part 4c: 2010 Stops in Pusan and Yokohama

DAY 73: Zooooom! Back in Pusan.

I’m sure it didn’t take long to get from Qingdao to Pusan the last time we made this lap, but for some reason it really seemed to be quick this time around. The best part though, was that we arrived at the end of a nice, clear afternoon, just as the sun was setting. It was bitterly cold, but I got some pretty pictures:

I would like to live in a house like that one someday. If nothing else, it would mean almost never having religious zealots knocking on your door early mornings on the weekend. Or at least the few that do make it out to proselytize are probably worth listening to. If they can find a way to stop by a place like that without an invitation, they might actually be onto something.

But I digest...

I also managed to snap a couple of self portraits. One on the bridge:

And another one a few minutes later on the bow:

Later in the evening I got a chance to run ashore and check my regular email account. On the way I snapped this shot of the ship at the pier:


DAY 74: Dropping the Boat

The later part of this morning started with a lifeboat drill. Since we haven’t had occasion to lower either of the lifeboats since the ship came out of the yard, this was the first chance to make sure they would actually work in the event of an emergency.

When we’re lowering boats for drills, it ends up being up to me to take charge of the sailors in the boat and serve as coxswain while it’s being lowered, released, and the hoisted back into the davits.

From the boats’ normal at-sea position in the davits, it’s about a 90-foot drop to the water.

Everything went smoothly on the way down. Here’s the view from the coxwain’s seat:


Once the boat was waterborne, I flipped the lever to release the hooks and bumped the engine ahead. We were underway under our own power for about 45 seconds before it was time to reattach the hooks and get hoisted back up to the davits.

On the way up, I got to asking the ordinary seaman a few questions about the boat just to make sure he knew his business. One of the things he didn’t seem to know about was the Rottmer releasing gear. This is the linkage that makes it possible to unhook both ends of the boat at the same time once the boat is in the water. The whole system is built around a big lever with a safety catch next to the coxswain’s seat plainly marked with a label which reads “DANGER! LEVER DROPS BOAT!”

As I was explaining this to the ordinary, I pointed out how to pull the pin (you have to twist it before you pull it out) and then explained that you have to pull the lever all the way down in order to unhook the falls. I told him that you had to wait until the boat was in the water before you did it or else risk a potentially deadly, catastrophic fall from the deck to the water some 90 feet below.

“The good part,” said I, “is that there’s enough steps involved in pulling the lever that you really can’t do it on accident.”

To illustrate, I grabbed the handle and yanked and then

CACHUNK!

That happened to be the exact same moment that the guys hoisting the boat up on deck reset the brake tension cable and dropped the boat a good two feet in the process. Nobody wet themselves, but we did all get strapped back into our seat harnesses in a hurry.

Aside from that touch of excitement, the day went pretty smoothly. We made our departure in the late afternoon. Despite the cold, the weather was nice. Here's a picture:


Funny side note: Once we were done letting go all of the mooring lines, I cut the sailors loose and stayed on the bow with the OS (Ordinary Seaman) to act as lookout and to stand by in case we needed to drop the anchor for some reason. As we were nearing the breakwater on the way out of the harbor, a little black boat rounded the corner inbound.

At first glance, it looked like a submarine. Now you have to hesitate before calling the bridge to let them know there’s a submarine because if, God forbid, you’re wrong about it, you’ll get no end of harassment about it.* So once the OS agreed with me, I called it in.

“Bridge, Second Mate,” I radioed, “there’s a submarine coming in through the breakwater just about one point on the port bow.”

“Nope,” replies the Chief Mate on the bridge, “that’s the pilot boat.”

The OS and I looked at each other, then back at the vessel in question. Now that it was closer, it looked like so:


“Maybe we’re not looking at the same thing, Mate,” I replied, “I’m talking about the small, low-profile, black vessel on the port bow.”

“Yeah, that’s the pilot boat,” replied the mate, “they’ve increased their security level here to MARSEC 37.**”

Suddenly I kinda like the Chief Mate.

*When I was in school, one of my classmates mistakenly sighted an aircraft carrier that turned out to be a containership. For this error he was haunted with mockery for the rest of our time at school. It’s also probably the reason nobody heard from him at all for six years after graduation.
**In the post 9-11 world, there is an international system of security levels for ships and port facilities. These are referred to as MARSEC (short for MARitime SECurity) levels. The lowest is MARSEC 1, meaning there is no specific threat of terrorist activity, and the highest is MARSEC 3, meaning a terrorist attack is currently taking place.

DAY 75: Transit to Yokohama

This was a nice little jaunt from one port to the next. With all of the excitement of the past few days, I actually slept through most of it. When I wasn't sleeping, I was doing my chores on the bridge:


DAY 76: Yokohama

Today I managed to squeeze in eight full hours of work before breakfast. After lunch I put in seven more. In all it was a pretty good time.

The day started before midnight, like all my days on board. When I took the watch on the bridge there were surprisingly few contacts on the radar. The wind was coming from astern and there was a handful of small islands ahead.

Once we passed between the islands and turned into the wind, the ship started drifting all over the place. With the wind on the bow we were getting pushed around more than the autopilot could deal with, so I had one of the sailors steer by hand.
It took him some work, but he finally managed to steady up on our course and at last we were headed toward Tokyo Bay. I went back to the chart room to plot the ship’s position and when I came back I was surprised to see nobody at the wheel. Instead, my helmsman was sitting in a chair and staring out the window while the ship was drifting a good twenty degrees off course.

“Hey,” says I, “what’s going on?”
“I’m good, mate,” he replied.
“Sure,” says I, “but I still need you steering.”
“Oh. Shit!”

I guess he thought I said I’d turned the autopilot back on. Odd things pop into peoples’ heads at two in the morning I suppose.

After watch I had to stay on the bridge to help keep up the navigation and admin chores while things started to get busy on the approach to Tokyo Bay. Then at 0530 I went down to the pilot ladder.

In case I haven’t explained it before, a harbor pilot is a mariner with in-depth knowledge of a particular waterway. Most harbors require inbound ships to take a pilot aboard to guide them through to the pier. The pilot usually comes out to meet the ship on a small boat. The ship’s crew rigs a ladder over the side for the pilot to climb up from the boat onto the ship.

On a ship like this one it’s a long climb from the water up to the main deck. Rather than having a pilot heft himself up twenty to forty feet worth of ladder, the ship is fitted with a sideport on either side. This is a door that can be opened down by the waterline, making it easier for a pilot to get aboard.

Once the pilot was on board I had a few minutes of down time before it was time to go up to the bow and tie the ship up. This is when everything started going wrong. I’m not sure why, but once the ship was alongside the pier and we’d started passing lines across, the tugs and bow thruster stopped pushing us toward the pier.

We spent the better part of 45 minutes seesawing back and forth while the pilot couldn’t make up his mind about what to tell the tugs to do. While all of this was going on, we had all sorts of little problems with the winches as we had to take up and then pay out more and more line. I’m not sure what was going on up in the pilothouse, but it was frustrating as hell for us on deck.

When we were finally all fast I looked at my watch and found out that there was no way I’d have enough time to go ashore and get anything done. Bummer.

Instead I rushed back up to the pilothouse and got started in the chartroom. By the time I had to take the watch again at noon, I’d just barely managed to line up all the charts and pubs and lay out all of the tracks for our trip from Yokohama to southern California.

During my watch our departure was delayed due to a broken down container crane. Then, once we were all set to let go all lines, we found out that the harbor pilot was going to be delayed.* We ended up waiting for almost two hours past our scheduled departure time. While waiting, I had the deck cadet take this picture of me:

You can just make out Mount Fuji in the distance behind my right shoulder.

When the pilot finally did show, I went up to the bow to find that two of the mooring winches weren’t working. Going below, I found that I couldn’t get the hydraulic pump that powered them to start. When the ship’s electrician and the First Assistant Engineer showed up, they did a bit of troubleshooting and found a burnt-out fuse.

So at the end of the day it was an uncharacteristically screwed up port call for Japan. To top it all off, while I was standing on the bow acting as lookout on the way out of Tokyo Bay, the Captain and Chief Mate forgot I was there. I ended up spending an extra two hours just standing around waiting to be told to turn in before I finally had to ask if they still needed me there.

Fun.

Next stop: California

*I maintain that the delay was caused when the pilot we’d had in the morning, ashamed and dishonored by his dismal performance, committed seppuku** and the rest of the pilots had to rework their schedule to carry on without him.
**Seppuku is ritualistic suicide that called for in the Bushido code. Having brought himself shame, a man may regain some semblance of honor by disemboweling himself with his sword.

2009 Sea Voyage Part 4b, More of the 2010 Part

DAY 65: Rolling North in the South China Sea

Today I finally felt as though I’ve got enough sleep. I crashed right after I got off watch yesterday afternoon and then went right back to sleep just as soon as my watch was over at 0400. Then I didn’t wake up until nearly 1000. I woke up with a new lease on life.

The morning watch was nice and simple. It was nice and calm, with almost no traffic to speak of. If I had to pick a first watch to come back to work for, this would’ve been it.

The afternoon watch went less well. We had a fire & boat drill and I had to run through a whole host of administrative issues. In the midst of all of this, the Captain asked me to make some changes with the electronics and add about seven more levels of frustration.

The issue is: we’ve been having problems with the GPS* receivers installed on board. During the last couple of voyages we were getting all sorts of alarms suggesting that the receivers were occasionally sending the navigation system incorrect positions. It would only be wrong for a flash, but it was enough to set off alarms and make the system stop working 100% properly. It wasn’t impossible to deal with, but it was something that frequently demanded attention from the officer on watch (who has plenty of other things to pay attention to).

As a result, much of my watch this afternoon was consumed by unplugging and plugging in the GPS receivers in a rush while I was trying to get everything squared away. The Captain was there to offer all sorts of helpful suggestions as I climbed on top of the chart table and went back and forth changing settings and trying to make things work right. In the end, there was no real improvement. What we really need is to update our GPS receivers instead of just replacing them with more 1990 vintage electronics.

After watch, my last chore was to take everyone’s temperature to fill in some sort of form for the Chinese health or immigration or quarantine folks. I’m not sure why they have us go through all of this crap, but when they do it falls to me to get it done.

To make my life easier we have an infrared thermometer. To take a temperature, all I have to do is swipe the sensor across someone’s forehead and it comes up on a little LCD readout.

To make my life harder we have the Chief Engineer. I stood by the mess as everyone was coming and going at dinner and swiped foreheads to get temps for the better part of an hour. In that same time, the C/E passed by four times and every time I asked he went on a rant about how I didn’t need to take his temperature because he’s perfectly healthy. Clearly. It finally took an order from the Captain before I could write down the Chief Engineer's temperature.

I’m starting to get tired of that guy.

*GPS stands for “Global Positioning System,” in case you’re the last person in the world to hear of it.

DAY 66: Another Update From the Middle of Nowhere

The last couple of weeks I was on board the drain under my sink started acting up. Every time I ran the sink, the water would come up out of the drain and wash around on the deck. Today the First Assistant Engineer went around and cleared out all of the deck drains in the heads where there were problems. Now I can shave without getting my feet wet. So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

DAY 67: Chiwan

Today was a genuinely pleasant day. My watch at midnight was calm and smooth. Afterward I slept until breakfast, ate well, then did laundry. When I took the watch at noon, I was surprised to find that there weren’t a huge number of ships heading in and out of the approaches to Hong Kong. There were ships, make no mistake about it, but not the mad mob of vessels we’ve found at all of the other Chinese ports.

My favorite one was this one:


It’s nothing special, I know. But the name is fun (in a junior high kind of way):

hee hee hee

Ahem.

The port town of Chiwan is located up a river which empties into the sea just to the West of Hong Kong. Because the river itself isn’t deep enough to navigate through, ships have to follow the channels that lead into Hong Kong, and then work their way around all of the islands and up the Lamma Channel to Urmston Road, which is deep enough to make the approach to Chiwan.

This should’ve been a bit of a nightmare. Instead, it was actually kinda nice. There was fog, sure, and there was a lot of traffic, yes, but somehow it was all very laid back and relaxed. The only thing I can think of that explains this tone is the new Captain. I swear the man must be under some kind of sedation to be as stress-free and relaxed as he is.

When I left the pilothouse to take my station on the bow, things got a tiny bit worse. The fog closed in and visibility dropped down to about half a mile. Then the fog turned to rain just long enough to get me soaked through. Still, things weren’t all that bad.

Soon after that, the ship was moored portside to the pier and my work was done. That’s when the Chief Mate mentioned that there were vendors on the pier with all sorts of things to sell. These usually range from pirated DVDs to black market electronics to generic Viagra. With suddenly nothing to do, the Third Mate and I decided to go and check it out.

As soon as we stepped off the foot of the gangway, we were nearly assaulted by Chinese dudes trying to lead us to their individual vans loaded with random and questionable merchandise. I ended up thumbing through one of their movie selections for a bit, but getting away from them without buying proved damned near impossible. What saved us was when the ordinary seaman* showed up. I turned to him and said, “Good evening, Captain,” and the vendors got so excited about the prospects of a customer with money that their attention was drawn away long enough to make our escape.

*An “ordinary seaman” is essentially an untrained member of the deck department. After a year of sea time, a couple of classes, and a set number of hours at the wheel, they can get their papers to become an AB, or Able-Bodied seaman. In essence, we’d gotten the Chinese to mistake the lowest-paid guy in the deck department for the Captain. Cool.

DAY 68: Craziness

Most days in this job are pretty boring. I spend eight hours a day staring out the window, watching the clock, and waiting for the world to go by. Then I’ll have a little bit of paperwork to do and wonder if the timing will work out so I can get some sleep.

Then there are days like today.

When I went to sleep, we were scheduled to depart at 1700. That mean that I’d have time to stand my watch from midnight to four, go back to sleep, wake up around 0900, plot out our track from Chiwan to Qingdao, stand my afternoon watch, then test the bridge equipment before heading to the bow to untie the ship.

When I woke up to take the watch at midnight, I found out our departure had been stepped up to 0830. This meant I’d have to get some of the plotting done while I was still in the middle of my watch on deck. Then I’d have to finish it up between 0400 and 0600. Gear tests would start by 0700. Then I’d be on the bow by 0800 to be underway by 0830. Then it would be time to make the transit through the foggy, congested waters of Hong Kong before starting my afternoon watch in the pilothouse.

Somewhere in the middle of my watch, around 0230 I suppose, the current started running pretty strong and the ship actually started pulling away from the pier. The ship has automatic tensioning winches on the mooring lines, so it was just a matter of increasing power to the winches. It also meant that I’d have to stay focused on them to prevent the ship from pulling off the pier again.

Moments after I turned up the tension, one of the longshoremen beckoned me out to the pier to show me where some vent louvers in our cargo hatch covers had fallen out. These were bulky, 80-pound, steel parts that the yard workers took out while we were in the shipyard. When their work was done they put them back in place but never bolted them in. Then when the cranes lifted the hatches off of the ship and set them on the pier, the impact was just enough to make them fall out.

It’s just plain lucky that they didn’t fall out and land on someone while they were being swung ashore. With the help of one of the Chinese longshoremen, it took the better part of half an hour to wedge two of them back into place. Then I dogged down the doors that covered them up and scrawled a warning over the door that they needed to be opened carefully.

This was just one of dozens of little problems that cropped up this morning. Of course, I still had to weave my way between sleeping Chinese longshoremen while I was running around:

After waiting a bit longer than planned for the harbor pilot to arrive, we were underway from the pier around 0900. Taking in the mooring lines went quick, smooth, and safe. I even had time to pose for a portrait at one of the mooring winches:


Then, after an hour standing by as lookout on the bow, it was time to finally sit down for a few minutes before going back up to the bridge at noon.
Visibility wasn’t great, but at least it was better than we had on the way in yesterday. Along the way, I managed to snap a few pictures of this somewhat busy stretch of water:






Then, just when everything seemed to be going well, the Voyage Management System (the computer that shares navigation data between all of the navigational sensors and shows us our position on the digital charts) decided to quit in a narrow choke point in the outbound channel. It took a bit of troubleshooting, so I just barely able to get the whole thing up and running again by about the same time as we were well clear of the channel and had nothing to worry about.

Once we were out in open water, the Captain went below and I finally got a chance to lean back and take a deep breath. It had been a long, long day, so I was glad to finally have a few moments to regroup.

Then the alarms started going off. Lots of them. The engine was shutting down, the steering system failed, an automated distress signal started coming in, and about a half dozen system faults were blinking and chirping. After a few minutes of deafening noise, I’d managed to silence everything. The crux of all of these problems was that the shaft generator had tripped offline and in the fraction of a second it took for the standby generators to take the load, there was enough of a hiccup to shut down everything else just long enough for the alarms to go off and start all sorts of noise.

Exhausted though I was at the end of my afternoon watch, I still had to come up an hour later and cover the watch so the Chief Mate could go below and have dinner. He was back fairly quick, and just as I was telling him there’s “nothing too exciting” coming up, we started to catch up with the entire fishing fleet of the Taiwan Straits and hundreds of little tiny boats started to pop up on the radar.

When I got back down to my deck, I stopped to BS with the 3rd Mate. We were in the middle of sharing war stories (he’s an Afghanistan veteran too) when the fire alarm went off.

Grabbing my radio I ran down to the Emergency Gear Locker to dress out and take charge of my firefighting squad. Just as I got to the door, the Chief Engineer called over the radio and said there was no fire. It turns out that a leaking steam pipe inside the superstructure on the main deck had set off the alarm.

It was a fitting end to the day.

DAY 69: Easy Day

That’s all. Nothing to it.

DAY 70: A Sunday

Today was weird. After my midnight to four watch, I woke up feeling rested and refreshed around 0800.* Then I went up to the bridge and laid out all of the tracks and updated all of the charts for the next two port calls* and filled out my overtime sheet and handed it to the Chief Mate well before noon.*

During my afternoon watch, I had a whole big mess of ships I had to weave my way through, and when I saw it coming I called up the Captain to give him a good half hour’s notice.* Then through deft skill and pre-planning, I managed to cross through extremely congested waters without ever even having to disengage the autopilot.

All the while the visibility was pretty good and there were no real surprises.
Like I said, weird.

Sometime tonight we’ll probably drop the anchor and hang out while we wait for space at the pier in Qingdao. The schedule says we’ll be there for 24 hours, but we’ll see.

*Instead of waiting to the last minute which is more my style.

DAY 71: Anchored Out

Today we’re sitting at anchor waiting for pier space in Qingdao. We weren’t early or anything, it just turns out that the folks that manage the container terminal are so completely disorganized that they’ve overbooked their piers and we’ll have to wait a full 24 hours before there’s space for us.

For me this isn’t really a problem. Anchor watch is a nice chance to sit alone in the pilothouse, listening to music, catching up on administrative chores, and even do a bit of reading. Sure, I still have to keep an eye out for anyone dumb enough to run into us while we’re sitting still and I’ve got to check our position regularly to make sure the ship isn’t dragging anchor and drifting away, but it’s all gravy compared to the underway or pierside watches.

Of course, the law of the sea dictates that every second of free time must be paid for later with interest. So after I got off watch at 1600 I tried in vain to sleep until around 2030. Then, at 2115, I got the call telling me to go up to the bow and take charge of the sailors heaving in the anchor. We were done by 2200, but after standing out in the freezing cold and staring into the wind watching the chain come up, it was a bit tough relaxing again.

It wasn’t even worth trying to go back to sleep before I had to get started on…

DAY 72: The Last Stop in Qingdao Again

With all of the craziness from last night and the early morning watch, I was up to 0630. I slept as good as I could, but I still woke up before my alarm went off at 0900. I spent the next couple of hours plugging away at my chores in the pilothouse before starting watch again at noon.

When I started the afternoon watch, there was only a few hours of cargo work left. During one of my rounds on deck, I snapped this shot of the cargo parade:


It still amazes me to think that when we leave the pier we'll have over 2,000 truckloads of stuff on board.

Out on deck the temperature was just about freezing. Untying went quick and easy and then all I had to do was wait until we were clear of the harbor before I could turn in.

That’s when I found out I was almost too tired to sleep.

We’ll advance clocks tonight, so I’ll be short an hour worth of sleep when I get up tomorrow.

Next up: Pusan, South Korea and Yokohama, Japan. Stay tuned.

2009 Sea Voyage part 4a: Back to Work

Prelude: Flying Out

I’m a fan of parts of my job. My favorite part is when I get off of a ship at the end of a job, get my last paycheck, and never have to think about where the ship is going or when it’ll get there ever again. It’s nice to know that I’ve done my job and the next time there’s some sort of emergency in the early hours of the morning it’s going to be the next guy’s problem.

Unfortunately, when I paid off of the ship in Singapore I was going to go back. That meant that every bit of free time to come was tainted by the notion that, at any moment, I was about to get a phone call or an email giving me short notice to fly back to Singapore and pick up right where I left off. Everything I decided to start on had to be tempered with the notion that I may just have to abandon it for a month or so while it was halfway done.

After almost a month of getting things not quite done, it was almost a relief to get the email telling me it was time to go back to work. Then I got a series of additional emails telling me that my return to work was being stepped up by another day so I could turn to a day before the rest of the crew to catch up on all of the stuff that hasn’t been done for the past month. I was overwhelmingly ready to just get out and get done with the job.

After a long weekend in Long Beach with Ana, my last day in Petaluma was amazingly anticlimactic. I had a lot of errands to take care of, but it was all minor stuff. I double checked that I had all of my gear in my seabag and triple checked to be sure that all of my documentation was in order.

Since I never really unpacked any of it, there was very little to actually do. Somewhere along the way I actually ended up just camped out at a coffee shop watching the crowd go by and the rain come down for a few hours.

I was scheduled to fly out of SFO at five minutes after midnight, so I ditched the car at my folks house, played with the dogs for a bit, visited with my grandparents next door, talked shop with my father, and then rode down to the airport with my mother. I actually got to the airport at 8pm with over four hours to go through security and then wait for my flight.

The flight itself was completely uneventful. I had a layover in Hong Kong and ended up camped out in another business class lounge for about two hours before it was time to go board the next flight. While I was headed toward the gate, the last thing I ever thought would happen in Hong Kong happened: someone called my name. It turns out that the Bosun* was also flying to the ship a day before the rest of the crew and he and I were going to be on the same flight from Hong Kong to Singapore. We spent a few minutes catching up on the latest rumors and happenings from the ship and then got on the plane.

When we landed in Singapore, I stepped off the plane and into the oppressively hot, humid local climate. Finding the ship’s Bosun again, we headed to the immigration line where the ship’s agent caught up with us and took care of getting our paperwork sorted out. Once we’d collected our bags and gone through customs, we managed to lose track of the agent. Not a problem except for the fact that the agent was supposed to arrange for our transportation from the airport to the ship.

After almost an hour of lugging our bags around in the sweltering heat, we finally managed to find the agent again. Almost an hour later, he dropped us off at the pier in the shipyard so we could make the seven story climb up to the deck. At first glance, the ship looked great:


The only part that didn’t make sense was the blue rudder:


Still, she looked pretty sharp at first impression.

Climbing up to the deck, that impression was quickly undone. There was junk everywhere, everything was greasy or dirty, there were swarming hordes of shipyard workers in the way all over the place, and the air conditioning had been shut down in most of the spaces on board. Nothing says "welcome back" like the canned stale body odor of hundreds of unwashed Bangladeshi shipyard laborers, the odd sulfuric smell of welding slag, and the acrid funk of paint fumes.

Once we’d had a chance to drop our gear and get cleaned up, the Bos’n and I went out in town. I had only packed work clothes and cold weather stuff, so I decided I needed to go shirt shopping so I could have something to wear ashore for the next couple of days. I was also determined to stay awake despite my exhaustion, forcing myself to acclimate to the local time zone.

It turned out to be a nice, low-key evening out. I bought one respectable shirt and one completely ridiculous shirt at the UNIQLO** store in one of the shopping malls. After that we ended up at Clark Key, an upscale nightlife area with all sorts of things to see and do. Here’s one view of it at night:

And here’s another showing the giant umbrellas that cover the open-air walkways:


When we stopped for dinner I had a Singapore Sling. It just seemed like the thing to do. Then we went back to the ship and I slept like a stone.

*In case I’ve never explained it before, the term “Bosun” or “Bos’n” is a somewhat bastardized version of the full term “Boatswain.” It comes from the base words “boat” (meaning small craft) and “swain” (meaning servant or boy). The Boatswain is responsible for the care and maintenance of the ship’s small boats, cordage, rigging, and deck gear. In modern usage they’re something like a foreman among the deck seamen.

**UNIQLO, for lack of a better analogy, is like an Asian version of Old Navy. I first came across them in Japan (where I think they originated) and would love to see them expand in the States. For now I think they only have one store in New York.

DAY 61: Welcome Back to Work

Despite my well-reasoned local time zone sleeping scheme I woke up tired. It was all I could do to drag myself out of bed and into my boots. A few minutes later I was on the bridge and I met the new Captain. At first impressions he seems like a nice, relaxed guy. The kind of relaxed that suggests to me that he’s on some heavy-duty psych meds.

Over the course of the morning I found out that when we leave Singapore we’ll be going somewhere called “Chiwan,” a small port near Hong Kong. Digging around I found that we were waiting to receive up-to-date charts for the area. I also found that everything had been misplaced or disassembled and that the power had been shut off for most of the navigational electronics on the bridge.

While I was trying to find a methodical approach to fixing everything, there were constant distractions. In talking to the Captain today I learned that the last guy didn’t tell him about all of the little problems we’d been having with the electronics. Consequently, none of them have been resolved. It’s going to be a long trip.

Today also came with more hot, sticky weather. Still, I decided to take advantage of the rare chance to go ashore and wander around town again. The cab ride from the shipyard to civilization costs around $20 Singapore dollars (around $14USD), but it was well worth it just to get away from the sundry smells and sounds of the shipyard.

Instead, the bos’n and I decided to check out the sundry smells and sounds of a Chinese drugstore:


No, I don’t know what they use the dried, flattened lizards on the top left shelf. I do know that the long, thin things to the right of the lizards (as well as the large one in the box on the bottom shelf with the ribbons tied to it) are dried deer penises. I don’t know what they use those for either.

While we were out this time, we ended up stopping to watch an amazing street musician playing a unique stringed instrument I’d never seen before. You can check him out at http://www.3stringsmusic.blogspot.com/. Other than that we were mostly just people watching.

During the cab ride back, our conversation turned to survival at sea. I don’t remember what brought up the topic, but when I mentioned reading a study about the health effects of drinking seawater, the cab driver launched into a pretty fascinating story. It turns out that he also happens to work as a commercial diver.

From what I could gather through his thick accent and broken English, he was working one particular job with a whole bunch of other divers and ended up surfacing later than the rest. By the time he’d come up, the support boat had left and he was alone at sea. This man spent over 40 hours adrift with nothing but his wetsuit before a passing fishing boat spotted him and hauled him aboard.

Amazing sometimes, the people you meet.

DAY 62: It’s So Damned Hot Here

I really can’t wait to leave this place behind. The temperature is virtually the same day or night and the only time it’s not hot and humid is when it’s suddenly hot and raining. At least the rain made the decks look kinda clean:


The big push today was to finish digging up all of the charts and pubs and restart all of the electronics so we can safely navigate to Chiwan. If it were part of the normal routine, it shouldn’t take me more than an hour or two. Coming out of the shipyards, countless folks have been in and out of almost every space on board. The pilothouse is no exception. Since I was last on board, they’ve installed some new shelves and made the chart table surface a bit bigger. So the bulk of my first two days on board was mostly spent digging around finding things.

When I was satisfied that I’d laid out enough tracks to get us a couple days away from Singapore and that I had everything I needed to get us all the way to the next port, it was time to go out again.

The Bos’n and I ended up catching up with the new Third Mate and the Ordinary Seaman to share a cab. Once we were in town (back in the Clark Key area) we stopped for dinner before going our separate ways.

After that, it was time for me to find my way to a coffee shop and plug into the internet for a while. Since it was already getting late, I was just resigned to stay up through the night since the ship would return to watch-standing routine. That meant that I would once again be on deck starting at midnight.

DAY 63: Underway SNAFU

Today we left the shipyard. After standing watch from midnight to 0400, the Chief Mate called me up at 0630 to start turning things on and testing all of the navigation gear and control systems. We were supposed to get underway at 0800, but there were so many things up in the air that everyone seemed content with the notion that we were probably going to be late. This was made even clearer when the Mate told me that I was not even to ask the engineering department to do their part of the gear tests until after 0800. Then I wasn’t supposed to call them, they’d call me. Cool.

One of the items on the gear test checklist was turning on all of the communications equipment. One of those pieces of equipment is called a Navtex receiver. It’s a small box mounted on the aft bulkhead in the pilothouse that receives navigation warnings and prints them out on a strip of paper. As soon as I turned it on, it beeped to life and spat out the following message:



“SEA ROBBERIES REPORTED IN THE SINGAPORE STRAITS, MARINERS ADVISED TO TAKE PRECAUTIONS AND INCREASE LOOK-OUT FOR SUSPICIOUS SMALL FAST MOVING CRAFT APPROACHING THEIR VESSELS. MARINERS TO MAINTAIN ANTI-PIRACY WATCH WHEN PASSING THROUGH THE AREA.”So really, nothing had changed in the weeks since I went home.

A little after eight I still hadn’t heard from the engineers. I also couldn’t get the ship’s whistle (or “horn” for shore types) to work. When I looked into it, I found a breaker in one of the electrical panels marked “aft whistle” that was turned off. Moreover, there was a tag attached to it which read “DANGER, Do Not Operate.”

At this point the Chief Engineer was on the bridge, so I asked him if he knew why the tag was there and if I could remove it. I’m not sure what was going on with that guy, but he reacted like I was a complete idiot and told me that obviously it was probably tagged out because there was someone working near the whistle on the deck above and they didn’t want to go deaf when someone pushed the button.

“So,” asked I, “can I pull the tag off?”

“You can tell just as easy as I can whether or not it still needs to be tagged out. Why don’t you climb up there and look to see if there’s anyone near it?”

The problem is this: I don’t have any reason to know what else gets power from that particular circuit, nor do I know why it was originally tagged out. For all I know, someone is elbow deep in the wiring somewhere else in the ship and turning this breaker back on would fry them.

Still, taking his blustery you-must-be-retarded-for-asking response as permission, I went ahead and pulled the tag. Afterward, the whistle still didn’t work. I still don’t know what the real problem was, but I told the Chief Engineer and the Captain that it wasn’t working (along with the starboard side running light) and then it was time to head to the bow to untie the ship.

In the weeks I was gone, the ship had been moved from being moored bow-in to the drydock to being bow-out at the next pier. I’m not sure who they got to run the mooring lines, but when I got up to the bow with the deck seamen to let go, we found a complete mess. The mooring lines had been run every which way back and forth on deck and were crisscrossed in strange ways that no self-respecting seaman would ever tolerate. Still, we managed to untie the ship and get everything in order in no time.

As we pulled out of the slip, I finally got a moment to stop and enjoy the view:


Once we were clear of the pier, we headed out into the main channel and then hooked around Sentosa Island to sit at anchor while we were waiting for space at the container terminal. I’m not sure why, but the harbor pilot directed us to a spot in the crowded anchorage within uncomfortably close range of other anchored ships, a buoy, and a charted wreck. When the Captain asked, the pilot made all sorts of assurances that there was plenty of space between the ship’s stern and the wreck. Fortunately with no cargo on board our draft is so shallow that we would be able to drift right over the top of the wreck (if its charted depth was correct) without ever bumping into it.

At that point, I was finally left alone on the bridge for a few hours. My sole responsibility while on watch at anchor is to make sure the ship isn’t moving. Other than that, I was free to catch up on my paperwork and watch all of the other ships coming and going. Some of them were a bit unusual, like this one, delivering cranes:

Around sunset we heaved in the anchor (along with about a quarter ton of clay and mud from the bottom) and steamed over to Brani Container Terminal. At this point I was running on 2 hours of sleep in the past 48 hours, so when the ship was all fast, I was ready for some much-needed rest.

Tired as I was, I decided to take the elevator instead of trekking up the five decks worth of stairs. While I was waiting, the Ordinary Seaman walked up and told me there was a barge coming alongside that kept blasting its whistle at him and its crew was yelling at him. When I walked out on the starboard side, this is what it looked like:

I’d heard we were expecting to take on lube oil (as well as marine diesel oil and heavy fuel oil) so I told him to grab a heaving line* and get one of the other guys to help tie up the barge alongside.

While I was standing there, one of the AB’s showed up to help. At that point the barge was alongside the ship and all we had to do was drop a line down to them in order to pull up their mooring lines. Rather than wait for the OS to come back with the heaving line, the AB just grabbed the first line he could find, a lightweight coil of polypropylene, and lowered one end down to the barge.

This set off a series of comical events that could only happen with the level of incompetence you find among mariners in Southeast Asia. Even though our AB had passed a messenger line down to them, they decided to back away from the ship and change their lineup. On the second approach they didn’t come close enough to the ship to drop the line to them.

Trying to help, our AB threw the coil of line to them. But without the weighted end of a proper heaving line, the wind blew it away from the barge. This is when the Chief Engineer decided to show up.

“You guys can’t even throw a fucking heaving line?” yells he.

“That,” says I, “is not a heaving line. We’re still waiting for someone to come back with one.”

“Why the fuck don’t you have one already?”

“We don’t just leave them all over the deck,” I reply, “and we’re down to only one up forward since the rest went missing in the shipyard.”

“You’d think someone would’ve thought to lock them up.”

“They were locked up Chief, right along with a lot of other things in the foc’sle head that went missing.”

“You’d think someone would’ve locked them up where there wouldn’t be anybody from the shipyard working…”

I wasn’t paying enough attention to hear the rest of his rant. The barge was trying to make its fourth approach at this point and the OS had come back with the heaving line. Somewhere around there the Chief Engineer went away. This time we had no problem at all tossing the heaving line down to them. Then they tied up their bow lines to it and we started pulling them up by hand.

Moments later (for no reason I can think of) they pulled their lines back, untied the heaving line, and backed away again. Then they twisted their barge around out in the middle of the basin and started to make another approach. This time they managed to get the barge right alongside and all we had to do was drop the heaving line down to them.

When we tossed the heaving line down, the weighted end punched a hole in the green awning, right next to the “LUb.” Then they backed away again and started yelling to us in whatever language they were using. The whole thing was about to stop being funny.

Moments later someone started pumping out ballast on the ship. This meant that there was a stream of water being pumped out under the waterline right about where the barge was supposed to be tied up. This is when the Chief Engineer decided to come out and give me another ration of abuse.

“What the fuck are you doing now?”

“Just waiting for them to figure out what they’re doing.”

When he looked over the side, he saw the bubbles foaming up from the ballast discharge and called the Chief Mate on the radio to have him stop pumping. Then he turned back to me.

“Can’t you see what the obvious fucking problem is here?”

“I assure you it wasn’t a problem when they made any of their past five approaches, but thanks for your help all the same.”

It’s too bad we can’t all be as intelligent and competent as the Chief Engineer. I take comfort in the fact that even after he helped it still took the “lub oil” barge three more tries before they were able to get into position and get lines up to us.

Having witnessed much of this aggravation (as well as the danger tag bullshit this morning) the new Third Mate told me, “you must have the patience of a saint to take that from him.”

“Not a problem,” says I, “if he wants to be an asshole, it doesn’t cost me anything. There’s no reason for me to be an asshole too.”

At that point I was more than tired. It was only 2100, but I was spent. I don’t even remember making it back to my room, but that’s where I woke up when the 3/M called me to relieve the watch at 2315.

*A heaving line is a length of lightweight rope with a weight at the end of it so it can be thrown from one place to the other and then used to pull over heavier lines.

DAY 64: Finished With Singapore

The morning watch was pretty uninteresting. The only part that was anything like unusual was that the Chief Mate had me stay on until 0500. Other than that I had to be careful not to trip over any of the longshoremen sleeping on the decks while I was doing my rounds. The nice part was that most of them brought hammocks to sleep in, so they were bundled up and out of the way:

After the watch at 0500, I was all to glad to get to sleep so I could be back on watch at noon. Then we finally left the pier at 1530 and I ended my day by 1730.

I’m glad to leave Singapore behind. I’m sick and tired of hot and sticky.

Next stop: China. Again.

Yay.